Send your print shop a vector file (AI, EPS, or PDF) plus a transparent PNG at 300 DPI at final print size, and label which method you’re using. Screen printing needs Pantone-separated spot colors and a white underbase for dark garments; DTG and DTF need clean 300 DPI PNGs; embroidery needs vector art a digitizer can convert to stitches. Include a labeled mockup and a font-outlined source file, and you’ll skip almost every round of art revisions.
TL;DR:
- Use vector files (AI, EPS, PDF) for scalable, high-quality artwork suitable for screen printing and embroidery, and provide a final-size PNG at 300 DPI for DTF and DTG methods.
- Always build your design at the actual print size to prevent pixelation, and include a labeled mockup with exact dimensions and placement details.
- For color accuracy, deliver Pantone spot colors with CMYK fallback for screen printing, and specify color intent clearly to avoid mismatches.
- Embroidery requires clean vector artwork with minimum letter heights of about a quarter inch and simple line thicknesses to ensure legibility and stitch quality.
- Avoid common mistakes such as submitting low-resolution images, unoutlined fonts, or layered files with hidden elements, which cause delays and errors in production.
Table of Contents
- Accepted File Formats and When to Use Them
- Resolution, Scale, and Print Size: Getting the DPI Right
- Color Setup: CMYK, Pantone, and White Underbase
- Method-Specific Artwork Rules: Screen Printing, DTG, DTF, Sublimation, and Embroidery
- Preflight Checklist: What to Include When You Upload Artwork
- RNK Apparel’s Production-Ready Tips for Jerseys
- Embroidery Digitizing and Minimum Stitch Sizes
- Bleed and Safe Area Guidelines for Jersey Printing
- Design Restrictions Tied to Jersey Material and Color
- Handling Gradients and Transparency in Your Artwork
- How to Prepare Artwork With Multiple Color Separations
- Common Mistakes to Avoid in Artwork Submissions
- Sources
- FAQ
Accepted File Formats and When to Use Them
Vector files are the backbone of good jersey artwork. AI, EPS, PDF, and SVG scale to any size without losing edge quality, which matters when the same logo has to fit a 10-inch chest print and a 3-inch sleeve mark. Vector artwork is preferred for screen printing and embroidery specifically because it supports the color separations both processes depend on.
Raster formats have their place too, mainly for direct-to-garment and direct-to-film printing, or anything photographic. PNG with a transparent background, PSD, and TIFF all work, provided the file hits 300 DPI at the size it will actually print.
A few rules keep both formats useful:
- Send the editable source file, not just a flattened export, so the shop can fix registration or color problems without starting over
- Outline all fonts in vector files before sending, since a missing font on the shop’s end can silently swap your typeface
- Strip hidden layers and unused artboards; they slow down file processing and sometimes cause export errors
- Keep raster and vector versions of the same design so the shop can choose the right one per method
Resolution, Scale, and Print Size: Getting the DPI Right
Build your file at the exact size it will print, not a scaled-down version you plan to enlarge later. That single habit prevents most of the blurry, pixelated logos that come back for rework.
300 DPI at final size is the standard for raster art. A 12 inch by 14 inch front print needs roughly 3,600 by 4,200 pixels to hold that resolution. Stretching a 72 DPI web logo up to fill a jersey chest panel does not add detail. It just makes the pixels bigger and blurrier.
A few things to lock down before you export:
- Set your canvas to the final print dimensions, not a placeholder size
- Never upscale a low-resolution image; recreate it in vector form instead
- Vector artwork itself scales freely, but any photo or raster image embedded inside it still has to meet the 300 DPI rule
- Export a final-size PNG alongside your vector file so the shop can proof placement immediately
Pro Tip: Check your file’s actual pixel dimensions at 100% zoom before sending. If a 12 inch design file is only 900 pixels wide, it’s built for the web, not the press.
Color Setup: CMYK, Pantone, and White Underbase
Color is where jersey orders go wrong most often, usually because the digital preview never matched the printed result. The fix is naming your colors precisely instead of trusting a screen.
For DTG and DTF, deliver files in sRGB or CMYK; high-resolution PNGs typically handle this conversion effectively. For screen printing, supply Pantone Solid Coated spot colors rather than relying on RGB values, since spot colors are what the press actually mixes.
