Society6 Backgrounds

Setting a black or other non-white background on Society6

Ray Vanderborght avatar
Written by Ray Vanderborght
Updated over a week ago

Most of the products Society6 offers print on white by default. Just about everything except shirts really. That means for designs meant to print on dark backgrounds you're usually limited to selling just on shirts by setting up a blueprint product with only shirts enabled.

However, there is an undocumented quirk of Society6 that images with a certain obscure background color option encoded in the image will be accepted by Society6 and the transparent areas of your design will be replaced by that color in the mockups for certain products.

So to allow you to sell on more products at Society6 we've enabled support for this. It's disabled by default and we've labeled it "experimental" because we don't have official word from Society6 that it's supported, but we've seen some initial tests that indicate that these products print ok, so here's how you enable it if you're interested and understand the risks:

When setting up the blueprint product at Society6, enable only products that accept a dark background. For example, here's the first couple rows of products, and you can see that the mini art prints, canvas prints and posters do accept it, but the others don't:

This step may take some trial and error, you can always change your blueprint product and re-sync an exhibit to pick up your changes.

Next, after creating your blueprint in OrbitKit using this listing, find the Options Section and enable the background color:

When this is off, the default is to leave transparent areas alone, but when this option is selected, the given background color will be used. Black is default, so if that's what you want, you're done:

If you want to use a color other than black for your background, click on the color swatch and a pop up color selector will appear for setting the color.

With that setting set on the blueprint in OrbitKit, any designs that get synced will have that background color set to replace the transparent areas in the image.

There are some caveats. If your design image is over 30mb in size we won't be able to set the background color and will use your image with transparency instead. Also if your images have very large resolutions, such as 10k x 10k or higher, this setting may cause some failed exhibits for those images. It's also important to note that if you have existing exhibits that were uploaded without a background set on the blueprint in OrbitKit, that adding the background in later and re-syncing won't update your products with the background. In this case it's best to create a new blueprint and re-exhibit (or delete and re-create the exhibits after editing the blueprint). This is still an experimental feature, but the benefits of selling on more products can outweigh these issues for some sellers, so we give you the option.

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