The guide
All Decoration methods
The decoration method comes first, the blank second. Every method has fabrics it loves and fabrics it flat-out refuses: screen printing handles almost anything, DTG wants smooth ring-spun cotton, sublimation only bonds to polyester, and embroidery needs a fabric stable enough to carry thousands of needle penetrations. Picking the blank before you know the method is how orders come back blotchy, faded, or puckered.
These guides cover the six methods decorators actually run in 2026: what each one does best, what it demands from the garment, and where the costs and pitfalls hide. Use them to match the blanks in your cart to the press, machine, or hoop they'll end up under, whether you decorate in-house or hand off to a contract shop.
Screen Printing
Any fabric
Screen printing pushes ink through a stencilled mesh screen, one screen per color, and has held the top spot in garment decoration for decades. Nothing else matches its color punch, wash durability, and per-piece economics once a run gets into the dozens. The trade-off is setup: every color in the design means another screen to burn, register, and clean.
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DTF (Direct-to-Film)
Cotton, blends & poly
DTF prints the design onto a release film, bonds a hot-melt adhesive to the wet ink, then heat-presses the transfer onto the garment. It has become the fastest-growing method in the industry because it pairs full-color prints with no minimums across cotton, blends, and polyester alike. For small-batch decorators it has largely replaced both vinyl multicolor work and entry-level screen printing.
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DTG (Direct-to-Garment)
100% cotton
DTG is an inkjet printer for shirts: water-based pigment ink jetted directly into the fabric, with photographic detail and effectively unlimited color. It owns the print-on-demand world and any job where the artwork is too complex for screens. But it's by far the pickiest method about the garment underneath it; the blank does half the work.
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Embroidery
Structured fabric
Embroidery stitches the design into the garment with needle and thread, and nothing else reads as premium the same way. It has texture, dimension, and durability that's effectively permanent. It's the default for corporate logos, left-chest placements, and headwear, where a printed logo would look cheap. The constraint is that it decorates with stitches, not pixels: fine detail, gradients, and big fill areas all fight the medium.
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Sublimation
Light polyester
Sublimation turns dye into gas under heat and pressure so it bonds inside polyester fibers. The result has zero hand, can't crack or peel, and is the only practical way to print a garment edge to edge. It built the all-over-print, jersey, and performance-wear categories. The catch is absolute: it only works on polyester, and only shows up on light colors.
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Vinyl (HTV)
Most fabrics
HTV is the cut-and-press method: a plotter cuts the design from a colored vinyl roll, the excess is hand-weeded away, and the design is heat-pressed onto the garment. It's unbeatable for names, numbers, and crisp one- or two-color graphics, with strong opacity on nearly any fabric. Its economics run opposite to screen printing: zero setup, but per-piece labor that never goes down.
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