Guidelines for Fan Artists
Thank you for your interest in submitting fan art for The Critshow! We adore fan art and are thrilled to see whatever you’ve created, be it illustration, cosplay, physical media like painting or embroidery, or anything else; featuring moments or characters from any of our shows!
In most cases, submitting a PNG or JPG file is sufficient. These formats are great for display on our website and social media, though we do recommend your submission be no less than 1200px on its shortest side. It’s easy for us to reduce large images for display, whereas it’s almost impossible to scale them up.
If you’d like your fan art to be considered for use in official Critshow branding (on merchandise, as social media banners, etc), please read on through our Guidelines for Designers.
To submit your art, use our Contact Form and select “Art Submission” as the reason for your message.
Guidelines for Designers
For merchandise and other official brand designs for use on our website and social media platforms, we have more specific guidelines that must be adhered to. Please read the information below thoroughly, and also adhere to our Brand Style Guidelines as laid out in The Critshow Style Guide. All our official logo files can also be found at that link.
Merchandise: If your design is intended for use on merchandise, please provide all art as CMYK in vector format (either .AI or Illustator PDF) with all fonts converted to outline and all layers preserved.
Artwork intended for use on garments will be printed via either DTG or screen printing depending on which of our printing companies we use. If you use a limited number (six or less) of solid colors (including the colors of any of our logos you include), this frees us to use either print process. Designs and illustrations that use more colors, gradients, shading, etc, will need to be printed via DTG or converted to half-toning. Either option is workable for us, although in some cases we may request you adhere to one or the other. Please contact us in advance if you have any questions about this.
Additional information about color for garment printing: Our primary source for printed garments is currently print-on-demand merchandiser Printful. Printful provides some incredibly useful information on their website about color considerations, as well as a very thorough blog post about color selection for garment printing. If you are creating a garment design for us, we recommend reviewing both these articles to understand how to create a design with the best chance of being reproduced as you intend.
Printful also provides a swatch chart of common colors to select from. Any colors in the CMYK range can be printed, but Printful’s swatches have been tested on a large variety of printed materials, and choosing from these swatches can yield consistently good results across multiple products.
Note: Printful recommends creating your art in CMYK and then converting it to RGB. We request that you provide the file to us in CMYK in case we need to make adjustments – we will convert it before submitting it for printing.
Social Media: Banner sizes for social media can be incredibly frustrating to design, because every site has different size ratios, and mobile ratios also differ from those on desktop displays. The most flexible option is for you to focus the primary action of your image in the center, with an extension of the background (whether a scene, texture, or solid color) much further than you think necessary. This allows us to crop your image to the various required ratios without losing the most important parts.
If you want to ensure your design will work on a particular platform at both mobile and desktop ratios, we recommend consulting an always up-to-date social image size guide like this one.
For this type of illustration, it’s also helpful if you create different characters and scenic elements in layers, and provide us the original layered file (for example, as a Illustrator PDF with layers preserved). This allows us the option to move the characters slightly, or use certain characters or elements in isolation – assuming you’re okay with this, of course! We will never make any such adjustments without running them by you.
Brand Guidelines and Logo Files
To use any of our official logos or marks in your design, please download them – along with our Style Guide – using the button below. Illustrator PDF vector files are contained in the “For Print” folder at that link.
Questions and Submissions
To submit your art, use our Contact Form and select “Art Submission” as the reason for your message. If you have any questions you need clarification on from our design team before you submit, use the same contact form and select “Question about art specifications” to get in touch with Nyx, our lead designer.