The constraints on apparel are the tightest of any common application for lettering. You have roughly 250 millimetres of width, one to four colours, and a viewer who is moving.
Design at the size it will be printed
The single most common mistake is designing at full screen size and shrinking the result. Fine details that look intentional at 1200 pixels turn into unreadable noise at 250 millimetres. Design at the final size, or design large and then actually look at it at final size before you commit.
Print your design at the real width, cut it out, and hold it against your chest in a mirror. It is a crude test and it catches almost every readability problem before you pay for a screen.
Flat colours, and count them
Screen printing charges per colour, and each additional colour adds a screen, a pass and a chance for misregistration. Every extra colour also increases the chance that a later layer covers a detail from an earlier one.
- Design in three flat colours or fewer. Fill, outline and one shadow is a complete design.
- Avoid gradients entirely unless you are printing digitally. On fabric, a soft gradient becomes a visible band of dots.
- Avoid fine lines thinner than about 0.5 mm at final size. They will not hold on a screen and they will not survive a wash.
- If letters touch, put a hard outline between them. Fabrics absorb ink and adjacent fills will bleed into each other.
Texture does not survive fabric
Overspray, grain, drips and distressed edges are what make a digital graffiti piece look like it lives outdoors. On a shirt they mostly disappear: the fabric texture replaces them at small scale, and at large scale they read as printing defects.
If you want the worn look on apparel, it is better to build it into the letterform — a chipped outline, a deliberately broken stroke — than to rely on surface texture. Structure survives; texture does not.
Readability on a moving surface
A shirt is seen at an angle, in motion, and often in poor light. That pushes the design toward the same rules as a throw-up: strong silhouette, clear counters, high value contrast, and a limited palette.
A wildstyle piece that is impressive on a wall is usually a bad shirt, because the decoding time it asks for is longer than the time a viewer will give it. Bubble and blockbuster lettering is used on apparel so heavily because it answers the question in the first quarter-second.
Sizing the artwork on the garment
| Placement | Typical print width | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Full front | 250–300 mm | The standard. Keep 60 mm clear of the collar and the side seams. |
| Left chest | 80–100 mm | Small enough that fine detail is wasted. Use a two- or three-letter mark. |
| Back print | 280–330 mm wide | Can be taller than a front print, so vertical lettering works here. |
| Sleeve | 60–80 mm | Treat it as a logo, not as lettering. Anything longer than three letters becomes unreadable. |
Build a t-shirt design in the generator
Getting the file out
For a single-colour or two-colour screen print, an SVG is the correct output — it is true vector artwork, so it scales to the print size without any softening and the printer can separate the colours from it directly.
For digital or direct-to-garment printing, a high-resolution PNG is usually what a print shop will ask for. Set the canvas to a square or a 4:5 ratio, switch the surface to Transparent so you are not printing a background, and export at the largest size available.
Questions
How many colours can a screen-printed shirt have?
As many as you are willing to pay for, but designs of three colours or fewer are the standard for a reason: each extra colour adds a screen, a pass and a registration risk.
Does graffiti lettering work on a shirt at small size?
Only if the letterform is simple. Detail disappears below about 100 mm of print width, so anything smaller than a chest print should use block, bubble or a short blockbuster mark.
Should a shirt design include overspray and texture?
Usually not. Fabric texture replaces it at small sizes and it reads as a printing defect at large ones. Build wear into the letterform itself if you want the effect.