Designing for Dark Apparel
When designing for dark apparel, you now have the ability to specify which parts of your image should be transparent. By treating something as ‘transparent,’ you are essentially excluding it from receiving any ink during the printing process, allowing the fabric color to show through.
The reasoning behind this is quite simple: You wouldn’t want to print red ink onto a red shirt, or black ink onto a black shirt!
You should also be mindful of the white space in your design. That doesn’t mean you can’t place some white ink onto a dark t-shirt. You certainly can. But there is a big difference between intentional white, and the empty space outside of your intended design that is white by default.
Here are some examples to better help you understand:
Colors printed on dark apparel are able to look vibrant and rich due to a base layer of white ink laid down prior to the actual printing. We refer to this process as ‘underbasing.’
Light apparel, on the other hand, does not employ this base layer. As a result, it does not have the option of printing with white ink: any white in your design will automatically be treated as ‘transparent.’ Please keep this in mind when designing.
As with all other products, Zazzle supports images in either PNG or JPEG formats. However, for dark apparel, we recommend using PNG images since it supports transparency.
Tips
- Most graphics programs (e.g. Photoshop) support PNG images with transparency, and will also allow you to convert your JPEGs to PNGs.
- Partial transparency is not supported. If an area is not fully transparent, it will be printed as opaque.
Jump to Another Section