T-shirt and apparel designer
A t-shirt designer places artwork inside defined print areas per garment and size, then outputs a different file depending on whether the shop prints direct-to-garment, screen, or direct-to-film. Web2Print Solutions engineers the placement rules, the colour-count and file differences between the three methods, the customer mockup, and the print-ready output each method needs.
Start a project brief Explore servicesReviewed by CEO, Netbase JSC · Updated 30 Sep 2026
What does a t-shirt designer have to do?
Placing a logo on a garment mockup is the easy part of an apparel designer. The hard part is that a t-shirt is not one flat surface: it has a front, a back and sleeves, each with its own usable print area, and that area changes size with the garment size a customer picks, since a full front print area on an adult XXL is genuinely larger than on a youth small. A designer that lets a customer place artwork freely on a fixed-size canvas, without tying it to the garment and size selected, will happily approve a placement that runs off the edge of a small or looks lost in the middle of an XXL. This page is one of the print-specific product pages in the web-to-print by print product family, and it sits next to the general design editor build choice between an embedded SDK and a hosted customizer.
How do print areas change by garment and size?
Each garment style defines named print areas - full front, left chest, full back, and one or two sleeve areas - and each has a maximum width and height. Those maximums scale with garment size, since the fabric's flat width itself scales.
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Youth S/M
- Full front area (illustrative)
- 200 mm × 250 mm
- Left chest area (illustrative)
- 80 mm × 80 mm
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Adult S/M
- Full front area (illustrative)
- 280 mm × 350 mm
- Left chest area (illustrative)
- 90 mm × 90 mm
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Adult L/XL
- Full front area (illustrative)
- 300 mm × 400 mm
- Left chest area (illustrative)
- 90 mm × 90 mm
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Adult 2XL/3XL
- Full front area (illustrative)
- 330 mm × 430 mm
- Left chest area (illustrative)
- 100 mm × 100 mm
The designer should place artwork relative to a fixed reference point - commonly a set distance below the collar seam - and scale the maximum bounding box to the selected size, rather than letting a customer resize freely on a canvas that ignores the garment underneath it. A customer who changes the size dropdown should see their placement re-validated against the new area, not silently kept at a scale that no longer fits.
DTG, screen print or DTF: how does the method change the file?
The three common decoration methods each need a structurally different output file, since they lay ink down differently.
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DTG (direct-to-garment)
- How it prints
- Inkjet sprays ink directly into the fabric
- Colour handling
- Full-colour raster, gradients supported, ink mixed like a photo printer
- File the designer must output
- Raster CMYK at print resolution, transparent background, white underbase on dark garments
-
Screen printing
- How it prints
- Ink pushed through a mesh stencil, one screen per colour
- Colour handling
- A fixed number of flat, named ink colours; no gradients without extra screens
- File the designer must output
- One separated spot-colour file per screen, in exact print order, plus a combined proof
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DTF (direct-to-film)
- How it prints
- Design printed onto film with adhesive powder, then heat-pressed onto the garment
- Colour handling
- Full-colour raster like DTG, with its own underbase baked into the film print
- File the designer must output
- Raster CMYK at print resolution, transparent background, underbase generated with the film output
DTG and DTF both accept a photographic, full-colour design without extra cost for colour count, since the process already prints in continuous colour. Screen printing does not: every additional flat colour is an additional screen, setup step and press pass, which is why colour count changes a screen-printed job's economics in a way it does not for DTG or DTF.
How does colour count change the price and the file?
For a screen-printed job, the designer counts the distinct flat colours in the artwork, since that count maps directly to the number of screens needed. A photographic image or a design with smooth gradients has to be posterized - reduced to flat colour bands - before it can be screen printed, or the job moves to DTG or DTF instead. A practical configurator flow separates artwork automatically where it can and flags artwork that cannot be cleanly separated - a photograph, a gradient, more colours than the shop's press supports - so the customer or shop can simplify the design or switch method before the order is placed, not after the screens are burned.
What does a customer need to see before they order?
A garment mockup renders the customer's placed artwork onto a photorealistic image of the garment in the chosen colour, at the chosen size's print area, so the customer approves the product rather than a flat proof of the artwork alone. The mockup is explicitly a preview, not the production file: it can use a lower-resolution garment photo and a screen colour space, since its job is to communicate placement and scale. Where a design must be separated into named ink colours for screen printing, showing a mockup using those flattened colours avoids approving a look the press cannot reproduce.
What print-ready output does each method need?
We can build custom product configurators and browser design tools that emit print-ready artwork to an agreed specification. The output branches by method rather than following one universal file: DTG and DTF both need a raster file at true print size and resolution (commonly 300 dots per inch) with a clean alpha channel for the transparent background and underbase generation; screen printing needs a vector or high-resolution spot-colour-separated file, one layer per ink, in the shop's registration order, with photographic content flagged rather than silently rasterised into a single screen. As with other browser-based design tools, the exported file needs a server-side render step rather than a client-side export of the on-screen canvas, since the canvas draws in RGB and the true output needs a named colour conversion for the chosen method. Where a technical output specification is named, it describes the file target an engagement is built to produce, not a credential Web2Print Solutions holds. The configurator and placement logic is print product configurator engineering, and web-to-print on Shopify covers how a garment product's options and price reach a cart when the catalogue sells through Shopify. Netbase JSC, which operates Web2Print Solutions, has delivered 50+ web-to-print platforms, and reusable garment designer components with print-area placement are available under their own licence terms.
Scope an apparel build in a project brief: the garment styles you stock, which of DTG, screen printing or DTF your shop runs, and your current colour-count limit.
Our view
Most apparel configurators we have reviewed sell the placement interface but leave the DTG, screen print and DTF handoff as a manual re-file step done after the order lands - someone in production opens the artwork and rebuilds it for whichever press the shop runs. That is where colour counts and file formats quietly go wrong, since the person doing the rework was not the person who talked to the customer. Print area and production method should be first-class inputs to the designer, not an afterthought applied once the design is "finished". - CEO, Netbase JSC, 2026-09-30.
Key takeaways
- Print areas are defined per garment style and scale with garment size; a placement should be re-validated, not silently rescaled, when the size changes.
- DTG and DTF accept full-colour raster artwork without a colour-count penalty; screen printing turns every flat colour into a separate screen and setup step.
- A design with gradients or photographic content needs posterizing for screen printing, or should move to DTG or DTF.
- The mockup is a placement and scale preview, not the production file, and should reflect flattened ink colours where the job will be screen printed.
- Print-ready output branches by method: raster CMYK with an underbase for DTG and DTF, spot-colour-separated files in press order for screen printing.
Discuss your web-to-print project
Frequently asked questions
Not usually. A photographic or gradient-heavy design suits DTG or DTF directly; the same design has to be simplified into flat, named colours to be screen printed - a deliberate routing step, not an automatic conversion.
Yes. A youth garment is physically smaller, so its print areas are set from its own flat measurements, not copied from the adult chart.
There is no fixed number; it depends on press capacity, order quantity and per-colour setup cost. A configurator should show the colour count and let the shop's pricing rules decide the threshold.
References (4)
- W3C, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2, accessed 2026-09-30.
- W3C, CSS Color Module Level 4, accessed 2026-09-30.
- International Color Consortium, ICC profiles, accessed 2026-09-30.
- Ghent Workgroup, PDF/X workflow, accessed 2026-09-30.