Why your first print run came back wrong
The design looked right on screen and wrong on the shirt. This happens to nearly everyone on their first order, and it is almost never the printer. It is one of four things, and each has a fix you can apply before you spend anything.
The colour shifted
Screens make colour with light. Printers make it with ink. A screen can show you a cyan or a lime green that simply does not exist in ink, and when you send that file to print, the machine substitutes the nearest colour it can actually make. The result is a duller, flatter version of what you approved.
The colours that suffer most are bright cyan, vivid orange, and anything neon. Deep navy tends to print slightly lighter than it looks. Rich blacks print fine, but a black made from mixed inks can come out with a colour cast.
What to do: judge colour on a mockup rather than on your design canvas, and if a specific colour is the point of the product - a brand colour, say - order one sample before you order fifty.
It printed smaller than you expected
A design that fills your screen does not fill a garment. Print areas are physically limited, usually around 12 by 16 inches on an adult tee and considerably less on a youth size or a hat. If your artwork is a different shape from the print area, it gets scaled until it fits the tighter dimension, which is often much smaller than you pictured.
What to do: check the print area dimensions, and design to that shape. A tall narrow design on a wide print area wastes most of the space.
The edges went soft
This is resolution. A 500 pixel wide image looks sharp on a screen because the screen has a few hundred pixels to work with. A print has 300 per inch. That 500 pixel image printed 10 inches wide has 50 pixels per inch, and it will look soft and blocky.
The number to hit is 300 DPI at final print size. A design printed 10 inches wide wants to be 3,000 pixels wide. Enlarging a small image does not add detail; it just makes the existing pixels bigger.
What to do: start from artwork that is large enough, or use vector art, which has no resolution at all and prints sharp at any size.
Something got cut off
Print positions have tolerance. The garment moves fractionally on the press, so a design placed hard against the edge of the print area can end up with a sliver missing on one side.
What to do: leave a margin. Keep anything that must not be cut - text especially - well inside the edges, and do not rely on a border that runs to the exact boundary, because a border that is 2mm thinner on one side is very visible.
The one habit that prevents all four
Order a sample of your best-selling design before you commit to stock. It costs one unit and it tells you the four things a screen cannot: what the colour actually looks like, how big it actually is, whether the detail held, and whether the placement is where you wanted it.
- Bright cyans, oranges and neons shift the most
- 300 DPI at final print size, not at screen size
- Design to the shape of the print area, not to your canvas
- Keep text away from the edges
- One sample beats any amount of checking on screen