A client of mine runs a boutique tea company. Last fall they printed 5,000 brochures for a trade show — full color, heavy cardstock, $2,300 worth. The cover featured their logo, which I'd sent as an SVG. Someone on their team converted it to PNG at the wrong resolution. The logo printed soft and pixelated, and they didn't notice until the boxes arrived.
$2,300 of unusable print collateral because of one bad SVG-to-PNG conversion.
That's when I stopped assuming everyone knows how to convert SVG to PNG for print and started writing down the exact settings.
Screen Resolution vs. Print Resolution
This is the mistake. Screens display at 72 PPI (or 96 PPI on Windows). Print requires 300 DPI minimum. A 100×100 SVG icon exported at screen resolution becomes a 100×100 pixel PNG — roughly 0.33 inches wide at 300 DPI. Smaller than a postage stamp.
The math I use now: take the desired print size in inches, multiply by 300. A 2-inch logo needs 600×600 pixels.
I tested six resolution combinations for a 1×1 inch icon:
- 72px (unusable)
- 150px (soft)
- 300px (acceptable)
- 600px (crisp — the sweet spot)
- 1200px (no visible difference from 600)
The Color Space Problem
SVGs use sRGB. Commercial printers use CMYK. When you convert an SVG logo to PNG for print, the PNG stays sRGB unless you explicitly convert it. CMYK can't reproduce about 30% of the colors in sRGB — neon greens and deep blues shift noticeably.
I don't try to fix this in the conversion step anymore. I deliver the PNG in sRGB at 600px per printed inch and let the print vendor handle the CMYK conversion. Their calibrated RIP software does a better job than any manual conversion I could attempt.
For bulk conversion, I use a free SVG to PNG converter that handles batch processing — 80 product icons took 90 seconds instead of two hours of individual exports.
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