Best Practices

Please use our design templates to make your products.

How to ensure your product design will look great

• CYMK: While you may design your product using RGB color space, your product will be printed using CYMK. CYMK colorspace is not as wide as RGB; for example, metallics and pastels are difficult to render in CYMK.
• 300 DPI resolution: Your design needs to be 300 DPI, not a lower resolution image resized to 300 DPI. Resizing will result in a pixelated, blocky print.  
• Less than 25MB files
• Design the entire product: You are submitting an 15" x 18" rectangular artwork using our templates; however, you need to consider that your design is being printed on a product Your design should integrate into the product. Generally speaking, you want to avoid a solid rectangle filling the entire printable area. Your design should work with the product. Where possible consider the (blank) product color in your design, by making that color transparent in your artwork.

Artwork sizing and placement

• While you can certainly use the entire 15" x18" in space, often customers find a print that is 18 inches to be overwhelming. By and large we find that keeping your maximum dimension to 12 inches or less results in higher conversion rates.
• Be conscious of the placement of design elements and where they would appear in relation to your customer’s anatomy. Remember your designs are printed on men’s, women’s, and kids products.
• Horizontally center designs visually as well as mathematically. Heavy design elements on one side can make a design feel off balance even if it is mathematically centered.
• Designs typically do the best when they are placed near the top of the print area.

Types of designs/effects to avoid

• Designs that look contained within a rectangular block, especially if the design does not incorporate the color of the product (taking a screen capture of a game)
• Elements that subtly blend into the product color. These can print like a halo with a hard edge. Think how web safe colors have big jumps between colors.
• Elements with a transparency less than 20% are likely to get lost when printing, or turn out as a solid color.
• Designs that have a single, large logo as the only element of the design
• Simple white products

Designs that typically sell well

• Designs on dark products (our product color selector is organized based on sales)
• Distressed designs
• Simple, identifiable silhouettes work well with content that has characters
• Bold high contrast colors.
• Larger art elements in the product design may get better response to online promotions, as subtler designs are hard to see in thumbnail views of the product

Product testing
Every brand is different, but what we’ve found is that most have fans who would love to wear products with the brand on it. What we never know for sure is what type of designs will appeal to a particular fan base. So we suggest that you test out at least 5 to 6 unique designs. Typically, there are four categories of designs that work well:

1. Logos
2. Funny/ inside jokes
3. Character driven designs, typically doing something
4. Subtle designs that just look “cool” to non-fans, but a true fan will recognize it

We suggest creating at least one design for each category, and then present each design to your fans. See what works and then iterate!