How to
Designing your own photo mug
10 November 2026 · Maffy
A short walk through the designer — picking a photograph, placing your wording and knowing what will wrap around the curve.
The mug designer shows you the real printable area, so what you see on screen is what comes out of the press.
Pick the right photograph
Square-ish photographs work best. A picture taken on a phone in portrait will need cropping, and anything below about 1000 pixels wide will look soft once it is printed at full size.
Mind the curve
The print wraps most of the way around the mug, which means the far left and right edges disappear from view when you are holding it. Keep faces and important wording in the middle third and nothing will be lost.
Adding words
Two short lines nearly always read better than one long one. Use the script fonts for names and the sans fonts for dates and captions — it is a small thing, and it makes a home-made mug look like a shop-bought one.
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