Artwork guidelines

The short version

DTF transfers

• Build 22.5" wide. That is the roll. Anything wider gets scaled down or returned.
• Transparent PNG at 300 DPI, sized at final print dimensions, is ideal.
• Vector (AI, EPS, PDF) is accepted and rasterized at 300 DPI on our end.
• We do not cut DTF transfers. Leave at least 0.25" between designs so you can separate them yourself with scissors or a rotary cutter.
• A white background prints as white ink. If you want a knockout, send real transparency — not a white rectangle.
• Strokes hold reliably down to about 1 pt at final size. Text is safe at 6 pt and up.
• Drop shadows and soft glows against transparency print with a visible edge. Either commit to a hard edge or accept the halo.

Banners & wide format

• 100 DPI at final size is plenty. 150 is generous. 300 is a waste of your upload time and ours.
• Building at quarter scale at 300 DPI works fine — the math is identical. Tell us in the production notes.
• Add 0.25" bleed on all sides. We mirror the edge if you forget, which is usually fine and occasionally ugly.
• Keep critical text and logos 2" inside the trim on hemmed banners. The hem folds over about an inch.
• Pole pockets eat about 4" of height each. Design around them or your art shifts.
• Outline your fonts or embed them. An unembedded font substitutes silently and you will not like the substitute.

Patches

• Vector art gives the sharpest engrave. AI, EPS, SVG or PDF.
• Raster art is accepted — we trace it at no charge and send you the proof to check.
• Engraving is single-tone. Gradients, photographs and fine halftones do not reproduce. A logo with a gradient becomes a logo without one.
• Keep strokes at 0.5 pt or heavier so they hold at final size.
• Cut-to-logo needs a closed outer path with no open ends and no stray points.
• Very thin necks or spikes narrower than about 0.1" get softened so they do not tear off in handling.

Stickers & decals

• 300 DPI at final size, CMYK, with 0.125" bleed.
• We offset the cut 0.08" outside your artwork by default. That offset is what gives a sticker its border.
• For a specific cut line, send it as a separate spot-colored path named CutContour and we follow it exactly.
• Keep text 0.125" inside the cut line. Cutting tolerance is real and it is not zero.
• On clear vinyl, add a white underbase layer if you want the color to hold. Without one, whatever is behind the sticker shows through.

Color

Your monitor is backlit and your substrate is not. Nothing printed will ever match a screen exactly, and any shop that promises otherwise is managing your expectations rather than your color.

• Send CMYK for wide format and stickers, RGB for DTF. We convert either way, but starting in the right space means fewer surprises.
• Pantone matching on solvent typically lands within 2 Delta E on coated spot colors in our gamut.
• Metallics, neons and Reflex Blue do not reproduce. Not here, not anywhere on a four-color process.
• Rich blacks: use C40 M30 Y30 K100 for large fills. Plain K100 across a big area looks washed out and shows banding.
• If a color is critical, say so at checkout. We will print a swatch before the full run at no charge.

The expensive mistakes

1. Approving a proof on a phone. The single most common costly error in this trade. Zoom in on the text. Read the phone number out loud.
2. A 72 DPI web logo scaled to 4 feet. If the customer emailed you a logo from their website, it is almost certainly not printable at size. Ask for the vector.
3. Unembedded fonts. Outline everything before you send it.
4. Art built at the wrong aspect ratio for the size ordered. Something has to give — either it stretches or it crops, and neither is what you wanted.
5. No transparency on DTF. A white box around the logo prints as a white box around the logo.