Small Print and Fine Line Quality Expectations

• Printing with small print and fine lines
• How do we ensure high-quality products at Gooten?
• Design tips & tricks for small print and fine lines
  • What to expect with DTG prints | Sample 1
  • What to expect with UV Inkjet Cylindrical Prints | Sample 2
  • What to expect with Dye Sublimation Prints | Sample 3

Printing with small print and fine lines

When creating designs for your print-on-demand products, you’ll always have to consider the level of detail in your designs. You might run into scenarios with smaller print and fine lines where your printed products produce illegible text or lines.

Since your print is made-to-order, we always recommend ordering samples of your designs so your printed products meet the expectations of your original design.

How do we ensure high-quality products at Gooten?

Our team has developed specific practices and policies to ensure that our products are printed to meet the highest quality standards. We work with best-in-class manufacturers to implement a quality control process that upholds the integrity and detail of your original design as it is printed on our products.

Gooten strives to support our partners by providing detailed information regarding how different designs will look when printing with smaller prints and more refined lines using our Direct to Garment, Dye Sublimation, and UV Inkjet printing processes. Our intuitive image editor makes it easy for you to design your products.

We have reference documents that explain how to create designs with smaller prints and more refined lines correctly, and what to expect from the output when using these techniques. These documents feature digital test images with various design elements that can be used to visualize print results across Direct to Garment, Dye Sublimation, and UV Inkjet products.

Design tips & tricks for small print and fine lines

Direct-To-Garment (DTG) printing technique

• Our manufacturers recommend that your lines or text not be narrower than 10 pixels. Doing so provides you with the best print quality consistency.
• Using fonts smaller than 10pt can result in illegible lines or text.
• Avoid black print on red shirts, as ghosted or faded design elements may appear.
• There shouldn’t be any issues printing any size copyright symbol, even when no underbase is needed.
• White print can be printed only on colored shirts, and Black print can be printed on white shirts.
• Note that there is a slight loss of detail when printing black on black/red, as the copyright symbol gets smaller.
• Please be careful when designing lines that are close together for line art. The closer the lines get to each other, the more they blur together when printed.

Cylindrical printing technique 

• For pint glasses, we recommend not going lower than 7pt for font sizes and above 0.25pt for arrows. Anything below 7pt starts to become barely legible. For arrows, a 0.25pt stroke appears faint.
• For Viking tumblers, we recommend using larger pt sizes.
• The smaller the pt size, the more unrecognizable the copyright symbol becomes.
• The text becomes blurry as the font size decreases when it is bolded vs. not bolded.
• The thinner the lines are in line art, the closer together the design becomes, which can result in issues.

Designing for small print and fine lines

Sample #1 - Expectations on DTG prints

The digital image examples below feature design elements in different sizes and thicknesses, including fonts, lines, symbols, and arrows, on various colored garments.

For our DTG-printed products, we’ve printed this digital image on black, white, Columbia blue, red, and athletic heather garments. We’ve used the Bella + Canvas 3001 CVC SKUs for this print test. We tested various points and thicknesses for the following categories:

• Font size range between 10pt - 240pt
• Line thickness/stroke width ranges from 0.5pt to 1pt
• Copyright symbol sizes range from 0.125” to 0.625” in diameter
• Squares with arrows size range from:
  • The smallest size: 2.375” x 2.375”
  • The medium size: 3” x 3”
  • The biggest size: 3.5” x 3.5”

Just so you know, the samples are printed in black-and-white ink across multiple colors. They show the contrast in color printing with small print and fine lines.

Printed samples on various garments

Sample 2 - UV Inkjet Cylindrical Prints

For our cylindrical products, we’ve printed this digital image on a clear pint glass and a Viking tumbler. We tested various points and thicknesses for the following categories:

For pint glasses:

• Font size ranges from 7pt to 60pt
• Line thickness/stroke width ranging from 0.25pt to 1.75pt
• Copyright symbols size ranging from the following sizes:
  • The smallest size: 0.03in x 0.03in
  • The biggest size is 0.25 in x 0.38in

For Viking tumblers:

• Font size ranges from 7pt to 38pt
• Line thickness/stroke width ranging from 0.25pt to 1.75pt
• Copyright symbols size ranging from the following sizes:
  • The smallest size 0.03in x 0,03in
  • The biggest size is 0.25in x 0.38in

Printed samples on a clear pint glass

Printed samples on a Viking tumbler

Sample #3 - Dye Sublimation Prints

For our dye sublimation products, we’ve printed the sample digital images on a tea towel, a minky blanket, and a mug. We tested various points and thicknesses for the following categories:

• Font size ranges from 18pt to 150pt
• Line thickness/stroke width ranges from 0.25pt to 8.9pt
• The size of copyright symbols should range from the following sizes:
  • The smallest size 0is .24in x 0.25in
  • The biggest size 0is .99in x 0.99in
• Squares with arrow size ranging from:
  • The smallest size 2is .95in x 2.98in
  • The biggest size 4is .25in x 4.25in

Printed Samples on a Tea Towel

Printed Samples on a Minky Blanket

Printed Samples on a White Ceramic Mug