How Do I Brief a Designer for Apparel Artwork?

Tell the designer the constraints before you tell them the idea. They need the decoration method, the number of colours you are willing to pay to set up, the garment and its colour, and the print size in millimetres with its placement. Artwork produced without those facts is a picture, and turning a picture into printable artwork is a second piece of work someone will bill you for.

Constraints First, Mood Board Second

Most bad apparel artwork is not badly designed. It is designed for the wrong medium. A soft gradient with a drop shadow is straightforward for DTF and impossible for embroidery. A six-colour illustration is comfortable on a digital process and expensive on screen print, where setup is charged per colour. If the designer knows on day one that this is a two-colour screen print on a navy hoodie at 260mm wide, they will design towards it and the result improves rather than suffers. Constraints are not the enemy of the brief. They are most of it.

Print Size in Millimetres, Never in Adjectives

"Big across the chest" means something different to everyone who reads it. Give a width in millimetres and a placement measured down from the shoulder seam, and the designer can check whether their thin outline still reads at that size. This matters most for the small stuff. A left chest logo is often somewhere around 80 to 100mm wide, and plenty of marks that look confident at the top of a website fall apart at that scale. Ask for the artwork to be printed at actual size on paper and held against a shirt. It takes two minutes and catches a surprising amount.

Colour Count Is a Budget Decision, Not an Aesthetic One

Set the ceiling before the design starts. Screen printing carries setup per colour, so each extra ink adds cost at the front of the run and then costs nothing more as quantity climbs. DTF has no per-colour setup at all, which is why full-colour and photographic artwork suits shorter runs. Embroidery counts thread changes rather than screens. If the method is genuinely undecided, brief a tight palette and ask for a one-colour version alongside the full one. You will reach for it more often than you expect.

• The decoration method, or a shortlist of two, with your reasoning so the designer can weigh it themselves.
• Garment type, fabric weight if you know it, and the exact garment colour, including any second colourway you might add later.
• Print width in millimetres and the placement, described from the shoulder seam rather than from the hem.
• The maximum number of colours you will pay to set up, and whether that number includes white.
• Deliverables: layered source file, outlined vector, one-colour version, knockout version for dark garments, and a stated minimum reproduction size.

Ask for Versions, Not a Single Artwork

One file is never enough for a real apparel programme. You want the full-colour master, a single-colour version for cheap runs, a reversed or knockout version that works on dark garments, and a simplified version for embroidery with fine detail removed rather than shrunk. Ask for a stated minimum size below which the logo should not be used. That one line in a brand document prevents years of argument about whether the mark will work on a cap front. Often it will not, and knowing that early saves a wasted setup.

“"The cheapest hour of any apparel project is the one spent writing down what you actually want before anybody opens a design tool."”

Say What the Garment Is Actually For

Workwear and merch pull in opposite directions and the designer needs to know which one they are serving. Uniform has to be recognisable from across a car park, survive frequent hot washing, and still look right when the wearer is bent over a machine. Merch has to earn a place in someone's wardrobe against garments they chose for themselves, which usually means a smaller, quieter, more confident mark. Brief them identically and you end up with uniform nobody can read and merch nobody wants to wear.

Settle the Files and the Ownership Up Front

Agree in writing which files you receive and that you may use them with any supplier. Editable source files, not only flattened exports. Fonts either outlined or named with their licence noted, because a typeface licensed for a designer's machine is not automatically licensed for your printer's. Then store everything centrally with sensible names and a date. The most expensive thing in apparel branding is rarely the artwork itself. It is paying to have artwork redrawn three years later because nobody can find the original.

Build One Round of Reality Into the Timeline

Expect at least one round of changes once a printer sees the file, particularly with embroidery, where digitising tends to expose detail that will not stitch. Production starts at artwork approval rather than at order placement, so approval delays move the whole schedule. As qualitative guidance, screen printing and embroidery run around 10 to 15 working days from approval, with sublimation and complex jobs nearer 15 to 20. Book the designer with enough slack that one revision does not eat your delivery date.