What Actually Goes on the Back of a Work Shirt (Logo, Phone, Services)
Think about how customers actually see your crew.
Almost never head-on. They see you bent over a driveway, halfway up a ladder, walking back to the truck for a fitting, kneeling at a spigot. A neighbor two houses down sees you for four seconds through a car window. The woman who hired you watches from the kitchen while she makes coffee.
Every one of those is a view of your back. Which means the back of the shirt is doing nearly all of the work, and most crews put almost nothing there.
The short answer
Four elements, in this order of size:
- Company name — biggest thing on the shirt
- Phone number — second biggest, and bigger than feels comfortable
- Two or three services — small, one line
- Website — only if it's short and matches your name
Front gets one small mark on the chest. That's the whole system. Everything below is how to size it so it actually works from a distance.
The 30-foot rule (and the math nobody does)
Sign shops use a rule of thumb: about one inch of letter height per ten feet of viewing distance. It's rough, but it's close enough to design around.
A customer standing at her front door watching you work on the driveway is roughly 30 feet away. That means your company name needs letters around three inches tall to actually read, not just "be present."
Now do the part most people skip. A shirt back gives you roughly 12 inches of usable width. At three-inch letters in a normal bold typeface, you fit about 10 to 12 characters per line.
"SUMMIT EXTERIOR" is 15 characters. It goes on two lines. "MIKE'S PROFESSIONAL EXTERIOR CLEANING SERVICES LLC" is 49 characters, and at a size that fits, it's unreadable from a car. This is why so many work shirts have a beautifully detailed back print that communicates nothing past ten feet.
Practical test: put the mockup on your phone, walk 30 feet away, and look at it. If you have to stop and focus, it's too small. That test takes twenty seconds and saves a reprint.
If your legal name is long, put the short version on the shirt. Nobody calls you by your LLC.
The phone number is the only element that generates a call
Everything else on that shirt builds recognition. The number is the only thing a person can act on in the moment, which is why it should be the second-largest element and often ends up nearly as big as the name.
Two things about it:
It has to survive a phone photo. Neighbors photograph work trucks and crews — that's how a lot of exterior cleaning work gets referred. A number that's legible in person can be mush in a cropped, zoomed photo taken from across the street. Bigger than you think.
Read it out loud off the mockup before approving. Digit by digit. A wrong number on twelve shirts isn't a design problem, it's twelve shirts. This is the single most expensive mistake available to you here, and it takes ten seconds to avoid.
Two or three services. Not nine.
One line, small, under the phone number: DRIVEWAYS · ROOFS · GUTTERS
The instinct is to list everything you'll do, because you don't want to turn work away. Resist it. Three services reads as a specialist. Nine services reads as a handyman — and homeowners pay specialists more, especially for anything involving their roof.
Pick the three you most want more of. Not the three you do most. The shirt is advertising, so it should point at the work you're trying to grow, not the work you're already buried in.
The website question — the honest version
You'll read a lot of advice saying leave the website off entirely, because people search your name rather than typing a URL off a moving target. There's real truth in that. But it's too blunt a rule, and it's wrong in a couple of specific cases.
Put it on when: the domain is short and obviously derived from your company name (SUMMITEXTERIOR.COM), so it reinforces the name instead of competing with it. In that case it's not really a second thing to remember — it's the same thing twice.
Leave it off when: the domain is long, hyphenated, a .net nobody expects, or unrelated to your company name. Then it's noise taking space away from your phone number.
Same test as everything else: if it doesn't survive the 30-foot walk, it's decoration.
Contrast beats color — and placement beats both
The most common mistake after "too small" is navy text on a navy shirt, or dark text over the busiest part of the design. It looks sharp on screen at full brightness. In flat overcast light at 30 feet, it disappears.
Two rules that solve almost all of it:
- Text goes light on dark or dark on light — no middle ground.
- Text sits on a calm area of the artwork — never on top of the busiest part.
That second rule decides placement more often than people expect. On a busy all-over print the calm area often isn't where you assumed. Sometimes the standard left-chest spot is the worst place on the shirt — if the artwork puts a bright graphic right there, move the mark to the other side. A logo you can't read isn't a logo. Look at the artwork before you pick the position, not after.
One accent color is enough. Use it on the phone number and nowhere else, and the eye goes exactly where you want it.
Front and sleeves
Chest: logo or company name, small, on whichever side of the artwork is calm. That's it. No phone number — the only person close enough to read your chest is close enough to ask, and by then you've already introduced yourself.
Sleeves: optional, and usually not worth it. A sleeve print is visible for about a second when the arm is in exactly one position. Spend the money on making the back bigger.
What to leave off entirely
- Social handles. Nobody is going to remember an Instagram handle off a shirt.
- Slogans. They make the shirt busier without making the phone ring. If you must, put it on the front, small.
- "Est. 2024." If the year is recent, you've just told a nervous homeowner you're new. Add it in five years.
- Licence numbers, unless your state actually requires display. Put it on the truck and the invoice.
The ten-second checklist before you approve
- Company name is the biggest element and fits on one or two lines
- Phone number is second-biggest and legible in a zoomed phone photo
- Three services maximum, one line
- Website only if short and matches the name
- Text sits on a calm area of the artwork, high contrast
- Viewed from 30 feet on your phone — everything still readable
- Phone number read out loud, digit by digit
Nothing prints until you approve the mockup, so this checklist is free to run. Mockups come back in 1–3 business days — use that time rather than approving the same hour it lands.
If you haven't kitted the crew out yet, do the uniform basics first — how many shirts per man, and picking one color you'll stick with. Getting the back print right on shirts nobody has enough of doesn't help much. And if you run chemical all day, the fabric matters too — a screen-printed back cracks long before the shirt wears out.
Start a design → — your logo, phone and services on the back, free setup, no minimum order.