Vector files first, everything else second

Vector art is built from paths, which are just math. A circle in a vector file is stored as the instructions for drawing a circle, so it prints clean at two inches or twenty-two. Raster art is built from pixels, a fixed grid of colored squares. Scale that up and the software has to invent squares it doesn't have, which is why an enlarged raster logo goes soft and mushy at the edges.

The formats we want are .AI, .EPS, or a PDF that still has live vector data inside it. .SVG works too, though the ones exported straight out of Canva tend to carry clipping masks and stray background boxes that have to be cleaned out first. If Canva is where your design lives, download it as a print PDF rather than an SVG or PNG, and know that anything built with a Canva photo, texture, or stock graphic is raster no matter what the extension says.

Screen printing puts each color in your design on its own screen. Clean paths make that separation quick and predictable. A pile of pixels makes it a rebuild.

Convert your text to outlines

This is the single most common thing missing from otherwise good files. Text in a design file is still tied to the font you typed it in. If that font isn't on our machine when we open the file, the software swaps in something else, and your carefully spaced headline turns into Arial with the letters in the wrong places. Sometimes that's obvious. Sometimes it's a slightly different weight nobody catches until the shirts are printed.

Converting text to outlines turns every letter into a vector shape. The letters stop being type and start being artwork, so the file looks identical on any computer. In Illustrator it's Type, then Create Outlines, or Command Shift O. In CorelDRAW it's Object, then Convert to Curves, or Control Q. In Affinity it's Layer, then Convert to Curves, or Command Enter. In Inkscape it's Path, then Object to Path, or Shift Control C.

Save a copy with live text before you do it. Once the letters are outlined you can't fix a typo by clicking into it, and you can't change the font later without redoing the layout. Keep two files, one editable for yourself and one outlined for us. If you want to check your work in Illustrator, open Type, then Find Font. An empty list means there's no live text left.

Resolution has to be measured at print size

When a raster file is the only thing available, it needs to be 300 DPI at the size it will actually print, not 300 DPI at whatever size it happens to be sitting at. Those are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where most bad files come from.

Run the math once and it sticks. A full front print at twelve inches wide needs about 3,600 pixels across. A ten inch print needs 3,000. A left chest at three and a half inches needs a little over 1,000. Now compare that to a logo saved off a website, which is often 500 or 600 pixels wide. Stretched to twelve inches, that works out to roughly 50 DPI. It will print. It will also look like a photocopy of a photocopy.

You can't add resolution after the fact. Opening a small file and typing 300 into the DPI field just spreads the same pixels over a larger area. The number changes, the detail doesn't. Same story with screenshots, logos pulled off Instagram, and images someone texted you. If the original is small, the real fix is a vector rebuild, which we can often handle.

Send PNG or TIFF with a transparent background instead of JPEG. JPEG compression leaves fuzzy garbage around hard edges, and it can't hold transparency, so your design arrives sitting on a white box that has to be cut off by hand.

Design for fabric, not for a screen

Ink pushed through mesh onto a cotton knit doesn't behave like light coming off a display. The fabric has texture, the ink spreads a little as it lands, and fine detail either fills in or disappears.

Keep lines at 1 point or heavier, about 0.014 of an inch. Thinner than that and a line can break up or vanish into the weave. Knockout detail, where the shirt shows through instead of the ink showing on the shirt, needs to be heavier still, because ink spread closes those gaps from both sides. Text under 8 points gets risky, and 10 to 12 points is where small type gets comfortable. Watch the enclosed spaces in letters like e, a, and B at small sizes. Those fill in first and turn a word into a row of blobs.

The blank matters too. Smooth ring spun cotton holds detail better than a heather, a slub, or a piqué polo. Fleece and textured knits both eat fine lines.

Digital effects are where most designs fall apart

Drop shadows, outer glows, soft blurs, and gradients that fade out to nothing cause more trouble than anything else on this list. All of them rely on partial transparency, and plastisol ink doesn't do partial. The ink is either there or it isn't.

The way any of that gets printed is halftones, a field of tiny dots that grows denser in the dark areas and sparser in the light ones. Step back and your eye reads it as a fade. It works, and plenty of good designs use it. But a gradient that runs all the way to zero has to end somewhere, and at the light end those dots get small enough that they either drop out or spread and fill in, because ink spreads once it's on the shirt. That gives you a visible edge in the exact spot your file says should be invisible.

Photographs sit at the far end of this. Reproducing one in screen print means simulated process, usually six to eight screens working together, and the price climbs to match.

The fix isn't complicated. Build a version of the design meant for print: solid shapes, hard edges, defined color breaks. If a gradient matters to the look, keep it inside a shape with a real outline instead of letting it dissolve into the shirt. If a drop shadow is doing the work, make it an offset solid instead of a blur. Designs built that way come off the press looking like they did on your screen, which is the whole point.

Every color you cut lowers the price

Each ink color gets its own screen and its own pass across the shirt, so color count moves the per piece price directly. We don't charge setup fees, which means that difference never shows up as its own line on your invoice. It's baked into the per piece rate instead.

Here's what it looks like in real numbers. At 50 to 99 pieces, a one color front print runs $5 a shirt and a four color front runs $8. At 100 to 249, one color is $4.25 and four colors is $6.50. On a 150 piece order, going from four colors to one saves $337.50 before you've picked a garment.

There are ways to bring the count down without gutting the design. Let the shirt be a color: printing on a sand or heather blank and knocking the background out to the garment color instead of printing it can drop an entire screen. Use one ink at two densities, solid in one area and halftoned in another, for a lighter shade of the same color without adding a second ink. Cut the drop shadow that's only there because it was one click in the design software. And take a hard look at that fifth color sitting on one small element, because it charges you across the entire run.

We'll prep your file. We won't design it.

Our team preps customer artwork for print, and that covers a lot of ground. Resizing to the right print dimensions, converting text to curves, clearing out stray paths and background boxes, separating colors, and rebuilding a simple raster logo as vector when that's reasonable.

What we don't do is create artwork from scratch. We're a print shop, not an art department, and we'd rather say so up front than take a loose description and hand back something that isn't what you pictured. If you need a design made, hire a designer or an illustrator.

When you do, tell them it's going on a shirt and it's getting screen printed. A designer who has only ever worked on web and social will reach for the effects that work there, and you'll get something that looks great in a browser and has to be rebuilt before it can print. A designer who understands the process builds with a limited palette, hard edges, and real line weight from the first sketch, and what they hand you is what comes off the press. Worth sending them this page before they start.

Send this along with the file

With the art, we need the garment brand, style number, and color, the print size in inches, the placement, and your size breakdown. Print size is the detail people skip most often, and it changes the look of the finished shirt more than almost anything else.

If you have Pantone numbers for your colors, send them. PMS numbers are the fastest and most accurate way for us to match ink, and we mix to them in the shop. Without them we'll match as closely as we can from what you send, but working backward from a hex value or a photo of an old shirt is slow and imprecise. Ask whoever built your brand assets whether the PMS numbers exist before you assume they don't.

Once we have all of it, you get a mockup built by hand on the actual garment color at the actual print size. Not an automated preview with your logo floated onto a template shirt. You approve what you're actually going to get, and then we print it.