Screen print
Ink is pushed through a mesh into the fabric. It sits in the weave, not on top. On a well-printed garment you can still see the fabric texture through the ink, and the edge has a very slight softness where ink meets fibre.
On dark garments there's usually a white underbase beneath the colour, which changes the surface slightly — it sits a fraction higher and the colour above it is more opaque.
Mockup implication: low relief, texture showing through, soft-edged at high magnification. If your mockup shows ink floating cleanly above the weave with a hard edge, it's showing vinyl.
Heat transfer vinyl
A film is cut, weeded and pressed onto the surface. It sits on the fabric, as a distinct sheet with a hard, mechanically cut edge.
Flex is thin and smooth, often with a slight sheen. Flock is matte and velvety with visible fibre texture and noticeable height. Glitter has physical particles that catch light independently. Puff rises dramatically and matte.
Mockup implication: hard edges, the fabric texture does not show through, and the shadow at the edge is real geometry rather than a filter.
Embroidery
Thread through the weave. Highest relief of the three, directional sheen, and it distorts the fabric around it.
Mockup implication: covered in the previous post. Direction is everything.
The comparison test
Put the same logo through all three in your head. In screen print, a thin line is fine. In vinyl, a thin line is fine but the weeding gets difficult below about 1 mm. In embroidery, a thin line has to be thickened or it vanishes. Puff needs at least 8 mm stroke width before it rises properly.
That means the same artwork is not equally producible in all three, and a mockup that renders it identically in all three is hiding a real constraint.
Why we build them separately
Our HTV set puts flex, flock, glitter and reflective on the same garment, photographed under the same light, so the difference is directly comparable. That's not an aesthetic choice — it's the thing designers actually need to see before specifying a method.
3. Cap mockups: why flat ones never look right
SEO title: Cap mockups — why curved fronts matter Meta: A cap front is a compound curve. Artwork applied flat to it will always look wrong, and here's the specific reason. Excerpt: The front panel curves in two directions at once. Flat artwork can't sit on it. Link: /collections/mockups-caps
Caps are where mockups fail most visibly, and the reason is geometry.
It curves twice
A structured cap front curves horizontally around the head and vertically from crown to brim. That's a compound curve — a surface that can't be flattened without distortion, the same problem cartographers have with the globe.
Artwork placed on it has to stretch and compress differently in different places. A perfect circle in your file becomes a slightly asymmetric shape on the cap. A horizontal baseline curves.
A mockup that just warps the artwork along one axis gets this half right, which is often worse than getting it obviously wrong.
The seam
Most caps have a seam down the centre front. Artwork that crosses it sits differently on each side, and there's a visible ridge. This is a real production constraint — decorators avoid placing fine detail across the centre seam for exactly this reason.
If your mockup doesn't have the seam, you can present something that can't be made cleanly.
The size limit
Cap embroidery fields are small. The stitching happens on a specialised frame, and the usable area is meaningfully less than on a flat garment. Plenty of logos that work beautifully on a chest simply don't fit a cap front.
Presenting a cap mockup with a chest-sized logo sets an expectation that will have to be walked back.
Structured versus unstructured
A structured front holds its shape and the artwork sits predictably. An unstructured or dad cap collapses slightly when worn, and the front panel sags — the same logo reads differently. Flat bills and curved bills change the viewing angle again.
Our cap set covers front, three-quarter and detail crops across structured and unstructured blanks, with the seam present and the field limits marked in the readme. The point isn't more angles for their own sake. It's that a cap only looks right from angles that show the curve.