A practical guide to designing, launching, and optimizing knitwear on Fourthwall
You can now create custom knitwear products with Fourthwall. From the infamous ugly sweaters to classic vests and cardigans, you can design hundreds of jacquard knit pieces directly inside your dashboard.
This guide details design rules, quality standards, and common questions that creators face in order to ship knitwear with confidence.
Designing tips
When building your knitwear design, keep these fundamentals top of mind:
- Yarn color limit: You can use only a maximum of four (4) yarn colors per product (cuff & base colors included). While 36 yarn colors are available, the system will automatically reduce your uploaded artwork to 4 colors. This is expected. Don’t fight it. Plan for it.
- Use darker base colors – Dark bases make accent yarns pop and drive a premium finish. Light bases often wash out foreground details.
- Collar, cuffs, and hem must match – The neckline, cuffs, and bottom ribbing must use the same yarn color. This is both a manufacturing requirement and a visual consistency best practice.
- Make the sleeves interesting – Asymmetric sleeves or contrasting patterns can elevate the final look and give the piece a high-fashion edge.
Yarn color options
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You can choose from 36 yarn color swatches.
- All knitwear uses a 55% cotton and 45% polyester blend for durability and structural integrity across repeated wear.
Button color options
For products that require buttons, the button color is assigned automatically based on your trim color:
- Light trim color leads to beige buttons
- Dark trim color leads to dark gray buttons
This is not editable and is aligned with manufacturing standards.
Are knitwear products printed or dyed?
Neither. Fourthwall knitwear uses jacquard knitting, which stitches your pattern directly into the fabric.
This means:
- Details are naturally simplified
- Fine lines become thicker
- Colors are limited to the four selected yarns
- The final look will differ from a printed garment mockup
If your design relies on micro-detail accuracy, jacquard knitwear may not be the right product type.
Frequently Asked Questions:
My uploaded artwork looks tiny or blurry in the preview
This is a common preview scaling issue. The mockup generator is not a one-to-one representation of knit output.
Do these instead:
- Upload a 300 DPI transparent PNG
- Expect simplification from four-color conversion
- Evaluate overall composition, not pixel sharpness
- If in doubt, submit a screenshot, and support can validate sizing
My detailed artwork loses thin lines or textures
This is normal for jacquard knitting. Thread cannot reproduce extremely intricate details.
Recommendations:
- Thicken line work
- Remove micro-details
- Simplify textures
- Consider DTG or DTF if preserving every detail is the priority
My mockup looks perfect, but the physical sample doesn’t match
When translating a digital mockup into a real knit garment, a few things can fall out of sync. It’s not just alignment — color shifts, scaling differences, texture distortion, or detail loss can all contribute to a sample that doesn’t mirror the artwork on your screen.
Here’s what happens when a discrepancy is reported:
- The support team reviews the issue and gathers the needed details.
- The case is forwarded to Production for verification.
- Once Production completes the assessment, they decide on the appropriate resolution. This may include a remake, replacement, or another suitable fix.
My design overlaps with part of the sweater pattern
If you manually resize artwork to avoid overlap, but the final product still shifts, it’s usually due to:
- A small production sizing mismatch
- A short-term bug in template rendering
Please share the order number and a photo. Our support team will coordinate and verify template behavior with the factory. We'll get back to you with the appropriate resolution.
Best practices for a high success rate
To avoid rework and get designer-level outcomes:
- Prioritize bold shapes over fine lines
- Maximize contrast within the four-color limit
- Mock up both large and small pattern scales for all-over styles
- Run at least one sample before launching a campaign
- Expect knit to soften sharp, crisp digital details