Carved into HTML: the 11 Commandments of Design Service

Many of you have probably uploaded a vector graphic at one point or another in your Spreadshirt life. If this much is true you might have also received a short e-mail in your inbox at one point with the following text:

Hello {FIRSTNAME},
Unfortunately, we cannot accept your uploaded design “{DESIGN_NAME}” (Design ID: {DESIGN_ID}) for the following reason: […]

A description of one of the 11 rejection reasons would follow with a short explanation of how you should rework your design so that we can print it. Sometimes this information didn’t completely clear up the confusion (let alone the frustration). So, we thought we would dig deeper into the reasons for rejection and stick this content into one of our more popular FAQs: “My design for plot printing has been rejected. Why?” This article also fits in well with our video of Micha and Klaus and is also linked in our rejection e-mails.

This new-and-improved FAQ now has a listed overview of the types of rejection for vector designs, sorted according to frequency. Smack-dab at the top is the first commandment “Thou shalt not create lines which are too thin”, a.k.a the 1.5 mm rule, followed by the “Thou shalt not leave curves open” and “Thou shalt not use too many anchor points”.

What’s also new is that we show and explain exactly what would happen if we were to print such a rejected design on a shirt. We’ve added some graphics to illustrate this point, which hopefully makes it clear why we can get pretty strict about the plot printing requirements. Here’s to fewer rejections!

For more information and answers to your vector and pixel graphics questions, check out our aptly named category.