How to design socks?
In general, sock is a pixelart - every pixel is on needle or loop. However It's always better to start with some brainstorm and then to make some mockup. It's our job to convert you design into the bitmap as in order to do that corretly, you need to know how to pre-deform it as sock is full of elastic materials and the knitwear behaves sometime weirdly - depending on the material.
First of all get a free quote from us and we send you all mockups needed for free. Then have a brainstorm with your team or on your own, figure out what do you really want and start drawing. Our mockups are ready to use in Adobe Illustrator also with predefined colors of materials in swatches. Let your creativity go wild here!
In case you are interested in come sport socks, it might get more challenging as the sock stops being only about making some pattern. Terry, different lenghts, bandages with elastic, breathable zones, selections of elastic itself are all coming into the game. Just note, that you can also make terry patterns in separate layers of our mockups, we thought about everything.
"The sock isn't painting canvas, it has some limitations, and you cannot do whatever you want."
In the end, don't forget to share your designs with us but more importantly with your colleagues, family and friends as they all can give you feedback. You are not going to wear all the pairs yourself right?
First rule - Less is more! Theoretically you can put up to 21 colors into one socks, however there are some situations where even 2 or 3 colors are too much. It depends on the patterns itself, how frequently are colors changing in a row, the more frequent or "dense" pattern is, the less colors it can contain. This means even sock with 2 colors can be extremely complicated and machine gets full of yarns so there is no space for other colors. Also it's not possible to use gradients in your design as in reality, yarn has only one solid color.
What's also important to mention is, that you cannot put any pattern in heel or toe. There is different technology, yarn composition and machine movement in this zone and so it does not allow us to do that. Some customers might want to put pattern also to hem. It's possible but in order to do that we need to add additional yarn in specific color there. So let's say your hem is going to be black, your pattern (logo) white. This forces us to use additional thin black yarn as a support of whole hem so your white logo won't be flawlessly white but it get's kind of greyish.
