What Artwork File Do I Need for Custom T-Shirt Printing?
You have the shirt picked out. The design looks great on your screen. Then the print shop asks for your artwork file and suddenly you are staring at a folder full of PNGs, JPEGs, PDFs and something called an EPS.
Which one do we actually need?
At Satellite PrintLab, artwork is one of the first things we look at when a custom apparel order comes into production. A good file gives us more control over the finished print. A bad file can create soft edges, pixelated text, unwanted backgrounds and colors that do not behave the way you expected.
The important part is that the best artwork file depends on how your apparel is being decorated.
Here is what we want customers to know before sending artwork to a print shop.
Vector Artwork Is Usually the Best Starting Point
If your logo or design was professionally created, you may have an AI, EPS, SVG or vector PDF.
Keep that file.
Vector artwork is built from mathematical paths instead of pixels. That means we can enlarge a vector logo from three inches wide to twelve inches wide without making the edges blurry.
This is particularly useful for company logos, text, line art and other graphics with clean shapes.
One mistake we see is a customer opening a vector logo, taking a screenshot of it and emailing us the screenshot.
At that point, we have gone from an excellent production file to a low-resolution raster image.
If you have the original vector artwork, send us the original.
What About PNG Files?
A high-resolution PNG can be an excellent production file, especially for DTF and DTG printing.
The key words are high resolution.
For raster artwork, we generally want the artwork prepared at approximately 300 pixels per inch at the actual size it will be printed. Current apparel-printing artwork guidance commonly uses 300 PPI at final output size for sharp production files.
That last part matters.
Imagine your design will be printed 12 inches wide on a shirt.
At 300 pixels per inch:
12 inches × 300 pixels = 3,600 pixels wide.
A 3,600-pixel-wide image has substantially more information available for that print than a 700-pixel image downloaded from a website.
Changing the resolution box in Photoshop from 72 to 300 does not magically recreate missing detail. If the original image does not contain enough information, simply enlarging it can still leave you with soft edges and pixelation.
This is something we deal with constantly in real production.
Why We Like Transparent Backgrounds for DTF and DTG
If the garment is supposed to show through around your design, your artwork should normally have a transparent background.
PNG files support transparency, which makes them particularly useful for raster apparel artwork.
Consider a black logo sitting in the middle of a white JPEG.
You may look at that file and think the artwork is simply a black logo. The printing software, however, can see the white area as part of the image.
That can result in a white rectangle being treated as printable artwork rather than empty space.
Current DTF file-preparation guidance consistently identifies transparent backgrounds as important when the surrounding area is not intended to print.
If you intentionally want a white box behind your artwork, that is different. We just need to know it is intentional.
JPEGs Are Not Automatically Bad
We receive JPEG artwork all the time.
A high-resolution JPEG can sometimes be completely usable, particularly with photographic artwork.
The problem is usually not the letters JPG at the end of the filename.
The problem is where the JPEG came from.
A high-resolution original photograph and a 500-pixel image copied from a website are both technically JPEGs, but they are very different production files.
Repeated JPEG compression can also introduce visible artifacts around text and sharp edges.
If you have the original PSD, TIFF, PNG or vector artwork, send that instead of a compressed copy whenever possible.
Please Do Not Send Us a Screenshot of Your Logo
This deserves its own section because we see it so often.
Screenshots are designed for displaying something on a screen. They are rarely the best source for reproducing a logo across a large shirt.
The same applies to:
- logos downloaded from Facebook or Instagram
- tiny images copied from a website
- graphics pasted into a Word document
- photos of printed business cards
- screenshots from Canva when the original artwork can be exported
Sometimes those are genuinely the only files a customer has.
That does not necessarily mean the project is dead.
It simply means we need to look at the artwork before deciding what needs to happen next.
Artwork for Embroidery Is Different
Embroidery introduces another step that customers sometimes do not realize exists.
An embroidery machine cannot simply take your PNG logo and stitch it onto a polo.
The artwork must first be digitized.
Digitizing converts the visual artwork into instructions that tell an embroidery machine things such as stitch type, stitch direction, density, sequencing and other production information.
And this is where experience matters.
A design that looks fantastic as a 12-inch DTF print may contain details that are simply too small to reproduce cleanly as a 3.5-inch embroidered logo.
Very thin lines may need to become heavier. Tiny lettering may need adjustment. Gradients and photographic details may need to be simplified.
Good embroidery preparation is not about forcing every pixel of the original design into thread. It is about preserving the character of the design while making it work in the embroidery process.
Design at the Size You Actually Want
Another common problem is receiving artwork without knowing how large the customer expects it to print.
“Put this on the front” does not tell us whether you are imagining an eight-inch graphic or a thirteen-inch graphic.
Those can look completely different on the same shirt.
When submitting artwork, tell your printer the intended location and approximate size.
For example:
Full front — approximately 11.5 inches wide
is much more useful than:
Make it big.
Garment style matters here too. A design that fits beautifully across a standard unisex T-shirt may need different positioning on a zip hoodie, women’s tank, pocket tee or youth garment.
This is one reason we look at the artwork, garment and decoration method together rather than treating them as three separate decisions.
What If My Artwork Isn’t Print Ready?
Send us what you have.
We would rather look at the original file before you spend an hour trying to “fix” it by repeatedly enlarging, converting and exporting it.
Sometimes the file is better than the customer thinks.
Sometimes it needs a transparent background.
Sometimes we need the original vector.
Sometimes a logo needs to be redrawn.
Sometimes we need to explain that a particular piece of artwork will reproduce better with DTF than embroidery.
That conversation is part of working with an actual print shop.
The File Is Only the Beginning
Great custom apparel does not come from choosing the right file extension.
It comes from understanding how the artwork will interact with the decoration process and the garment underneath it.
A technically perfect vector file can still make a poor embroidered design.
A beautiful 300 PPI PNG can still be printed at the wrong size.
A great DTF transfer can still look wrong if the garment color, print placement or artwork treatment was poorly chosen.
At Satellite PrintLab in Austin, Texas, we produce custom apparel using multiple decoration methods because different projects call for different solutions.
Our job is not simply to put whatever file arrives onto a shirt.
Our job is to look at what you are trying to make and determine how to produce it well.
If you are not sure whether your artwork is ready, send us the best original file you have.
We’ll start there.