Design Tips

All the colors in the image below generally produce "true to eye" — what you see is what you get. These are all the colors we can reliably produce. Very bright colors, neons, and pastels can render strangely or not at all, so if you submit a design or image with those tones, we may suggest replacement shades we know will present better.

Here are a couple of before and after images to give you an idea of how pictures translate from your screen to the blanket, in both quality and color. (Click and drag the slider from left to right to see.) Notice that very fine, small details can get a bit lost but still contribute to the design as a whole.

The better image you can give us up front, the better result you'll see when unwrapping your blanket. We really want that to be a special moment for you, so here's how to make it happen.

We take your image and increase it to the sizes you see below, and the more we have to increase it, the more likely it is that we'll have some quality loss that translates to your blanket.

Large: 80” x 60” blanket: 7680 x 5760 pixels at 96dpi
Medium: 60” x 50” blanket: 5760 X 4800 pixels at 96dpi
Small: 52” x 37” blanket: 4992 X 3552 pixels at 96dpi

If you know what this means...great! If not, no worries. Here are a few tips to help:

1) If someone texted you a picture or you grabbed it from Facebook, it's too small. Your best bet is to use an image you took yourself OR have the sender email you the full size photo.

2) Check the file size of the image. If it's at least 500 kb, you're on the right track (but the bigger the better!). If it's smaller than 500 kb, we may have some quality issues.

3) If all else fails we can upscale your image, but we can't guarantee there won't a loss in quality. We promise we'll do our best to touch it up and work with what we've got, but please understand that there are limits to the miracles we can work.

BEST: vector files (.svg, .ai, .eps)

These are our favorite because we can resize your image to fit the dimensions of the blanket with zero quality loss. If you have or can get these files, please send them.

GREAT: standard photo files (.psd, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, .heic, etc.)

Of this group, we like Photoshop files (.psd) the best. The rest of these are normal photo files you can find in the wild and will generally work fine. There are others not listed here that we can use as well.

OKAY: everything else (.pdf, scanned images, photos of photos, etc.)

We'll try to work with whatever you have, but we might have some work to do. Images that fall into this category will likely require substantial time to get into shape, in which case we'll ask for a small art fee ($49). Or, if it's a more complex project requiring a professional artist's help (such as a custom design from scratch, a reproduction, etc.), we'll get a free estimate for you. It may cost a bit more, but we've had some really nice results and you own all the files afterwards. Check out an example below!

One of the major benefits of working with a small business instead of giganta-corps is that we can help with special projects. For example, a young lady came to us with the family crest image you see on the left, which was far too pixelated and low-resolution to make into a blanket. When our usual photo editing tricks didn't work, we took it to the next level and roped in one of our talented artists, who painstakingly recreated the crest by hand. (Please note that art fees vary in these types of scenarios.) He delivered a digital file that not only resulted in a beautiful blanket but that the client could use for all kinds of other purposes!