Can you match our team font and colors?

In most cases yes, and the honest version of the answer depends on which of three situations you are in with your typeface, and on what you can actually hand us for color. Matching is a supply problem far more than a printing problem, so this page is written as a list of what we need from you and what you get back.

The typeface: three situations

You have the font file and the right to use it

This is the clean case. Send the file with the license that covers commercial use, and the numerals and name letters are set from your own type. Nothing is approximated. This is what league and uniform programs usually have sitting in a brand kit, and it is worth asking your marketing team for it before you ask us anything else.

You know the typeface but do not hold a file

Tell us the name. If it is a commercially available face we can obtain it properly and set from it. If it is a foundry face with restrictive terms, we say so rather than substituting something similar and hoping nobody looks.

The numerals are custom and no file exists

Plenty of athletic numeral sets were drawn once for a uniform and never existed as a font. If you own the rights to that artwork, send flat vector outlines of the digits 0–9 and the alphabet, and we build the layout from those outlines directly — which is more accurate than any font substitution. If you can only supply a photograph of a jersey, we will tell you plainly that what you get is a close visual match, not a reproduction, and we will show you a proof before you commit to it.

Color: what "matching" means on a garment

Names and numbers are applied with full-color transfers, so color is not rationed. There is no per-color surcharge, an outlined two-tone numeral costs no extra pass, and a gradient or a photographic element inside a numeral is not a technical problem.

What color matching does require is a reference that means something. A hex value from a website and a Pantone reference from a brand book will not always land in the same place on a garment, and neither will look exactly like the swatch on your monitor. Three things move the result:

• The garment underneath. A mid-tone jersey shifts everything printed on it. The same file on white, on navy, and on a heather reads as three different colors.
• Fabric and finish. A textured mesh scatters light differently from a smooth performance knit, which flattens saturation slightly.
• Range limits. Fluorescents and metallics sit outside what a printed transfer can reproduce. We will get close and we will tell you in advance that it is close rather than exact.

The way past all of that is a pressed proof: we apply your name and numeral treatment to a sample of your actual garment, photograph it, and send it for approval. That proof is the color agreement. Once you sign off on it, we have a physical reference on the bench rather than an argument about screens.

What to supply

If some of that does not exist, we can build it. Layout and art preparation is quoted as its own stated line rather than folded invisibly into a per-unit figure, so you can see what you are paying for and decide whether to supply it instead.

How the match survives a live line

Once the proof is approved, the layout is locked into the intake tablets: typeface, letter height, numeral height, arc, spacing rule, color values, and registration references. Every ticket that reaches a lane produces identical geometry, whether it is the first unit of the day or the last one before teardown. Operators are not choosing type or nudging placement by eye — that is the entire point of locking it.

Name length still governs, whatever the typeface. About nine characters is where a jersey back stops cooperating — past it, letters get tightened or scaled until they no longer look like jersey lettering — and numbers run one to three digits. If your typeface is unusually wide, we find that out during the proof and set the ceiling accordingly, in the layout file rather than at the counter.

Numeral specification and heat-applied numbering →   What belongs in a written spec →