Design Advice - Leather Products

How to make great looking leather products!

Leather products glow with class and really showcase the designs you create with elegance. 

So let's talk about making your artwork the best it possibly can be!

Size matters!

The previews of products that you see are close-up shots, with the designs digitally rendered. This may make text and other design elements appear larger and/or more legible than they may be on the finished product. 

Make sure you check the physical dimensions of the leather product you have chosen. This can be found within the description of the product in the product creator. You will need to make sure that the designs you create will look good at this size.

The size of this product is ideal for short messages with clear fonts, simple photos, and simple illustrated designs.

If you want to make sure your design will look great, print it out at the correct size on a regular printer! If it looks great there, it will look fantastic on the real thing. 

Choose the correct DPI.

The DPI (dots per inch) setting controls the amount of detail a print will have when the artwork is applied to the product. For best results you should set the DPI of your artwork to 300. Lower DPI settings will work too, but you'll be missing out on quality.

Check your color profile.

When uploading your design to our system ready for print, your image will be converted to a .PNG file. This file type does not support CMYK color profiles, and so the color in your image will be converted to an RGB color profile. This will still work just fine, but If you have designed your artwork using the CMYK color profile, the colors in the image might look slightly different when printed.

If you require pixel-pefect color, we recommend designing your products using an RGB color profile.

Another note on colors.

On leather products your designs are being printed onto a brown leather backing. This can affect the way colors look on the final printed product as the brown underneath my interact with the color of the print. You may notice that your designs look a little bit different in person than they did on the digitally rendered mock ups. 

Try transparency.

On leather products it's possible to make parts of the design see-through using transparency. Transparency will only work with .PNG files. Make sure you are saving your design as a PNG with transparency enabled from within your design software.

Leather products support the printing of white and all other colors on the transparent design. So you can make all sorts of different designs work.