| There's a general term for this, designing for manufacturability[0]. I've made something of a hobby of learning new ways to manufacture things. Every time I learn a new manufacturing technique I start to notice things that were made that way in the real world, and I especially start to notice aspects of design that would have been influenced by how the thing in question was manufactured. Case in point: injection molding. When you injection mold parts, the sides have to be tapered so that the part can detach from the mold easily (the term of art for that is "drafting"[1]). Once you know that, you see it everywhere. Back to the topic at hand: owning an embroidery machine and learning how to digitize completely opened my mind to all the intricacies of patch design and why all of what the parent comment said is true. Case in point: > military patches look best when using lines with fixed-width This is because the thread itself is fixed width, and you can either do a straight stitch for really thin lines (they call that a running stitch[2]) or you can do a sort of zigzag stitch that's so tight that the thread runs horizontally and fills up the line width (they call that a satin stitch[3]). Satin stitches only look good within a certain narrow range of widths; wider and the threads are too loose, narrower and the needle holes are close enough that they impact the structural integrity of the backing the design's being embroidered on to. Anyway. I could go on for hours, but to wrap up: DFM is a fascinating world to explore. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_(engineering) [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_stitch [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_stitch |