All articles · 2026-09-18

Artwork a screen printer will not send back (T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags)

Screen printing splits your design into one screen per colour. What that means for the file you send, why colour count is a price, and what to check first.

A screen printer does not print your picture. They separate it into one screen per colour, burn each screen, and pull them one at a time onto the garment. Every part of that depends on your design having clear, separable colours — which a JPEG does not have, because compression smears every boundary into a gradient of intermediate tones.

A red circle with a cream star and two bars below: on the left a soft, speckled JPEG; on the right flat separated colours with crisp edges.
Left: a 170-pixel JPEG at quality 60. Right: Logo mode. 5 paths, 88 nodes, and each colour is now a shape rather than a cloud of similar tones.

Colour count is a price, not a preference

Most shops charge per screen. A four-colour design costs more to set up than a two-colour one, on every run. So the colour count in your file is worth deciding deliberately, rather than inheriting whatever the compression left behind. A file with forty near-identical reds in it will either be quoted high, or quietly reduced by somebody who is not you.

Where small detail disappears

Ink spreads. A line thinner than about 1 mm on the garment tends to close up or break, and fine detail inside a dark colour fills in. This is the corner worth looking at before sending anything.

The point of the star magnified: on the left the tip dissolves into speckled pixels; on the right it is a sharp point with straight sides.
The point of the star. On the left there is no single edge for a separation to follow. On the right there is exactly one.

What to send, and what to say

  • Send SVG, EPS or PDF — all three carry real geometry and all three are read by separation software
  • Say the print size in millimetres; the file has no size of its own
  • Give the colours as names or codes (Pantone if you have them), not "the red from the logo"
  • Say which colour the garment is: artwork designed on white behaves differently on black, and a cream star on red needs an underbase

None of this asks the printer to guess. That is the whole point — every guess somebody else makes about your artwork is a decision you did not get to make.