Art Guidelines

Properly formatted artwork is massively important to achieve good prints. We recommend using a qualified artist or graphic designer that knows how to format artwork for shirt printing. If you need recommendations, we regularly work with several artists of varying styles that take commissions. We also understand everyone is working with different budgets. If you aren’t sure, send over what you have and we’ll see what we can do with it.

Acceptable file types for print: AI, EPS, PSD, PNG, PDF. To get the best quality prints of non-vector art, your art MUST BE ORIGINALLY CREATED at FULL PRINT SIZE and 300dpi RESOLUTION.

When saving/outputting your design, some programs may default the file type to jpeg. Jpegs are good for computer and phone screens, because they compress to take up as little space as possible. Compression is the enemy of good prints! Jpegs are fine for mockups but never ideal for print files. Sending in jpegs for print files will almost always require us to retrace and otherwise “fix” your artwork, but even then the results will almost never be as good as if we had a properly formatted file to begin with.

Vector artwork is preferred for screenprinting if you have it.  Next best is artwork originally created at full print size AND 300dpi resolution. You must ensure that your document is correctly sized before creating your artwork, otherwise you will have to stretch out the existing pixels and the quality will suffer. On finished artwork, you should be able to zoom in at 100% and not see any “fuzzy” lines!  See example below.

This is what the file format screen in Photoshop looks like when you create a new file. Every design program should have these options.
Up close example of high quality artwork. Clean, smooth lines.
Up close example of poor quality artwork. Lines are blurry and will result in pixelation and/or loss of detail.

Halftones: If you are using halftones in your artwork, they should be no smaller than 50dpi (we recommend 50 or 45 for most prints) so that all of the smallest dots hold in the screen. If your entire artwork is halftones, like with photo type prints, we generally prefer to generate them in house.

Color Separations: We handle color separations ourselves.  Usually we have to tweak a few things slightly to make sure the image works on press. If you already have color separated art, go ahead and send that too!