How to design your football club's crest

Shapes, colours and the right file format so your crest looks flawless sublimated.

The crest is the soul of the club and the most visible thing on the jersey. A good design is recognisable from afar and works just as well embroidered large as sublimated at the size of a kid's chest. Here are the keys, and the mistakes we come across most often.

Less is more

The best crests are simple: a clear shape (classic shield, circle, hexagon), one or two main colours and a recognisable symbol. Too much detail gets lost when the crest shrinks down to chest size.

Try this test: shrink your crest to 2 centimetres on screen and step back a metre. If you can't tell what it is, you won't be able to on the jersey either. Crests that carry the founding year, the club's full name, a motto and a silhouette of the town tend to fail here: there's too much information competing.

Colours with contrast

Choose colours that contrast with the jersey. A dark crest on dark fabric disappears; a white one on a white jersey, too.

If your jersey is a bold colour or carries a busy pattern, consider a version of the crest with a border or background that separates it from the design. Many clubs have two versions of the crest: the main one and one "for dark backgrounds". It's the cleanest solution.

Think about the away kit too: the crest that works on white may not work on black. Having it sorted in advance saves improvising in August.

The file format (this is where most crests are lost)

This is the point that ruins the most results, and the easiest one to fix:

• PNG with a transparent background. If you send us a JPG, it comes with a white box around it that will get printed on the jersey. It's the number one mistake.
• Good resolution. A crest pulled from the club's website or forwarded over WhatsApp arrives compressed and pixelated. If it looks blurry on screen, it will come out blurry on the garment.
• Better still, a vector file (SVG or AI). A vector can be scaled to any size without losing an ounce of sharpness. If your club has one, that's the file you want to use.

And watch out for "inherited" crests: many drag along a shadow or a white border from an old version that was once added so it would stand out on a specific background. Sublimated, that shows.

What if I only have the crest in poor quality?

It happens all the time, especially at clubs with history whose original crest lives on paper or in a twenty-year-old file. Tell us: we can help you redraw it. Better to sort it out beforehand than to make twenty jerseys with a pixelated crest you'll be looking at every Sunday all season long.

Where to place it

The standard position is the chest, on the heart side. It's what anyone looking at the jersey expects and what works best in the team photo.

From there, order by hierarchy: crest on the chest, main sponsor in the centre or upper back, secondary ones on the sleeves. If you put the crest too close to a seam or the collar, it won't look right. Our customiser warns you if anything falls outside the print area.

How much does adding your crest cost

Nothing. At EZ Sports Lab, the crest is included in the price of the garment, whether sublimated or basic. On sublimated kits, sponsor logos are included too, at no cost per logo (on basic cotton garments, printed in DTF, logos start from 4 €). It's worth checking this point with any supplier: a very tight per-jersey price can hide a charge for every print, and with three sponsors and twenty players that's sixty prints somebody pays for.

Sublimation: why the technique matters

When sublimating, the ink bonds into the fibre. The crest isn't a sticker sitting on top of the fabric: it becomes part of it. It doesn't crack, doesn't peel off in the wash and doesn't block breathability. It's the difference between a crest that lasts the whole season and one that starts crazing in January. We explain it in depth in sublimation vs printing.

Try it on the jersey before deciding

Before settling on anything, place your crest in the customiser and see how it looks on the real model and colour. Contrast, size or white-background problems you hadn't spotted on your computer show up straight away.

And since there's no minimum order, you can always get a single jersey and see it in your hands before launching the whole club's order.