T-Shirt Design Generator
Apparel artwork is a vector job. Screen printers want separated spot colours, vinyl cutters want paths, embroidery digitisers want unambiguous contours — and a flat PNG gives none of them what they asked for. One file, youth small to 3XL, no redraw.
Six steps
In the order the constraints actually bite. Print size and colour count are both decided before the artwork is any good, and both are expensive to change afterwards.
Generate from a prompt, or attach artwork up to 10 MB for the generator to work from. Either way you finish with paths and named groups rather than a flat picture — which is what every apparel process downstream is asking for.
11 × 14 inches for a standard adult front, 3.5 inches wide for a left chest. Judge the design at that size from the start; detail that reads on a laptop can vanish at 11 inches on cotton.
On screen print every colour is a screen and a setup fee. Four instead of seven is a pricing decision. Merge near-identical fills while it is still cheap to change your mind.
Give each colour its own group and name it in the code panel. Generated artwork already arrives grouped, so this is renaming and merging rather than rebuilding the file by hand.
The printer does not have your font, so letterforms have to be paths. Then raise anything under 1 mm — it breaks up in screen print and disappears under a DTG underbase.
Send the vector to a screen printer, vinyl cutter or embroidery digitiser. Preview it against white and black before you commit — a palette that assumes a white shirt dies on a black one.
Steps three and four are the ones a raster generator cannot offer. A flat image has no separable colours — a screen printer looking at a PNG is quoting you for a trace before they quote you for a shirt.
Print methods
1 – 6 spot colours
What it needs
Flat separated colours, no gradients, no soft edges. Each colour is a physical screen, so every extra one costs money on every shirt.
Vector angle
Ideal. Each colour is already its own group, so separation is a matter of naming rather than tracing.
Unlimited
What it needs
Full colour is fine. Watch the edges instead — DTG on dark garments needs a white underbase, and thin details disappear into it.
Vector angle
The master stays sharp at any size, but note the PNG here rasterises to 1024px on the long edge — not the 300 DPI a DTG shop wants. Send the .svg, or rasterise it at full size in a free editor.
1 – 3 layers
What it needs
Cut paths, not fills. Every shape must be weedable — no islands so small you cannot lift them off the backing.
Vector angle
Required. The cutter follows paths directly, so this is the format the machine wants.
Thread colours
What it needs
Bold, simplified shapes with no detail under about 1.5 mm. A digitiser converts your file into stitch paths.
Vector angle
Best starting point. A clean vector gives the digitiser unambiguous contours to work from.
Print sizes
Set your artboard to the real dimensions and judge the design at that size. Everything about stroke weight and legibility follows from it.
| Placement | Inches | Millimetres |
|---|---|---|
| Standard front print | 11 × 14 in | 279 × 356 mm |
| Youth front print | 9 × 11 in | 229 × 279 mm |
| Left chest | 3.5 – 4 in wide | 89 – 102 mm |
| Full back | 12 × 16 in | 305 × 406 mm |
| Sleeve | 3 × 3 in | 76 × 76 mm |
Before you send it
Artwork that assumes a white shirt disappears on black. Check it against both grounds before you commit to a palette.
Anything thinner breaks up in screen print and vanishes under a DTG underbase. Thicken it in the editor — one attribute, whole drawing.
On screen print each colour is a screen and a setup fee. Deciding at four instead of seven is a pricing decision, not an aesthetic one.
The printer does not have your font. Convert letterforms to paths so what they open is what you drew.
A print that crosses a seam distorts. Keep the artwork inside the flat panel of the garment.
Set the artboard to the real print dimensions. Detail that reads on a laptop can be invisible at 11 inches on cotton.
Not the tool for this
Most tools ranking for this search do at least one of them. If one is what you came for, the honest answer is to go and use the thing that does it.
Placeit, Pacdora, Kittl
We do not render your design onto a photographed shirt. There is no mockup generator here at all — if a listing photo is what you actually need, those tools do it in a click and we would only slow you down.
Canva, Kittl, Adobe Express
There is no catalogue of ready-made shirt designs to start from. Everything begins from your prompt or your uploaded artwork, which is slower on a blank day and better when you want something nobody else is selling.
Printify, Printful, Merch by Amazon
We print nothing and ship nothing. We make the file those platforms ask you to upload — and specifically the vector master that survives being resized, reseparated and re-cut for a different process later.
What is left is the part those tools hand back as a flat image: a vector master you can reseparate for a different print process, cut on vinyl, or hand to a digitiser two years from now.
Questions
