Our new offices are located right across the street from a major retail shopping mall and we frequently head over there to check out the trends. We scour the internet for sure but there is something different about being able to touch and feel the newest products and methods that get us excited. One thing is certain in the industry of custom t-shirts and custom hats….what happens at retail eventually trickles down to our customers. Unfortunately, some of these decoration methods are not possible or are very difficult to reproduce domestically.

One of the more important parts of You Design It that we have neglected lately in this blog is custom hats. I recently went to the Galleria and purchased quite a few hats just to admire the different decoration methods being used at the retail level. Many of these embroidery and custom applique’ methods just aren’t possible to do with blank hats that are already sewn. So why not do it domestically before they are sewn? Because most of the manufacturing and production has moved overseas. Then why not just get them done overseas? There are downfalls to that such as 3 month turnarounds, high minimums, pay vendors up front, etc. There are also some major advantages to producing them overseas as well.

We want to start a short series on explaining the pro’s and cons of accomplishing retail styled t-shirts and hats and the best way to approach that. Specifically we are going to be looking at domestic vs. overseas and ways to get around both.

Stay tuned for that and check out a few of the pics that I took of the hats I recently purchased. I will also be posting the definition of each method you see in these thumbnails:

For custom printed hats and custom embroidered hats, visit You Design It.

It is our goal to try and improve the tee shirt screen printing industry for our customers, t-shirt designers, and other t-shirt printing companies just like us.  As we have mentioned before in a previous post, screen printing t-shirts with jpeg’s as artwork is far from ideal.  It is possible, but dealing with single spot colors is much easier and more effective when trying to print high-quality designs.  Because each screen in screen printing represents a single color in the design, we have to take the artwork and separate each color.  Once the colors are separated, they can be outputted to film, which is then used to burn the screens.  That is further than we will go with this illustration, but it is definitely something we will cover later.

When we do receive artwork that is jpeg’s incorporated in it, our first step is to vectorize the image if at all possible.  Converting the image from jpeg to vector makes separating the colors much easier.  Here is an example of some artwork that was sent to us for a t-shirt printing job that had jpegs in it for us to convert.

The rack and the pool ball are both jpeg’s that we are going to have to redraw from scratch inside Adobe Illustrator.  That step in this process can be a whole long tutorial by itself.  But not by us right now, here is the image after it is vectored.

Now comes the color separation part.  This isn’t one of those in-depth tutorials on how to actually do each portion of the separations (sorry if that is what you’re looking for), but more of an illustration to show you what those separations look like when done correctly.  In this instance, there are four different colors to separate with them being white ink, yellow, cool gray 9, and red 485.  Here is the final picture of those four colors separated in Adobe Illustrator.

Most of that image is self-explanatory with each color separation labeled with the location of the print on the t-shirt and the actual color.  What you may not recognize is the x’s at the top and bottom of each separation.  Those are our registration marks to help the printer know exactly how to line up each screen to make the colors touch each other.

One other thing that we would like to point out is that each color is printed directly on top of the fabric.  What we mean by that is the ink of one color is not printed on top of another color ink.  This next image is a close-up of the pool ball with the cool gray 9 color and you can see where the other colors that touch the pool ball are represented as blank on the image.

We hope this helps you understand part of the process.  We are definitely working on more tutorials/illustrations like these to make the screen printing process more easily understood. We want to do your next custom printed t shirts.

One of the beautiful things about You Design It and its custom t-shirt design studio, is that you can go through multiple iterations of a design to find exactly what you are looking for.  What is so great about that, you ask?  Since you can design t-shirts online with us for free, you never have to worry about the high cost of paying a graphic designer for many hours of design that you weren’t looking for.  Now we aren’t knocking, graphic designers, because I am one myself and we have a few on staff, but designing t-shirts with our studio could even be used as a way to show a graphic designer the general idea of what you are looking for.

Since it is so easy to create a tee shirt design and save it, you can create a couple of designs and e-mail them to your friends.  This is a way that they can help you decide on what you’re looking for.  Here is an example of the same theme for cookoff t-shirts made three different ways with the last one being chosen as the final print.

First T-Shirt Design:

Second T-Shirt Design:

Final T-Shirt Design:

When it comes to t-shirt printing, the best artwork is vectored spot colors. What are vectored spot colors you ask? Before we break that down for you, it is important to point out what the opposite of vectored spot colors is. This would typically be a photograph or jpeg that has hundreds or possibly thousands of colors in them. The whole premise for this post is because we get a lot of requests to print photographs or jpeg’s onto t-shirts or hats.

Now back to vector graphics. They are defined Wikipedia as:

“the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based upon mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.”

In more simple terms, vector graphics are simply creating artwork from scratch in programs such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The best feature about vector graphics is that you can scale them up or down in size, and they never lose their quality. This is very important as it pertains to screen printed t-shirts, because there is a lot of resizing involved with getting the artwork ready for print. If you magnify a vector graphic, you will always see the sharp edges and a very clear image. As you begin to magnify a photograph or jpeg, the quality starts to deteriorate, and everything begins to blur. Wikipedia has a really cool image of what I’m describing here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

With that description and illustration of what vector graphics are, coupled with the fact that screen printing T-shirts revolves around single ink colors… everything should begin to come full circle. The “screen” in screen printing actually represents one screen per color in the artwork printed. So you can imagine that a photograph with thousands of colors should be impossible to print on t-shirts. Right? Wrong.

Printing photographs and jpeg’s on t-shirts is possible with four color process. What is four color process? we are going to leave that explanation for another blog post, but for now understand that it is a very inexact science and considered lower quality most of the time. Not to mention, four color process can get quite expensive as well.

On the flip side, printing four color process on paper can look amazing. So when we are presented with a request to print something on t-shirts that has already been printed on paper, we usually have reservations. This was the case recently, when we were quoting on a t-shirt printing job and the artwork supplied was from a poster for an event coming up. The print on the poster was from a painting that was relevant to the event. Here is what that artwork looked like:

We were faced with a few dilemmas when we viewed the artwork. The first being what we prefaced earlier, that the artwork would need to be accomplished with four color process. The second being that the customer was on a budget. The final being that the customer wanted dark t-shirts and four color process is even harder when printed on dark t-shirts. As we spoke with our client, we explain the situation and suggested converting the artwork to a single vectored spot color. This would require a lot of time in artwork, but would guarantee a great print at a low price. Here is what we were able to do when converting a jpeg to vector:

Our client was very pleased with the vectored t-shirt design and loved the price. Here is a picture of what the final print looked like:

If you learned one thing from this post, please understand that there are many options for printing t-shirts and those options are worth exploring when it comes to complex jobs. Please feel free to contact us at any time you have a t-shirt printing job no matter how big or small, hard or easy.

When underbasing for screen printed t-shirts (laying down a white print underneath your artwork on dark t-shirts) it is very important to not print white underneath any of the black or metallic silver portions of the t-shirt designs. The black ink will print out a lighter shade than true black and the metallic silver will lose a lot of its pop.

Just a small tip for you. 

Need a quote? Already have a design? Upload your artwork to us and we will send you a price right back to you. All we need is the design, the quantity, and the product that you are interested in. We will email you the price and let you know how to get the order rolling. Click on the banner below: