A major key to a successful design is creating a proper print file. That way the design looks and works the way your customers expect it to when it arrives on their doorstep. Looking at the 8 most common mistakes sellers make, we can show you how to avoid print file mistakes that could potentially ruin a design.

8 Ways to Avoid Print File Mistakes

1. Have Enough DPI

DPI (dots per inch) is a printing term that refers to how many dots per inch will print out. The higher the DPI, the sharper the print. If your prints are turning out blurry or grainy, it’s likely your DPI is too low.

For example, you have a design that’s perfect on a mug, but you want the image on a t-shirt. When you try to enlarge it, the DPI is too low for a shirt. You have a few options:

1. Find or create a new, high-quality image that meets the DPI requirements
2. Turn your low-quality image into a vector
3. Use the smaller, but the higher-quality image

For the best results, always create your designs at 300 DPI and avoid resizing royalty-free images you find online.

Remember: Simply increasing the DPI settings on the file will NOT improve the quality of your image if it was too low in the first place.

2. Have Correct Ratios

When designing for print, it’s important to take into consideration both the aspect ratio of the image and the aspect ratio of the print. The aspect ratio is the relationship between the height and width of an image. Your image could be 500 pixels wide and 1000 pixels high, which gives it an aspect ratio of 1:2 or 1 to 2.

For the best print, your image aspect ratio should match exactly your print aspect ratio. If they are similar, but not exact, you can:

• Crop your image
• Change your print size

Keeping your print and image aspect ratios as close to the same as possible will help you achieve the print you want and customers will love.

3. Fix Transparency Issues

We often see designs that use transparency incorrectly leading to a bad print. Some of the issues we see include:

• Colors outside the printable range
• Low resolution
• Semi-transparent layers
• Transparency levels are wrong
• The base color they are printed on

To avoid a bad print when it comes to transparency, we recommend:

• Use 100% transparent background in your design
• DO NOT use transparency in a print graphic for any reason
• Use halftones instead of transparency with colors

Remember: When you use the magic wand tool to eliminate the background or cut out an object, DON’T leave stray pixels! The almost transparent pixels are hard to make out when you look at the image, but they will print as gray blobs or shadows and make the final print look off.

If you follow these tips for transparency, you are on your way to creating a successful design!

4. Use Printable Colors

One of the most common mistakes we see is designers choosing the wrong colors for their designs. The most successful designs stick with a basic color palette. Out of our top 100 campaigns, 47% of the designs featured two colors or less. Simple is better!

We recommend using the CMYK for the best prints. While it is slightly more limited than RGB, it produces the best end product. It is also the most commonly used profile for printers. You can learn more about the difference between RGB and CMYK in our GL Academy course on product color best practices.

Another common mistake is using a design on a product that’s the same color as some of the art. This results in some of the art looking like it’s missing or unprinted. If you have a design that is predominately white, for example, you would not want to choose a white product to print it on.

Our final tip: Never use neon colors in your design. They aren’t part of the RGB/CMYK color gamut that POD printing machines can print.

5. You Pay Attention to Bleed Areas

As you put your design on various products, it’s important to pay attention to the bleed areas. Bleed areas are the limits of the printing area, including the small margin of variance, made possible by the type of product, fabric, or size used.

Our designer has simplified this consideration by providing outlined mock-ups in the campaign creation process.  

6. Use the Personalization Box Properly

Personalization is a fantastic way to sell even more products, but if your design is wrong, your customers won’t be satisfied. One mistake we see all too often is the personalization box being too close or over the design.

When you create a design using personalization, be sure to:

• Choose your font carefully so that it looks great with your design
• Keep away from the edges of the print area
• Leave plenty of space around it to allow for both short and long text entries by customers
• Avoid placing the text area over your design

7. Adjust Your Design for Wall Art

When you create designs for our wide variety of wall art, it’s essential that you align your design for every size you plan on selling. Each size will require adjustments to your design to fit and print correctly in the space available.

If you create a multi-product campaign with both a front and back design, remember to choose your products carefully. Wall art, for example, does not have a printable back, so you would want to create a separate campaign for wall art using only the front design option.

8. Choose Your Design Carefully

Not every design will work on every product. An awesome mug design may not translate well onto a t-shirt. Every product has a different texture and made from different materials, which affects how your design looks when it’s printed. Fabric stretches more than the hard surface of a travel tumbler or wine glass.

By following these steps, you can avoid print file mistakes and have designs that make customers happy.

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