Apparel Print Guide

When recommendations are made on the site, it's often to highlight providers that have advantages in terms of quality, turnaround time and ease of use. Products like card sleeves, playmats and dice are standardized to an extent; picking a single choice among many, one that matches the needs of most people and highlights which services distinguish themselves, makes sense there.

Not so with garments. What you'll apply the asset on depends on what you want to wear — it's not very useful to you to list a set of t-shirts if you would rather like a sweatshirt! On top of that, services that do print-on-demand for apparel are often much less user-friendly, with quality that is so similar as to make a single pick very hard.

So, there is no specific recommendation for apparel services or products. Instead, the assets are tested on a small range of products on multiple popular services. Their size should be enough to fill the customizable areas of a good number of garment templates, by having a suitably high DPI when used as-is with default margins and centering.

Some of these print-on-demand services are:

• Printful. This service distinguishes itself by streamlining printing designs for your own personal use, though you will find most of the tooling it provides is largely built around the needs of people setting up their own store. Assets on this site satisfy the transparency requirements of Printful's print process. Access Printful at printful.com.

• Gelato. At a slightly higher price point, Gelato offers a larger catalog of possible base garments. Access Gelato at gelato.com.

• Printify. This service is very similar to the other two. Access Printify at printify.com.

Due to the above, you may find that the assets you get from this site don't match exactly the size of the printable areas of the specific garment you want. You should be able to just drop the asset into the appropriate spots in the design page, and let the service center it, even if the size isn't exact. To be safe, double-check if this would clip the design on an edge if you're working with garments with unusually narrow or short print areas.

Note also that all assets were built with DTG (direct-to-garment) prints in mind. Some of these services offer embroidery for your garment; the assets have not been tested with that and your results may vary.