Preparing artwork for all-over sublimation

A central point about all-over sublimation is that the artwork is prepared for flat fabric panels, not for a garment. The garment does not exist yet when the printing happens. What exists is a set of pattern pieces, and the artwork has to be built onto those pieces.

That is why an all-over design cannot be supplied as a single rectangular image and why a mock-up of a finished garment is a starting point rather than a production file. How the garment is then produced is covered in full sublimation jersey manufacturing; what sublimation suits commercially is covered in the all-over sublimation guide. This page is about the artwork itself.

The workflow, in the order it happens

Two things about this order are worth noticing. The pattern comes before the artwork mapping, which means the fit has to be settled before the design can be finalised: change the pattern later and the artwork has to be re-laid. And cutting happens after printing, so the cutting operation is following the printed design rather than optimising fabric use, which is one of the reasons sublimated production is costed differently from cut-and-sew production in plain fabric.

Panel templates

A template is the pattern piece expressed as an artwork canvas. There is one for each panel in the garment and one set for each size in the range, because a size L front panel is a different shape from a size S front panel and the artwork on it is not simply the same image scaled.

Each panel carries a cut line, a bleed extending past it, and a safe zone inside it where critical artwork stays. Anything continuing across a seam has to be drawn to match at both panel edges.

Panel count is a design constraint as well as a construction one. Every additional panel is another edge the artwork has to resolve, and a design that reads well on a two-panel body can become difficult on a six-panel one.

Bleed and safe zones

Two concepts do much of the work at the panel edges, and they pull in opposite directions.

The seam allowance is the reason the safe zone has to be inside the cut line rather than at it. Fabric between the cut edge and the stitch line disappears inside the garment when the seam is sewn, so artwork placed there is printed and then hidden. A sponsor logo positioned right up against a panel edge can lose a visible slice of itself for exactly this reason.

Artwork that crosses a seam

This is where all-over design succeeds or fails visually. A graphic that runs from the body onto a sleeve, or from the front onto a side panel, has to be drawn so that the two panels match at the line where they will be joined, allowing for the fabric that disappears into the seam.

Perfect continuity across a seam is not realistic to promise. Fabric stretches slightly during printing, fixation and handling, panels are cut with a tolerance, and the sewing operation itself has a tolerance. What is realistic is designing so that small misalignment does not matter.

The graphic here runs from the body onto both sleeves. The textural elements cross the seams without the eye registering an offset; the wordmark stays entirely on the front panel.

Placing logos and sponsors inside an all-over print

A sublimated garment usually carries specific marks as well as a background design, and those marks are placements in the ordinary sense described on the artwork placement hub. The difference is that they are positioned on the panel rather than on the garment, which is a less intuitive coordinate system.

1. 1Decide the position on the garment first, in the normal way: a distance down from the shoulder and across from centre front.
2. 2Have that translated onto the panel template, allowing for the seam allowances that will be consumed.
3. 3Check that the mark sits inside the safe zone with room to spare, since it tolerates a shifted cut poorly.
4. 4Check it against the background artwork underneath: a logo over a busy area of the print may need a plain field behind it to stay legible.
5. 5Confirm how it behaves across the size range, because a panel that grows changes where a fixed-position mark sits relative to the body.

The last point catches people out. On a sublimated garment the artwork and the placement are the same file, so a decision to keep a logo at a fixed size across sizes has to be built into every panel set rather than applied once.

Resolution, and what actually needs it

All-over artwork is physically large, and a file that is adequate for a chest print is not adequate for a full panel. The rule is the same one that applies to any print artwork and is set out in the artwork file requirements guide: resolution is only meaningful at the final printed size.

• Vector elements, which is what logos, text and hard-edged graphics should be, scale to any panel size without loss.
• Photographic and painterly elements are raster by nature and have to be supplied large enough to cover their area at the intended output resolution.
• Textures and patterns can often be built as repeats, which solves the resolution problem and makes seam crossings easier at the same time.
• An upscaled small image does not gain detail, and sublimation shows softness clearly because there is no fabric texture obscuring it the way a printed ink layer would be.

Colour

Sublimation colour is produced by a printer through its own colour management, not mixed to a target the way a screen printing ink is. A brand colour reference is therefore an input to a conversion rather than a specification of the output, and the achievable result depends on the ink set, the profile and the fabric.

Two consequences follow. Some colours in a brand palette will be closer than others, and it is worth knowing which before the design is finalised rather than after. And the colour has to be judged after fixation on the actual fabric, because sublimation colour shifts between the printed transfer and the finished garment, which is the mechanism described in polyester print colour change.

There is also a substrate constraint that has no equivalent in printing on cotton: sublimation dyes bond with polyester, so the fabric has to be a polyester or a high-polyester blend, and the base fabric is normally white or very pale because the dye adds colour rather than covering what is underneath. The fabrics themselves are covered in performance polyester knits.

What to send, and what to expect back

Approving the panel layout is a step that is easy to skip and expensive to skip. Once panels are printed there is no correcting a graphic that was positioned wrongly on the template; the fabric has to be reprinted.