What the print shop actually hands back to you
When you bring an AI-generated logo to a print shop for a banner, a menu board, or a truck wrap, the person behind the counter is going to ask you for a vector file. Specifically, an .ai, .eps, or .svg file. When you hand them a .jpg or .png, they'll either tell you they can't use it, or they'll print it anyway and charge you for the job — and you'll get back something that looks like it was designed in 2003 and printed on a home printer.
This is not a policy. It's physics.
The DPI problem, explained plainly
Every raster image — .jpg, .png, .webp — is made of pixels. Those pixels have a fixed count. A logo that's 500 pixels wide looks sharp on your phone because phone screens display around 72-96 pixels per inch. Print shops need files at 300 DPI minimum. At 300 DPI, a 500-pixel-wide image prints at 1.6 inches before it starts to degrade. You're putting that on a 6-foot banner. The math doesn't work.
AI image generators output raster files. Every single one of them. The image looks sharp on your screen because your screen is only showing you a fraction of the actual print size. Scale it up and you see the pixels. Scale it further and it looks like someone traced your logo on an Etch A Sketch.
If you can zoom in and see individual pixels, it's a raster file. Raster files have a maximum useful size. Once you exceed it, every print is a gamble.
What vector files actually are
Vector files aren't made of pixels. They're made of math. Bezier curves, anchor points, fill and stroke instructions. When you scale a vector file from a business card to a 16-foot trailer, the software redraws the curves at the new size using the same math. No pixels to blow out. No fuzzy edges. Sharp at any size, always.
Professional logo design software — Illustrator, Affinity Designer — works natively in vector. Every logo a trained designer produces comes out as a vector file by default. It's the starting point, not a deliverable upgrade. AI image generators don't work this way and currently can't. They are fundamentally raster tools producing raster output.
Why this matters more for food trucks than almost anyone
A software company with an AI logo can probably get by. Their brand lives on screens — a website, an app, a slide deck. The logo never needs to be more than a few hundred pixels wide.
Your brand lives in physical space. It's on a 16-foot trailer. It's on a banner 10 feet in the air. It's on a menu board at three feet under direct sunlight. It's on a business card that gets handed to an event coordinator who might book you for 200 guests. Every single one of those applications demands a vector source file, and several of them will embarrass you visibly if the file is wrong.
Wrap shops will tell you the minimum file resolution they'll accept. What they won't always tell you is that technically-acceptable and actually-good are not the same thing. A raster file upscaled to meet their spec prints flat. It looks like a logo that doesn't quite belong on the truck.
What to do if you already have an AI logo
There are two real options. One is to have a designer trace the AI output and rebuild it as a vector — this is called vectorization or live tracing. Depending on the complexity of the logo, this can take a few hours. It's not free, but it's less than starting from scratch.
The other option is to start fresh with a real designer who delivers vector source files as part of the package. This is what we do. Every logo that leaves this studio comes with .ai, .eps, .svg, and print-ready PDF formats. You don't have to ask for them. They're the job.
The AI logo looked free. By the time you've reprinted the banner twice and paid someone to vectorize it before the wrap can be installed, it wasn't.