Artwork on leavers hoodies – how does it work?

Artwork – was a serious hassle

A few years ago artwork was a serious hassle for businesses decorating garments – businesses such as the Leavers Hoodies Company. Few people seemed to understand the requirements for a graphics file and even fewer had easy access to the appropriate files for their order.

Today, most people have a much better understanding of the requirements, and nearly every school, college, university and business has a readily available library for the most used graphic files.

There are still occasions when people don’t know what is required or are struggling to get hold of a usable image. It is for those people who are struggling that we write this article.

What is printed or embroidered onto hoodies

There are generally 3 things which the majority of leavers hoodies have printed or embroidered on.

• One or more pieces of text.
• A logo, emblem or motif representing the organisation / institution.
• A picture, outline or symbol of some variety – often used to make the purpose of the garment apparent, at least to the wearers.

Text

First, the easiest one to deal with. The text element(s) that are going to be printed or embroidered. Although the text is not a graphic in the true sense, it is part of the ‘artwork’ being added to the hoodies. The choices which the hoodies buyer will need to make include:

Font

• Font size
• Colour of the type
• Placement of each piece of text

Within reason, you can choose to have anything printed anywhere on your garment. Previously, some schools have tried to be overly creative and generated some fairly weird and wonderful designs. There is a, however, a reason why most companies offering personalised leavers hoodies offer very similar options for text placement. It works!

What are the standard areas of text printed or embroidered onto Hoodies?

• Front Chest – left, centre, right
• Back Chest – usually centred but nape of neck is also common
• Either shoulder / sleeve

Standard areas for text work because…

The generally accepted standard placements work in several ways.

• They are generally viewed as ‘looking good’.
• The flexibility these positions provide allows for reasonably sized fonts to be used for regular-sized words or short phrases.
• The standard locations are more long-wearing than some of the ‘funnies’ which have been tried.

For example, a previous request was to print a word on each cuff of a hoodie. While possible to do it would have been prohibitively expensive and, more importantly, because how someone chooses to spend their money is not our concern, the print would not have lasted above a couple of wears without damage. The cuff is a part of a hoodie or sweatshirt which faces a fair bit of harsh wear and tear. Printing in such a location would not make sense.

Some companies might not worry about the longevity of the garments they produce but we do. We want everyone to be happy and if we are lucky we want them to come back and order from us again. If we were to agree to every request, no matter how impractical we would have a long list of clients not happy with the garments they buy from us.

If you have an idea for where you want some text to go onto your garment which isn’t one of the standard places then it might be worth giving an expert a call and discussing it with them first.

Standard Text Colours, Fonts and Font Sizes work because…

By trial and error, over many years, the standard colours offered and font and font sizes have proven to be most popular and most effective. There is little point in getting something printed or embroidered onto a hoodie if it can’t be easily read.

The standards we offer are:

• Text Colours:- we use are Black text on light coloured hoodies and White text on darker colours.
• Printed Fonts:- we use IMPACT font to print names as this is bold and stands out well. Other common fonts used include – VAG Rounded, Freshman, Cooper Black, American Type and Futura
• Embroidered Fonts:- we use Tahoma for embroidered names

These are the default offerings. They work in the widest variety of situations and if you don’t have any specific feelings or issues this will be what is used.

However, if you do have specific requirements then speak to the team, or let us know at the quote stage. As ever, we will assess what you are asking for and let you know if there is any good reason why it might not ‘work’ well on your garment selection

Logo, emblem or motif

Second, we look at the artwork needed to allow print or embroidery of the organisation’s logo, emblem or motif. This used to be the biggest issue for many clients but has now become the easiest by far, in most cases.

For most people, if you are working for a school, college or university and you are tasked with getting some hoodies decorated with the organisation’s logo just ask for the logo file. It should be that simple!

It might take a couple of goes around the admin functions to find the person who knows where it is but someone has the necessary file(s). If you are getting desperate ask the people responsible for the website. It is highly likely they have a folder with all of the graphics they might need readily to hand.

If you are the unfortunate person, now luckily quite rare, who is buying hoodies (or any other decorated promotional items) and the organisation doesn’t have the logo file to hand then you have only one option. Take the best version of anything with the logo on and take a high-quality image of it and send it through to the company you are buying your hoodies from and ask them if that will be sufficiently good to reproduce an embroidered logo from. The answer is, unfortunately, likely to be NO!

Doing justice to your garments, crest / logo

Any size or quality of image file can be digitised and used to produce an embroidery but the result won’t do justice to the garments if the quality isn’t sufficiently high to start with.

Graphic designers understand this and, when your logo was produced, they will have created a high quality version of the image for use for this purpose as well as lower quality versions for use on such things as the school website or email signature files.

Picture / Graphic on the back of your hoodies

The image you want to get printed onto the back of your hoodies is the final design element.

The process to produce the finished print is different from the digitisation for embroidery. Depending on the type of printing which is to be used the actual method of getting the ink onto the garment varies. (See our hoodie decoration options page which discusses the different print options available & talks about embroidery too). The input to all of the printing processes is the same.  An image file. The following shows the preferred input for the different garment printing processes.