Free Sublimation Templates and How to Use Them

Why it's Important to have Accurate Design Placement

If you're just getting started with sublimation, you may be wondering what a sublimation template is and why you even need one. Sublimation templates are premade design files that provide general guidelines of the image size that you will want to print for your product. They conform to the size and shape of your sublimation blank, and most of our templates include a small bleed (that is, printing that goes beyond the edge of the substrate) which covers you in case your item shifts slightly during heat transfer.

Sublimation templates are super useful as they take the guesswork out of what size your substrate is and how big of a design you need to print. Just simply pop your design into the template, print, and heat press it! Without a template, you may find yourself printing your design a few times to get the size just right, which wastes not only ink and paper but also your valuable production time.

Below, you will see a template we made for our neoprene hand sanitizer keychain holders. In this image, you can see the item size, the bleed layer, and our Coastal branding.

How to Use Your Sublimation Template?

Once you’ve downloaded your template, open it in your design program. For the purposes of this demonstration, we’ll be using Adobe Photoshop, but if you’re using Illustrator or CorelDRAW, the instructions will be similar. So don’t worry!

When you’ve got the template opened, you will notice three layers – safe area, bleed, and Coastal branding. The safe area is the actual item size. The bleed area is some extra printing space that we’ve added beyond the item’s size (between .25” and 1”), which gives you some wiggle room when you go to transfer.

Now, bring your designed image into your design program. (We should mention, you will probably want to have an image already prepared by the time you’re using this template). This could be a pattern that you downloaded online on websites like freepik.com or Adobe Stock, an SVG image you purchased, a photograph, etc.

Next, size your design appropriately within the template’s bleed area as shown in the video below. Next, create a clipping mask to clip your image into the bleed area (not the safe area). In Photoshop, this involves placing your design layer above the bleed layer, then right-clicking the design layer and pressing “create clipping mask.” After clipping your design into your bleed layer, you can hide the item size as well as the Coastal branding. And now, you should have one ready-to-go image that aligns perfectly with your blank!

How Does this Work for Curved Items?

When working with our templates for curved items such as latte mugs and certain other drinkware, you will notice there is not a bleed layer – only a safe area. This is normal! For these items, you will follow the same steps above except create a clipping mask to clip your mask onto the safe area instead.