Pre-Print Pattern Checklist: Ten Checks Before You Send a Design to Fabric

There’s a particular kind of quiet dread that arrives about four days after you email a design to a printer. The files are gone, the deadline is close, and you start wondering whether the repeat really lined up at the join, or whether that coral was the coral you signed off. Most costly textile rejections aren’t caused by weak design. They’re caused by preparation details that take ten minutes to fix before uploading and a fortnight to fix afterwards.

What follows is the sequence to work through before any file leaves the studio, whether it’s a two-metre sample of cotton poplin or a five-hundred-metre order of viscose. Each check assumes the one before it is settled.

1. Know the finished size and the process first

Before you touch a file, get three answers from the printer: what fabric, what printing process, and what the repeat size on cloth will be. A digital pigment line, a rotary screen press and a sublimation calendar want slightly different things from the same artwork.

Then build at 100 per cent of final print size. If the repeat is 32 cm across, your tile is 32 cm — not 32 cm scaled down “to save memory”. Scaling up later softens edges and thins hairlines. Anything under roughly 0.3 mm wide stands a good chance of vanishing into the weave, so judge line weights at final size rather than at screen zoom.

Ask for the spec sheet

Most printers publish one, listing file format, resolution, colour mode and bleed. If yours doesn’t, ask in writing and keep the reply. It’s your reference if something goes wrong later.

2. Resolution, format and what not to send

For busy all-over patterns on woven cloth, 150 dpi at final size is often plenty; the texture of the fabric does most of the softening. For fine linework, small motifs or engineered panels carrying text, work at 300 dpi at final size and consider building in vector instead. A cotton weave will not resolve 600 dpi detail, so don’t confuse a huge file with a sharp one.

• Check pixel dimensions, not the document size box. A file can claim to be A0 at 300 dpi while holding enough pixels for a postcard.
• Never upscale. If the source isn’t big enough, redraw or rescan. Interpolation invents softness no printer can undo.
• Send TIFF, PSD, PDF/X-4 or AI — whatever the printer lists. Keep JPEGs for sharing proofs, not for production.
• Flatten or label layers. An unlabelled PSD with fourteen hidden layers is a trap for whoever preps your file.

3. Colour mode, profiles and spot colours

Ask which colour mode the workflow expects. Digital textile printing often runs from RGB and converts inside the RIP; screen-printed work usually needs CMYK separations, one film per colour. Either way, the printer’s ICC profile is what makes that conversion predictable, so apply it before you send rather than hoping for the best.

Watch the colours that always cause trouble. Bright orange, deep navy and saturated greens sit near the edge of what ink can do on cloth. Soft-proof with the profile switched on and look for flattening. If a colour must be exact — a brand navy, a signature pink — send a textile reference swatch and expect a small shift between base cloths. The same ink reads differently on cotton, silk and polyester.

4. Building a repeat that actually aligns

A repeat is only seamless once you’ve tested it. In Photoshop, run Filter > Other > Offset with half the tile width and half the tile height, then look at the middle of the canvas, where the edges now meet. Seams, clipped drop shadows and mismatched motifs show up immediately. Tile the design three by three afterwards and squint at it from a distance.

Know which repeat you’ve built, and say so in your notes:

• Straight (full) repeat: motifs sit on a grid, in the same position in every column.
• Half-drop: each column drops by half the repeat height.
• Brick: offset horizontally, usually by half the motif width.
• Mirrored: the tile flips along an axis — handy for damask-style symmetry.
• Tossed: a scattered layout, which still needs a tile boundary that hides itself.

Give repeat measurements in centimetres, both across the width and around the circumference if the design is heading for a rotary screen.

5. Registration, bleed and the edges of the cloth

Where two colours meet, add a small overlap — roughly 0.5 to 1 mm is typical — so slight fabric movement doesn’t open a white hairline between them. Too much trap and you get a visible dark edge, so keep the overlap consistent across the file.

Add bleed at the cut edges: 2 to 5 mm for simple cut lengths, more for cut-and-sew panels, where you’ll need seam allowance as well. Pull critical motifs inward, at least 10 mm from the trim line, and keep anything important clear of the unprinted selvedge. For engineered placements, supply a diagram with measurements taken from the selvedge and a marked grain line — and accept a tolerance, because cloth shifts as it is printed and finished.

6. The ten-point pre-flight

1. Artwork built at 100 per cent of finished print size.
2. Repeat dimensions and repeat type written down in centimetres.
3. 150–300 dpi at final size, or vector where the detail demands it.
4. Colour mode and ICC profile matched to the printer’s specification.
5. Spot colours named, with a lab dip or strike-off approved.
6. Repeat tested with an offset move and a three-by-three tile.
7. Adjoining colours trapped consistently.
8. Bleed added, and critical detail pulled in from edges and selvedge.
9. Fonts outlined, layers flattened or clearly labelled, stray layers deleted.
10. File named readably: client_pattern_colourway_repeat-size_date.

7. Order a strike-off before the full run

Nothing on a screen tells you how a design behaves on cloth. A metre of printed sample answers the questions that matter: whether the repeat reads at the right scale across a body, whether that green goes muddy on the base you’ve chosen, and whether the linework holds. Ask for it on the actual fabric, in the actual process, and check it in daylight as well as indoors.

Then write down what you approved — fabric, colourway, repeat size, date — and keep that note with the file. Next season, when someone asks why the second run looks different, the answer will be in one document rather than an afternoon of guesswork.

Photo: VariousPhotography / Pixabay