Effective merchandise is a great marketing tool for your event. This can have numerous benefits such as building awareness of your event, as your attendees who purchase your merchandise, are effectively walking billboards, promoting your event. 

It’s important to use eye-catching designs to create event merchandise that people want to purchase and wear all year round, not just at your event, to create awareness.

Lets jump into some of our tips to help you to design your own eye-catching merch for your event.

Bright Colours

Don’t be afraid to use bright colours within your design for your merch. We see a wide variety of bright colourful, eye-catching designs pass through our production facility each day. Our cutting edge production machinery coupled with our expert team never fail to create amazing results. Our print applications can offer an exact replication of the design, colour tones included, especially with our DTF applications. 

Our printing is perfect for multi-coloured designs. Our printers produce vibrant, colourful prints which are true to the original design, making it ideal for event merch. As well as printing really vibrant colours, printed applications are good at printing crisp, bold images to incredible detail. 

Consider the Image Format

In order to make sure that your design is as eye-catching as it can be, it is important to consider the file format that you use and the quality of the image.

We recommend that you use a vectored image file. This is either an .ai, .eps, or .pdf. Or second to this, a .psd file. The reason as to why we recommend a vectored image file is that they still remain editable so our artwork team can open them and edit elements within if needed. Also, vectored images can be increased or decreased in size without compromising on the image quality.

We also accept the following file types: jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, ps, png, svg, tiff, tif.

Due to our machines being very sophisticated, they pick up every detail of the design. This means if the quality of your design is poor then the quality of the end result will be the same or even slightly worse. 

We would recommend the optimal quality to be 300 DPI. DPI stands for dots per inch which is also known as pixels per inch. As a general rule, the higher the pixel count, the better the image quality.

Not sure on your artwork quality? Don’t worry, our expert artworkers review every order and we will contact you if we don’t think we can get a great result with your upload. Our priority is to ensure every order looks as good as possible.

Be sure to check our artwork guidelines for more information regarding the requirements for your design.

Is The Design Versatile?

A key factor to consider for your event’s merchandise is the design being versatile. The design primarily needs to reflect the essence of the event and convey its message effectively. Additionally, the design needs to be simple and easily recognisable. Be sure to avoid excessive complexity or clutter that might make it difficult to understand or reproduce on merchandise. 

If you plan to create a range of merchandise, the design would need to be adapted to different merchandise items, such as t-shirts, hoodies or bags. It should look appealing and balanced on different surfaces and materials. Therefore, the design must be able to be easily scaled up or down without losing its visual impact. This is so it will work well on various merchandise items of different sizes and formats.

Embroidery Is More Than Capable 

Printed applications achieve bright, bold true to life colour. However, embroidery applications are more than capable of creating eye-catching event merchandise. Embroidery can be just as striking as a print application, plus it is incredibly hard wearing. We would recommend using an embroidery application on merchandise items such as polo shirts, sweatshirts and headwear.

For embroidery applications, designs can also contain text. Embroidery is able to recreate a wide variety of text fonts. Within the design, use appropriate fonts that reflect the event’s personality. Ensure the text is clear, readable, and balanced within the design, in order to achieve the best embroidered results.

In House or Outsourcer?

A further consideration would be to question how the design will be created or updated. Is there the capacity to create the design in house, or will a design outsource be required? 

Your event may need a new logo. This could be the case if you feel that your current design does not align with your events identity. Does it match with the colour scheme, typography, and any existing visual elements used within other aspects of your event? It is important that this is the case in order to maintain consistency and strengthen brand recognition.

By considering these points, you can create designs that are visually appealing, optimised for printing or embroidery, and effective in promoting your event through merchandise.