Setting up your files

Thank you for being a part of The Wooden Pin project. We are extremely excited to bring your unique talents to life with a truly one-of-a-kind product. 

This document will provide you with everything you will need to get started and will also serve as a reference as you create. 

There are a few things to consider while designing:

• Design to the size of the final product. Do not design at 5x the size and then scale it down. You will lose a lot of detail.
• Make sure your artwork lines are no smaller than 0.3pt. We can engrave smaller lines but sometimes you run the risk of losing detail.
• Everything is black (0 Red, 0 Blue, 0 Green) or white (255 Red, 255 Blue, 255 Green). No grays or gradients. Just black and white. The black will be engraved and the white will stay as raw wood. The only exception of color is the “cut” line, it should be red (255 Red, 0 Blue, 0 Green) and .001pt thick.
• Be conscious of large black areas. Especially if you have any type of thin design elements inside the engraved area. This can, on occasion, cause small details to flake away (see example below).
• Flatten your design and merge all black artwork into one layer. All white should be removed. Your design should now only be leveraging the background to show the white in your design (reach out if this doesn’t make sense). Keep the cut line as a stroke. Do not expand or flatten this element.
• If you include any type, make sure there are no misspellings. 

Pro Tip: if you are interested in adding a bit of padding between your artwork and the cut line as in the example below, add a white outside stroke to your artwork that measures 3pt, make sure that you select the rounded ends for your stroke. Then add your cutline outside of that.

Once you have completed your design, send it to jake(at)thewoodenpin.com as an EPS. If you need help with your artwork, we can help with that too! Just reach out through our custom order form.

Example - Notice the fine white lines located in the large engraved area. We were able to execute this example but please be aware that fine lines run the risk of flake-off because the support around it will be etched away.