The Print-Ready Pattern Checklist: 12 Checks Before You Sell Your Designs

You have spent a fortnight on a pattern. The colours sing, the repeat flows, the motifs sit exactly where you want them. Then you upload it, and three weeks later a customer emails to ask why their cushion arrived with a visible seam down the middle, or why the teal looks like grey card. Nothing about the design was wrong. Something about the file was.

Most of what comes back to bother pattern sellers is technical, and nearly all of it can be caught in the ten minutes before you hit publish. Here is what to check, in order.

Colour mode, before anything else

Colour is the hardest thing to fix once a design is out in the world, so start here. Screens make colour out of light — RGB. Most fabric, wallpaper and paper printers make it out of ink — CMYK. A file built in RGB and sent straight to print tends to come back duller and flatter than the version on your monitor, because saturated blues, greens and bright oranges sit outside the range ink can reproduce.

Keep your master in RGB, then convert a copy for print destinations. Note which colours shift during that conversion and decide whether to adjust them, or to offer a slightly softer print colourway alongside the digital one. If you sell through a print-on-demand platform, check which profile it asks for: some handle conversion themselves, and sending a CMYK file to a shop expecting sRGB can undo the work.

Choose one working space and stay in it

sRGB is the safe, predictable choice for digital work and most print-on-demand. Wider spaces look richer on your own screen but flatter when something downstream reads them as sRGB. Whatever you choose, label exports clearly so a buyer or printer knows what they have.

Resolution, tile size and file format

Pixel dimensions matter far more than the dpi figure buried in the metadata. For print, work out the finished size and multiply. A 12-inch cushion panel at 300 dpi needs 3,600 pixels across; a 24-inch wallpaper drop needs 7,200. Export at the size the design will actually be printed at and let buyers scale down if they need to. Scaling up rarely ends well — a pattern that looks crisp at 100% goes soft the moment it is stretched.

Picking a format

• PNG for crisp flat colour, transparency and lossless quality.
• JPEG at high quality for textured, photographic-feeling patterns where file size matters.
• TIFF when a print partner requests it, or for an archival copy.
• Layered master in your design program's own format, saved separately and never exported over.

Test the repeat, not just the tile

A repeat can look immaculate on a single tile and fall apart the moment it meets itself. Build a temporary canvas three tiles wide and three tiles tall, drop the tile in, and stand back. Three tests catch almost everything:

1. Zoom out to thumbnail size. Diagonal drifts and unintended stripes appear at a distance long before they show up close.
2. Offset the tile. Nudge it by half its width and half its height, then repair whatever lands on the new edges. What was in the middle is now the seam.
3. Check the other repeat types. For a half-drop, offset vertically by half; for a brick, stagger horizontally; for mirrored, look for reflections that create odd symmetry — faces, letters and leaves that suddenly lean the wrong way.

Watch, too, for the one-pixel line that appears after a resample, and for motifs sliced at the edge but never completed on the opposite side.

Know what you are allowed to sell

Patterns are often assembled from borrowed parts: a brush set, a stock leaf, a scanned texture, a font used as a decorative motif. Each carries its own licence, and plenty allow personal or client work but not resale within a product. Read the terms for anything you did not draw yourself, and keep a copy of those terms with the file.

If a pattern was made for a client, the contract decides whether you can sell it again. Some clients buy exclusive rights, others buy a season's usage. Selling a design twice when the first buyer believed they owned it outright damages a reputation faster than any technical fault. When you grant exclusivity, remove the design from every shop, portfolio and stock library the same day, and note the date you did it. Keep an eye out, too, for trademarks, brand characters and anything that reads as a logo — those are not yours to reinterpret.

If you are unsure whether an element can be sold, leave it out. There is always another leaf.

Licensing rules vary by country and by contract, so for anything significant, take proper legal advice rather than trusting a forum thread.

Name files so future-you can find them

A simple convention saves hours: pattern-name_colourway_tilesize_dpi_version. For example, meadow-bloom_indigo_3600px_300dpi_v3.png. Lower case, hyphens between words, no spaces, and no file called final-final-really. Then split the folders:

• /masters — layered originals, never exported over
• /exports — print and digital versions
• /previews — listing images and mockups
• /licences — saved terms for anything borrowed

Keep a plain text note in each folder recording tile size, repeat type, colourways, dates and any licence details. When a buyer asks whether a design is a half-drop or whether it can be scaled to a three-metre wall, you will have the answer in seconds rather than opening six files to check.

Previews that tell the truth

Your preview image does the selling, so it needs to be honest. Show the pattern tiled at full size and again at thumbnail scale, and include a colour swatch. State the tile size, repeat type, colourways and file types included in the download. If the preview has been pushed brighter than the actual file, buyers will notice, and refund requests follow. Remember that on a marketplace page your carefully composed mockup may be seen at 150 pixels wide.

The twelve checks

1. Layered master saved and untouched.
2. Colour mode correct for the destination — sRGB for digital, CMYK for print.
3. Colour soft-proofed or test-printed, with no muddy surprises.
4. Tile is seamless on all four edges.
5. Repeat type confirmed and noted: basic, half-drop, brick or mirrored.
6. Pixel dimensions match the final print size at 300 dpi.
7. Exports are the right format and quality.
8. File names follow your convention, with no spaces.
9. Licences checked and saved for every borrowed element.
10. Exclusive or non-exclusive rights confirmed, with other listings removed if needed.
11. Previews match the files and show the pattern at two scales.
12. Listing states tile size, repeat, colourways and file types.

Ten minutes before every upload

Keep this list as a pinned note or a text file in your patterns folder, and run it every time, even for a design you are certain about. The checks take about ten minutes. Skipping them costs far more: reissued files, returned fabric, awkward emails and a buyer who quietly decides not to come back. Get into the habit and the technical side of selling becomes invisible, which is exactly what you want. It leaves the pattern itself to do the talking.

Photo: markusspiske / Pixabay