Written by Jamie Park — UI/UX Designer. I've learned print requirements the hard way — through client disasters. More about me →
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 them as an SVG exported from Figma. 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. Here they are.
This is the mistake that burned my client. 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. That's smaller than a postage stamp.
The math I do now: take the desired print size in inches, multiply by 300, and that's your target pixel dimension. A 2-inch logo needs to be 600×600 pixels. I tested this with six different resolution combinations for a 1×1 inch icon: 72px (1×1 at 72 DPI — unusable), 150px (1×2 at 300 DPI — soft), 300px (1×1 at 300 DPI — acceptable), 600px (1×2 at 300 DPI — crisp), and 1200px (1×4 at 300 DPI — no visible difference from 600). 600px is the sweet spot for a 2-inch print.
SVGs use sRGB by default. Most commercial printers use CMYK. When you convert an SVG logo to PNG for print, the PNG stays in sRGB unless you explicitly convert it. The result: colors that look vibrant on screen come out muddy on paper. CMYK can't reproduce about 30% of the colors in the sRGB gamut — those neon greens and deep blues shift noticeably.
I don't try to solve this in the PNG conversion step anymore. Instead, I deliver the PNG in sRGB at 600px per printed inch and let the print vendor handle the CMYK conversion. They have calibrated RIP software that does a better job than any manual conversion I could attempt. What I do check is that the PNG has an embedded sRGB profile — some tools strip it.
For bulk SVG to PNG conversion for print catalogs, I set the resolution once and batch all files. A product catalog with 80 SKU icons took 90 seconds instead of two hours of individual exports. The printer confirmed every single one was sharp.
Written by Jamie Park — UI/UX Designer. I've learned print requirements the hard way — through client disasters. More about me →