A short list of habits that prevents color disputes later:
- Always include Pantone numbers for brand colors with a CMYK fallback noted alongside.
- On dark garments, mark a white underbase channel or a clearly labeled layer so the printer knows where opaque white goes first
- Note color intent directly in your file, not just in an email that might get separated from the art
Printers convert Pantone to CMYK automatically when a spot match isn’t available on a given machine, but only if you’ve told them which Pantone number you actually want.
Method-Specific Artwork Rules: Screen Printing, DTG, DTF, Sublimation, and Embroidery
Each printing method reads your artwork differently, and the rules that keep one process sharp can ruin another. Here’s what changes by method.
- Screen printing. Vector files (AI, EPS, PDF) are strongly preferred. Build one spot color per layer, or name your spot colors clearly, and keep line weight around 0.4 mm minimum so thin strokes don’t drop out during screen exposure. Dark garments need a white underbase layer, and gradients have to be converted into halftone patterns since a screen can’t lay down a smooth fade the way a printer nozzle can.
- DTG and DTF. Supply a PNG or layered PSD at 300 DPI with a transparent background, built in sRGB. These methods handle photographic detail and soft shading far better than screen printing, so gradients and fine shadows are fair game. Send both a final-size PNG for proofing and an editable source file in case revisions come up.
- Sublimation. This method dyes polyester or coated substrates directly, so it can’t print white ink at all. Supply CMYK files, or vector art with any embedded raster elements at 300 DPI. Because sublimation has no underbase step, white areas of a jersey are just the fabric showing through.
- Embroidery. Start with clean vector art for digitizing. Final production runs on DST or PES stitch files, which a digitizer builds from your artwork, not from a flat image. Digitizing enforces minimum letter heights and line thicknesses to keep small text and thin lines from turning into a tangled knot of thread.
Pro Tip: If you’re not sure which method your order will use, send vector art. It converts cleanly into every other format, while a raster file only goes one direction.
Preflight Checklist: What to Include When You Upload Artwork
A complete upload the first time saves days of back and forth. Before you submit anything, gather:
- An editable vector source file with fonts outlined
- A transparent PNG at final print size, 300 DPI
- A low-resolution proof or mockup showing exactly where the design sits on the jersey
- Labeled layers and color callouts, including Pantone or embroidery thread codes
- Exact print dimensions and placement notes (front, back, left sleeve, and so on)
A professional preflight checklist also covers permissions. If your logo includes licensed team marks or a third-party design, attach signed authorization before you submit. Beyond the files themselves, confirm a consistent naming convention and designate one person on your side as the single point of contact for art approvals. Two people approving revisions independently is how jerseys end up printed with the wrong logo version.
RNK Apparel’s Production-Ready Tips for Jerseys
Every jersey has seams and paneling that flat mockups don’t show. Design within safe zones, and avoid stretching critical details across a seam line unless that detail is at least 0.5 inches tall, since stitching shifts small elements just enough to misalign them.
Confirm exact name and number sizing against available jersey templates before finalizing a full-team order, and request a sample proof when you’re printing for an entire roster. Keep a layered source file on hand and provide a mockup for each print location. It speeds approval and prevents rework once production starts. RNK Apparel’s design and logo guidance and name placement checklist walk through both steps in more detail.
Embroidery Digitizing and Minimum Stitch Sizes
Embroidery doesn’t print your artwork. It rebuilds it out of thread, one stitch path at a time, through a process called digitizing. A digitizer takes your vector file and converts every shape into stitch instructions, choosing stitch type, direction, and density for each area.
That translation has hard physical limits a flat design doesn’t. Letters below a certain height start to fill in and become unreadable, since the needle can’t lay thread finer than the fabric and backing allow. Most digitizers set a practical minimum text height around a quarter inch for block lettering, and thinner script fonts often need to be even larger to stay legible once stitched.
Line thickness matters just as much as text height. A hairline stroke that looks crisp in Illustrator can vanish entirely in thread, or worse, cause the machine to skip stitches and leave gaps. Solid fills, outlined letters, and simple shapes digitize far more reliably than fine gradients or intricate line art.
