TIPS FOR SUPPLYING GREAT QUALITY ARTWORK
GOOD QUALITY ARTWORK
If you are looking to get clothing made for your business, band, brand or anything else it is essential to start with good quality artwork if you want the best possible finish. This brief guide will outline things to bear in mind when creating your designs. If you have no experience with design but just have an idea please reach out to us and we will be happy to help.
FILE FORMATS
The best possible format to send your artwork to us in is as a vector file. This type of artwork is created in software such as Adobe Illustrator. Vector artwork can be scaled to any size without compromising quality and can easily be adjusted if required. The file extension for artwork created in Adobe Illustrator would be ‘.AI’ but it may also be saved as a ‘.PDF’ or ‘.EPS’ file, all of these should be suitable.
If you are designing in something like Adobe Photoshop, or Procreate please ensure the document size and DPI settings are configured as stated in the next tips.
This image shows a green circle made as a vector in Adobe Illustrator and a red circle made in Adobe Photoshop. At standard size they look similar but when you enlarge them both the quality of the vector remains unchanged whereas the other one degrades significantly in quality. The appearance of both is also the same under magnification.
DOCUMENT SIZE
If you are not designing in vector format and instead choosing to use a program like Adobe Photoshop or Procreate then it is important that you set your canvas size to a minimum of what the intended print size is to be, ideally larger if possible. This will then allow us to shrink the design down if required without loss of quality. If the artwork is not created big enough and we need to expand it then this can result in loss of quality and may be subject to an artwork fee if we have to recreate it for you.
DPI SETTINGS
When creating your canvas to work on we recommend setting your resolution to a minimum of 300DPI. This will help to ensure a great quality print.
LAYERS
If your designs has multiple colours it would be very helpful to not flatten the design once complete so that each colour has its own layer. This allows us to easily separate your artwork out for print.
When saving your artwork if using software like Adobe Photoshop please save it in the softwares file format such as ‘.PSD’ rather than ‘.JPEG’ or ‘.PNG’.
