A tee shaft is about six millimetres across and maybe forty long. That is a smaller print area than almost anything else a brand puts a logo on, and artwork designed for a letterhead does not survive it.

Simplify one level, then one more

Taglines, registered marks, web addresses and secondary lines do not survive at tee scale. A mark and a short name is the realistic budget, and often the mark alone is stronger.

The instinct is to shrink the full logo. The right move is to build a reduced version — which we do free — and use it for anything printed this small.

Stroke weight has a floor

Below roughly 0.3mm at final size, a printed line either drops out or fills in depending on ink coverage. Fine serifs, hairline rules and thin outlines are the first casualties.

Thicken strokes deliberately rather than hoping. A slightly heavier mark at tee scale reads as confident, not crude.

One or two colours, not four

Each colour is a separate pass and each pass introduces registration tolerance. On a curved six-millimetre surface those tolerances stack up fast, and a four-colour mark ends up soft at every edge.

One colour, in strong contrast to the tee, outperforms a faithful full-colour reproduction every time at this size.

Tee colour is half the contrast equation

A dark mark on a natural or white tee reads from a distance. The same mark on a mid-tone painted tee can disappear entirely.

If the tee is painted in a brand colour, the mark usually has to be white or black rather than a second brand colour. That is a design decision worth making before the run rather than being surprised by.

Bamboo prints sharper than wood

Hardwood is open-grained, so ink spreads slightly into the fibre and edges soften. Bamboo is denser and paler, and holds a crisper edge.

If your mark has any fine detail that has to survive, that alone is a reason to specify bamboo.

Always proof at actual size

A logo viewed at 400 percent on a screen tells you nothing. We render every tee mockup at true scale, and it is reliably the moment a customer decides to drop the tagline.

Ask for the same from anyone else you buy from. It costs nothing and it prevents the most common disappointment in promotional print.