Because of these limits, embroidery works best with logos that were built with thread in mind, or at least simplified before digitizing starts, as explained in detail in How Football Club Crests Are Chosen: The Full Process. Complex multi-color gradients typically get reduced to flat color blocks, and small secondary details sometimes get dropped altogether if they’d disappear at production size. Send your cleanest vector version, flag any text under a half inch so the digitizer can flag concerns before production, and always request a stitch-out sample for a new logo before committing to a full team order. A DST or PES file that looks fine on screen can still stitch differently once it hits real fabric.
Bleed and Safe Area Guidelines for Jersey Printing
Jerseys aren’t flat canvases. They have side seams, shoulder panels, collar binding, and sometimes contrast inserts that cut straight through a print area if you’re not planning around them.
Building files at 1:1 scale and checking safe areas is standard production guidance for exactly this reason. A safe area is the zone within your print space where you’re guaranteed the full design stays visible and unbroken. Anything placed right up against a seam, sleeve edge, or panel transition risks getting partially caught in the stitching or folded out of view during construction.
Bleed works differently on garments than on paper. There’s no trimming step to hide a slightly oversized edge, so bleed on a jersey mostly matters for full-panel designs, like an all-over sublimated pattern, where the print needs to extend past the visible fabric edge to avoid a thin unprinted strip after sewing.
A practical safe-area buffer for standard chest or back prints is roughly a half inch to one inch inward from any seam or hem, more if the jersey has heavy paneling like raglan sleeves or a contrast yoke. For sleeve prints specifically, keep in mind the sleeve is curved, not flat. What looks centered on a flat mockup can shift once it wraps around the arm. Always request a physical or 3D mockup for sleeve and side-panel placements before locking the file.
Design Restrictions Tied to Jersey Material and Color
Fabric choice changes what your artwork can actually do once it hits the press. Moisture-wicking polyester, the material behind most hockey jerseys, behaves very differently under heat and ink than cotton.
Sublimation only works on polyester or poly-coated surfaces, since the process bonds dye into the fiber itself using heat. It won’t work at all on cotton or cotton blends. Screen printing and DTF, by contrast, sit on top of the fabric and work across more material types, but heat-sensitive synthetics need lower cure temperatures to avoid scorching or fabric distortion.
Garment color sets its own limits. Dark jerseys need a white underbase for screen printing and often for DTF, adding a production step and sometimes a slight texture change where the underbase sits. Very bright or high-contrast base colors, like a bold red or royal blue jersey, can also affect how true a light or pastel design color reads once printed, since some dye migration or “bleed through” can happen with sublimated polyester if the base fabric color is dark.
Texture matters too. Mesh panels, common on the underarms and sides of performance jerseys, aren’t ideal print surfaces for detailed graphics; place fine text or intricate logos on solid fabric zones instead. When in doubt about how a specific fabric or color will take a design, ask for a swatch test before committing an entire team order to one print method.
Handling Gradients and Transparency in Your Artwork
Gradients look great on a screen and cause the most confusion in production, because different print methods render them in completely different ways.
DTG and DTF handle gradients and soft transparency naturally, since both methods print in a continuous range of tones, closer to how an inkjet printer works. A drop shadow, a soft fade, or a photographic background all translate reasonably well, as long as the file is 300 DPI with a properly flattened transparent background.
Screen printing can’t do true gradients. Simulated process printing rebuilds a photographic or gradient image into controlled halftone separations, essentially breaking a smooth fade into a pattern of dots that the eye blends back together at a distance. This adds cost and setup time, so if your design has a soft gradient and you’re screen printing, expect either a halftone conversion or a request to simplify the design into flat color blocks.
Transparency in your file matters for a separate reason: it defines where there’s no print at all. A PNG with a properly transparent background tells the shop exactly where the garment fabric should show through. If you flatten a design onto a white background instead of a transparent one, you risk the shop printing an unwanted white box around your logo. Always export with transparency preserved, and check the file in a viewer that shows transparency as a checkerboard pattern rather than defaulting it to white.
How to Prepare Artwork With Multiple Color Separations
Multi-color designs need to be broken into individual color layers before they reach the press, especially for screen printing, where each color runs through its own screen.
Start by identifying every distinct color in your design and assigning each one a named spot color, ideally a Pantone Solid Coated number rather than a generic RGB swatch. Every print job should travel with the decoration method, garment color, the maximum ink colors the press allows, exact print location and size, and exact Pantone or thread colors, since a press only has so many screens or thread colors available per run, and that number caps how complex your design can be.
