Phone cases: the camera, the corners and the curve

A phone case has a hole in the most useful part of it and curves away at every edge. How to place a design so it survives both.

A phone case is the most constrained thing here. It is small, it wraps around four corners, and it has a large hole cut through the area a designer instinctively treats as the top left.

The camera comes first

Decide what happens around the camera before anything else. Designs that ignore it end up with a face cut in half or a word with a hole through it. Two approaches work: keep that corner deliberately empty, or use a pattern where a missing piece does not matter.

The edges curve out of sight

Small means simple

The whole print is roughly the size of a hand. Anything with more than a few elements becomes a texture rather than a picture. One strong image, or a repeating pattern, reads. A detailed scene does not.

The print rectangle shown in the editor is measured for that specific case, including the camera cutout, so what you see inside it is what gets printed.

Contrast against a black case

Most cases are dark, which makes light artwork read well and dark artwork disappear. This is the product where checking your design against the actual case colour matters most, because there is no white paper underneath to save it.

It is seen in the hand, not on a wall

A case is looked at from about thirty centimetres away, held, and put down. That is a completely different viewing distance from a shirt, and it means fine detail is actually visible here in a way it is not on fabric. The constraint is space rather than resolution.

Patterns beat pictures

A repeating pattern survives the camera cutout, the curved edges and the corners without any of them destroying the composition, because there is no single focal point to lose. It is the reason so much commercially sold case art is a pattern.