Preparing Artwork for Custom Shirt Printing
Everything You Need to Know
For the best print quality, send a clean, high-resolution file. Crisp, well-prepared artwork ensures sharper details, clearner lines, and a smoother printing process, giving you the best results on your custom t-shirts.
Why is Quality Artwork important?
High-quality artwork is key to getting the best print results on your custom t-shirts. Sending a clean, high-resolution file ensures that your design will come out super crisp and clean without any pixelation or blurriness. Low-quality or blurry images can lead to poor prints, so it's important to use the right file format, and correct sizing. Well-prepared artwork helps create a professional, polished look, making your design stand out exactly as you envisioned.
"Good artwork = good print. Bad artwork = bad print. That's it in a nutshell."
File Terminology
Sometimes the terminology can be confusing if you aren't familiar with graphic design. We know sometimes someone who doesn't know design just wants to make a cool shirt. Let's get you up to speed on some terminology so we can better communicate what we might need.
Image Resolution – The level of detail in an image, measured in DPI (dots per inch); higher resolution means sharper, clearer prints, while low resolution can result in blurry or pixelated designs.
Pixels – Small squares of color that make up digital images; more pixels create higher detail, while fewer pixels can make prints appear blocky or blurry. If you think of this in mobile phone terms, low pixels is like taking a picturs on an old flip phone while a high pixel image is like taking that same photo on the latest greatest iPhone. One is old and grainy while the other is super clear.
DPI – Dots per inch (DPI) measures image sharpness; for screen printing and DTG, 300 DPI is ideal to maintain crisp details. Don't be fooled by what you see on the screen! For example, a low dpi image (72 DPI) may look fine on a screen but will appear blurry when printed. A high DPI image (300 DPI) has more detail, making it print crisp and clear.
"If it looks blurry on the screen, it will print blurry. But if it looks good on the screen, it doesn't always mean it will print perfect!"
File Types – Preferred formats include vector files (AI, EPS, PDF) for the sharpest prints, or high-resolution PNGs with transparent backgrounds for digital printing. Other file types include TIFF, PSD, JPG.
Raster Art – Pixel-based images (JPEG, PNG, PSD) that can lose quality when resized; best used at their original dimensions for printing. We recommend artwork that is 300 DPI at print size and which still appears clean and crisp. PNG files are great raster files to use because they have transparent backgrounds, whereas a JPG does not.
Vector Art – Scalable artwork (AI, EPS, PDF) made of mathematical paths, allowing designs to be resized without losing quality for sharp, clean prints. These are the preferred file types to send in for printing.
Print Size – Your design should be set to the exact dimensions you want it printed to ensure accurate scaling and placement on the garment. This is espcially important with raster images because you might send in a high resolution image that is only 1 inch wide but you want the design to be 12 inches wide. So if we were to increase your tiny image to 12 inches wide, the image suddenly becomes very pixelated, which would result in a poor print.
Must Haves for a Quality Print
There are a few non-negotiables when submitting your artwork if you want the best print possible. There are some scenarios where we can make exceptions, however, it should be clearly understood that with every sacrifice with artwork, there will be a sacrifice on the print.
Acceptable file types – Preferred vector files: AI, EPS, PDF. Preferred raster files: PSD or PNG.
Art Size & Resolution – All artwork must be sized for print. Raster files must be at 300dpi resolution at print size with no pixelation.
Maximum Print Size – Artwork must not exceed print area for garment. Please review the print areas each garment in the online designs.
Acceptable Content – Artwork must not contain any hateful, illegal, racist images or messages. Images must not violate any intellectual property rights or out team may cancel your order with a refund but without warning.
Outline All Fonts – If fonts are used in an image, they must be converted into images. If the font stays a font type, when we recieve that file, if we don't have the same font files in our computer then the font will not display properly. For photoshop, all fonts will automatically turn into an image, or pixels, when saved as a PND file. To view a video which explains how convert fonts into outlines in Illustrator click here.