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· 5 min read
A good shirt design doesn't need to be complicated. These seven tips come from the questions we get most often and the issues we see in uploaded designs.
Dark designs on dark shirts and light designs on light shirts get lost. White or bright ink works on black and navy shirts, and dark ink on white or light grey. If your design has many colours, preview it on the shirt colour you're ordering before you add it to the cart.
Text that looks fine zoomed in on a phone can be tiny on a real shirt. Our design studio shows the real printed size in centimetres, so check it. As a rule of thumb, main text across the chest should be several centimetres tall, and avoid long sentences.
One bold font for the headline and one simple font for details looks cleaner than five different fonts. Very thin or script fonts can lose detail, so use them large.
In our studio, Size & placement snaps your design to these spots in one tap.
Blurry images print blurry. Use the original file instead of a screenshot or a photo saved from social media. The studio rates every image at its printed size: Good at 200 DPI or more, OK from 150 DPI, and a warning below that.
A logo saved as a JPG usually has a white box around it, which prints as a white rectangle. Use a PNG with a transparent background so only the logo prints.
Don't push elements right to the edge of the print area or crowd them together. A little space around each part of the design makes it look intentional, and it keeps text clear of seams.
A PNG with a transparent background, at least 150–200 DPI at the printed size, ideally 300 DPI.
A left-chest logo is usually about 9 cm wide. A center-chest design is about 25 cm wide.