In your vector file, organize separations onto individually named layers or groups, one per color, so the shop can isolate and output each one without hunting through a flattened file. Overlapping colors need clean, deliberate layering, since screen printing lays down colors in a specific sequence, and the wrong stacking order can make a design look muddy or let underlying colors show through where they shouldn’t.
Watch for colors that are visually close but not identical; two near-matching blues in your file might print as separations only to reveal a mismatch you never noticed on screen. Reduce the color count wherever a design allows, since fewer separations means a faster, cheaper print run and fewer chances for registration errors between screens.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Artwork Submissions
Most production delays trace back to the same handful of avoidable errors, and they show up on nearly every artwork intake form for a reason.
Submitting a low-resolution image is the single most frequent problem. A logo pulled from a website or a social media post is almost always well under 300 DPI at any real print size, and no amount of software sharpening fixes that after the fact. Forgetting to outline fonts is close behind. Without outlining, a missing font on the shop’s system can silently substitute a different typeface, and nobody notices until the proof comes back wrong.
Sending a flattened raster file when a vector source exists is another common slip. If a shop can’t access your editable layers, they can’t fix registration issues, adjust color separations, or resize elements cleanly. Ignoring safe areas ranks high too. A design built without accounting for seams or panel lines often gets a cropped or distorted final print, and it’s rarely caught until the finished jerseys arrive.
Vague color instructions cause real trouble as well. Sending a screenshot with “make it blue” instead of a Pantone number leaves too much room for interpretation. Skipping a labeled mockup is another one; without a clear image showing exact placement, front and back designs sometimes get swapped, or a chest logo lands off-center on a full team run. Finally, having multiple people submit revisions independently creates version confusion that can quietly undo an approved design right before production starts.
Author perspective: quick rules-of-thumb from production
If you’re unsure which format wins, send both a vector file and a 300 DPI PNG at final size, plus a labeled mockup. That combination covers nearly every method without a follow-up email. Assign one person as the art approver; nothing burns time faster than two “final” versions arriving a day apart. When a color has to be exact, ask for a physical swatch or sample print before the full run goes to press.
— Eric
How RNK Apparel Helps You Get Print-Ready Artwork Right
Getting a jersey design to production-ready shape on your own is doable, but it’s a lot of DPI math and Pantone lookups for a volunteer team manager to handle between practices. This service closes the gap: instead of guessing at safe areas and stitch minimums, you get templates built around actual jersey panels and a team that checks your file before it hits the press.
RNK Apparel’s design guide for youth team gear walks through placement and sizing specific to hockey jerseys, and the team color palette guide helps you pick contrast combinations that stay readable once printed. To submit your own logo or roster names for review, start on the Customized Hockey Apparel page, where you’ll find the file requirements and upload steps for a full team order. If you’re outfitting the bench in layered gear alongside the jerseys, browse the hockey hoodie collection for matching logo placement across garment types. Submit your artwork now and get a proof back before you commit to a full roster print run.
Sources
FAQ
What Is the Recommended Artwork Size for a Jersey Print?
Build your file at the exact final print size, not a smaller version scaled up later. A typical adult chest print runs around 10 to 12 inches wide, and raster files at that size need to hit 300 DPI, or roughly 3,600 pixels of width for a 12 inch print.
Can You Screen Print on Jerseys?
Yes, screen printing works on jerseys, though the polyester fabric common in performance jerseys needs lower cure temperatures than cotton to avoid scorching. Dark-colored jerseys also need a white underbase layer beneath the design so colors stay opaque and vibrant.
What Size Should a PNG Be for a Jersey?
A PNG for jersey printing should match the exact final print dimensions at 300 DPI, with a transparent background rather than white. This size standard applies whether the design is going on the chest, back, or a sleeve, and it’s the same benchmark DTG and DTF printing both rely on for a clean hand-off.
How Much Does It Cost to Print on a Jersey?
Pricing depends on the printing method, number of colors, garment type, and order quantity, so there’s no single flat rate across the industry. For custom hockey jerseys and team apparel specifically, current pricing is available directly on RNK Apparel’s site once you specify your design and order size.
Do I Need Both a Vector File and a PNG?
Sending both covers you across every print method a shop might use. The vector file (AI, EPS, or PDF) handles screen printing and embroidery digitizing, while the 300 DPI PNG at final size is what DTG and DTF printing need directly.
