Dye sublimation

Your artwork is printed with dye onto a transfer sheet. Heat and pressure turn that dye directly into a gas, which passes into the surface of a polyester fabric or a polymer-coated hard item and solidifies again once it cools — inside the material rather than on it.

That is why a sublimated mug can go through a dishwasher and a sublimated sock can be worn out without the design fading at the edges. There is no ink layer to fail because there is no ink layer.

These products rarely have a neat rectangular print area. A mug wraps, a tumbler tapers, a sock is tubular, a bath mat has a bound edge. Extend artwork fully to the bleed on all sides so nothing lands short and leaves an unprinted margin, and keep anything you care about away from the physical features — the handle join on a mug, the lid seam on a tumbler, the heel and toe on a sock.

Placement can shift slightly from item to item, so avoid designs that require a specific element to land in an exact spot. Patterns, full-bleed scenes and generously spaced compositions all handle the tolerance well; a single small motif that must sit dead centre does not.

The dye is translucent and adds colour to whatever it lands on rather than replacing it. On a white base that is exactly what you want. On a coloured or off-white base, everything shifts toward the base colour, and no amount of ink will produce a colour lighter than the surface beneath it — white in your artwork means "no dye here", so it comes out as the item’s own colour rather than as printed white.

Colours generally emerge vivid and saturated, often more so than they look on screen. The exception is deep black on textiles, which can read slightly softer than expected because a little of the base still shows through.