How to prepare an image for printing on a shoe

Most rejected artwork is not bad artwork. It is a good image saved in a way that cannot survive the trip onto a curved, sewn, absorbent surface. These six settings are the whole checklist — get them right and the rest is judgement.

1. Size: aim for pixels, not DPI

DPI is a printer setting, not a property of your file. What matters is how many pixels you have to give. Our largest panels are printed at up to 1658 × 1987 pixels, and the artwork is sampled from a window that is then enlarged — 2.9× at the median across our range, up to 4.8× on the widest patterns.

That gives a concrete target: at least 2,000 pixels on the short edge. A 2000 × 2500 JPEG is plenty for every style. A 600-pixel screenshot lifted from a chat app is not, and no amount of resampling in Photoshop will add the detail back.

2. Colour: work in sRGB

Convert to sRGB before uploading. CMYK files get converted anyway, and the conversion that happens automatically is rarely the one you would have chosen — saturated blues and greens shift first.

Expect the printed result to read slightly darker and less luminous than your screen. A screen emits light; leather reflects it. Deep blacks lose some depth and very bright saturated colour loses some glow. If a colour must be exact — a brand mark, a team colour — say so before we print, because adjusting after the fact is a reprint, not a tweak.

3. Background: transparent, or deliberately not

A white background prints as white. If your design is a logo on a white square, the square goes on the shoe. Two clean options:

• Transparent PNG — for logos, line art, lettering and anything that should sit on the panel like ink rather than like a sticker.
• A deliberate full-bleed background — when the white (or colour) is the design, as in a framed illustration or a pattern tile.

What to avoid is accidental white: an exported JPEG of a vector logo, a screenshot with a page background, a photo with its studio backdrop left in. Those are the most common cause of an artwork revision.

4. Type: convert it to shapes

Fonts get substituted. The only reliable way to guarantee your lettering looks the way it looked on your machine is to convert text to outlines, or to rasterise the whole thing at final size before saving. If you are working in vector, convert text to paths and keep the file as PNG or SVG at full resolution.

Two rules for type on a shoe specifically:

• No hairlines. Strokes thinner than a millimetre may break up, and any thin rule crossing a seam will not line up after sewing.
• Keep text off the panel edges. Seam allowance is taken from the printed edge; letters close to it get clipped.

5. Aspect ratio: fit the canvas, don't letterbox it

Our design canvas is roughly 3:4 on most styles (611 × 800 logical units on the Classic Low-Top). A 16:9 image dropped onto a 3:4 canvas either has to be cropped or leaves empty bands above and below — and those bands are part of what gets sampled by the panels.

The practical move is to compose at 3:4, or to accept the crop consciously. If a subject must stay whole, scale it down and place it on one panel rather than filling the canvas.

6. Format: PNG or high-quality JPEG

The pre-flight checklist

Then look at the panels

All six checks can pass and a design can still break at a seam, because none of them say anything about where the cut lines fall. That part needs a visual check: the panel preview tool runs the real sampling and cutting step in your browser and shows every panel of the style you pick, at its production size.

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