How is my t-shirt printed using digital printing?

We use the Digital Direct printing technique for all of our digital prints. For information about size requirements for digital designs, check out the article about our design requirements.

About Digital Direct

Digital Direct uses superior textile ink to print directly onto the apparel. When using Digital Direct on white apparel, the shirt fabric will be the white or transparent parts of your design. For example, the stars and white stripes of an American Flag would be the t-shirt itself.

With darker t-shirts, we print a layer of white ink under the design then add the colored ink on top of that initial layer. The colored ink is then embedded directly into the white layer for a rich, vibrant effect. Using the above example, an American Flag would first be a white rectangle, with the red and blue elements printed on top of this initial layer of white. Therefore, these prints can feel a bit thicker than those on light-colored t-shirts.

For the best results, we strongly recommend using transparent file formats (.png or.gif). Learn about transparent backgrounds and how they work .

Special note for shop owners:

CMYK is used for Digital Direct printing. However, the design is displayed in RGB mode in the Spreadshirt shop (and on any monitor.) You can use your software to compare the design in both palettes, as they may appear differently.