A gang sheet is one long piece of film with as many designs on it as you can fit, priced by the inch of roll used. Fill it well and a transfer costs a dollar. Fill it badly and you’ve paid for empty film. This is how to fill it well.
The maths
Every sheet is 22 inches wide. You choose the length — 12, 24, 36, 60, 120, 240 inches — and pay the same rate per inch of length whatever’s on it. So the cost per transfer is the sheet price divided by how many you fit. A 22×24 with eight full-front designs on it is one price per design; the same sheet with twenty-four left-chest logos is a third of that.
Rough capacity, at a quarter-inch gap:
| Sheet | 3.5″ chest logos | 10″ adult fronts | 12″ backs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22×12 | ~15 | 2 | 1 |
| 22×24 | ~30 | 4 | 2 |
| 22×60 | ~78 | 12 | 8 |
| 22×120 | ~156 | 24 | 16 |
| 22×240 | ~312 | 48 | 32 |
Two 10-inch designs fit side by side across 22 inches with room to spare. Two 12-inch designs don’t — 24 plus the gap is over 22 — so 12-inch designs go one per row and you lose the strip beside them. That single fact decides more layouts than anything else: if a design can be 10 inches instead of 11, make it 10.
Laying it out
Group by size
Put all the 10-inch designs together in rows, then all the 4-inch ones, then the 3-inch. Mixed rows leave odd gaps that nothing fits in. The builder’s auto-pack does this for you; if you’re laying out by hand in Photoshop or Canva, sort first.
Rotate to fit
A design that’s 8 wide by 10 tall fits two across at 8 wide. Turn it 90° and it’s 10 wide by 8 tall — still two across, but now the row is 8 tall instead of 10, and you’ve saved 2 inches of sheet per row. Over a 60-inch sheet that’s an extra row. Rotation costs nothing; the transfer doesn’t care which way it was printed.
The gap
Quarter inch between designs. Less than that and you’ll be cutting them apart with a craft knife instead of scissors. More than half an inch and you’re paying for film. The gap is for you, not the printer — the printer would happily print them touching.
Fill the last row
Sheets come in fixed lengths, so a layout that needs 50 inches gets printed on a 60. You’ve paid for 10 inches of blank film. Put something in it: a few extra chest logos, a couple of sleeve prints, spares of the design that always gets reordered. Anything you’ll use inside a year.
File prep for a sheet
- Canvas 22 inches wide by your sheet length, at 300 DPI. For a 22×60 that’s 6600 × 18000 pixels. Yes, it’s a big file.
- Transparent background. Everything with pixels gets ink and adhesive. A white box around a logo prints as a white box.
- Every design at its final print size. Don’t place a 2-inch logo and expect us to scale it. What’s on the sheet is what prints.
- Export PNG, sRGB. Not JPG — no transparency. Not CMYK — the press converts it and the colours shift.
- Mirror nothing. Some vinyl workflows need the design flipped. DTF doesn’t. Send it the way you want to read it.
Builder or DIY?
Same price either way — we don’t charge for the builder. Use the builder if you have loose PNGs and want it packed for you. Lay it out yourself if you already work in Illustrator or Photoshop and want control over exactly where everything sits. Either way it prints today.
When a sheet is the wrong tool
Under about ten transfers of one design, by-size is simpler: no layout, no cutting, each transfer arrives trimmed. The crossover is roughly a 22×12 — if you’d fill one, gang it.
