A valve sleeve is a small canvas — 3.5″ × 0.875″, one ink color, wrapped around a lever handle. These four rules cover most of what separates a sleeve that reads at arm’s length from one that doesn’t.
The sleeve prints at a real-world width of 3.5 inches. Anything below an 18 pt equivalent disappears once it’s on the valve. The designer enforces a minimum size so you can’t accidentally print something illegible — if a line won’t fit at that size, shorten the wording rather than shrinking the type.
Light ink on dark sleeves and dark ink on light sleeves produce the strongest result. The print color picker shows previews against your current sleeve color, so you can check a pairing before committing. White on navy, yellow on black, and black on orange are all reliable.
Sleeves print in a single ink color, so your logo becomes a one-color mask. High-contrast logos with simple shapes reproduce best. Use the threshold slider after upload to clean up edges and remove halos from PNGs with white backgrounds. A phone snapshot of a logo on a truck door works fine as a starting point — our artists redraw it if it needs it.
The dashed margin in the canvas marks the safe-print area. Elements that drift outside it may be cropped when the sleeve is wrapped onto the valve — the rounded ends are the usual casualty, so keep QR codes and logos clear of them.
