Sending Artwork: What you need to know
We get this question a lot: "What kind of file do you need for my logo?" The honest answer is — pretty much whatever you've got. But it helps to understand why, so here's a quick look at how artwork requirements used to work, and how things have changed.
Traditional screen printing is unforgiving. Each colour in a design needs its own screen, burned using a film positive — basically a high-contrast stencil. That meant artwork had to be vector files, separated into individual colours, sized exactly right, with crisp edges and no soft gradients. If your logo wasn't print-ready in exactly the right format, the shop either bounced it back to you or charged extra to fix it. That's where a lot of the strict "vector only" reputation around print shops comes from — it was a real requirement, not just printer pickiness.
Most of what we do these days is DTF (direct-to-film) printing, which works completely differently. Instead of separating colours onto screens, we print full-colour designs directly onto film, then heat-press that onto the garment. This opens things up a lot — full-colour, photo-quality designs are no problem, and the file requirements are way more forgiving.
If you've got a vector file — .SVG or .AI — that's our favourite. Vector files scale to any size with zero quality loss, so it gives us the most flexibility no matter what size we're printing at. That said, most people don't have vector files sitting around, and that's totally fine. .JPEGs and .PNGs work great too. If the resolution is on the lower side, we can usually clean it up and upscale it ourselves — between AI tools and our usual prep work, this isn't the costly, time-consuming process it used to be. For any order of 10 or more shirts, this artwork prep is on us, free of charge.
A few things worth knowing: if your logo has a transparent PNG version, send that — it saves us a step. Even with a JPEG or PNG, starting with a larger image gives us more to work with than a tiny one pulled off a website or screenshot. And if you're ordering for a team or school with multiple garment colours — say white, navy, and black hoodies — a logo that pops on white might disappear on navy. We'll look at this for you and put together mockups showing how your design will look across different garment colours, so you're never guessing.
Don't stress about getting your artwork "print-ready." Send us what you've got — logo files, screenshots, whatever you have — and we'll take it from there. We'll prep it, mock it up on your garment colours, and send it back for your approval before anything goes to print.
Reach out using the quote form below to send over your artwork, and we'll get you mockups to approve so we can get going.