There are many ways to accomplish getting the distressed T-shirt printed look on your t-shirt designs.  The easiest way we have found to do it is by having four different preset distressed filters that we lay on top of any design and match it to the color of the background. You have to be very selective when you choose the level of distressing for the custom printed t-shirts, because it can sometimes wipe out the overall design or text being printed on the tee.  To illustrate our four different levels of distress, we first are going to start out with a simple design of a star:

Here’s the same star with our “small” distressed filter:

This is with the “medium” distressed filter:

Here it is with the “large” distressed filter:

The last one we use is a “very fine” distressed filter:

These filters can be combined, used by themselves, or even rotated to all provide a different look depending on the T-shirt artwork. Please let us know if you would like to use one of our distressed builders on your next screen printed t-shirts project.

What happens if you have a T-shirt design but you want a few different colors T-shirts to be printed on?  For instance, we recently had an order for custom restaurant T-shirts, and the different employees wanted to choose from a few different colors T-shirts.  Our customer’s concern was that she would have to pay for different setups and not get the overall volume discount.  However, that is not the case whenever the design stays the same throughout the shirts.

In that same instant she wanted for different color printed T-shirts and the design had four different spot colors on the back.  One of the colors in the artwork on the back had to alternate between the dark and lighter color printed t shirts.  The words on the front also alternated from black on the light-colored shirts to white on the dark colored shirts.  Because there were only two overall ink changes, we only had to charge $10 per ink change for a total of 20 extra dollars.  So all in all, only 20 extra dollars for four different colored T-shirts out of a total of one hundred shirts.

Here is how the screen printed T-shirts came out:

One of our earliest posts on the You Design It blog was an informational about all over T-shirt printing. We have received many phone calls, a lot of e-mails, and quite a few comments regarding the subject. One of those contacts was a vendor that is able to not only print over the seams, but also has a printing area capable of 21″ x 24″. This is much larger than the typical 12″ x 14″ size screen that we are used to working with.

It wasn’t long after they first contacted us that we were already able to test out our first job. Our customer wanted a lower off centered front print and an oversized back print that would reach from seam to seam. The T-shirt printing came out beautifully, and here’s the picture to prove it:

One of the best features about us offering oversized printing capabilities is that we only need a minimum of 72 versus the industry standard of 144 to 288. We look forward to printing a whole lot more of these in the future and hope your custom T-shirt project is next.

One of the biggest factors in determining the price of custom screen printed T-shirts has to do with the amount of printed ink colors on the T-shirts. At You Design It we like to keep it simple and count up the total colors needed to print the T-shirts. For instance, if you are printing blue ink and red ink on the front of the T-shirt and nothing on the back, that is considered two total colors. Similarly, if you are printing blue ink on the front of the T-shirt in red ink on the back of the T-shirt, that is also considered two colors.

However, one of the most confusing parts of counting up screen printing colors is separating the print locations. For example, if you print black on the front and black on the back, that is still considered two colors. With that said, if you print black ink on the front and blacking on the back and add one more location of black ink on the sleeve, then you have three total screen print colors.

Knowing this information will empower you to optimize your design and lower the cost of your custom screen printed t shirts.

Have you ever received a quote for custom printed T-shirts to find out that darker shirts cost more? There are quite a few reasons for this and we would like to share these reasons with you.

The first and most obvious reason is that dark T-shirts cost more blank when they are purchased from the manufacturers. This is due mainly in part to the additional process it takes to dye the shirt to that darker color.

The second and less obvious reason that custom printed dark T-shirts cost more is because of the under basing and flashing. What is under basing and flashing when it comes to screen printed T shirts? Under basing is taking the original artwork and converting all the colors to white to print below the artwork to serve as the base color. This allows the colors printed on top to really pop and show up vibrantly. Once you have a good under base laid down on the shirt and you begin to print the colors on top, it is important to print each color twice. This part of the screen printing process is known as flashing.

All of these additional steps in the T-shirt printing process require more products, labor and time. At You Design It, you are safe in knowing that we do all these extra steps to ensure that your design is printed the best it can be.

When designing for custom T-shirt digital printing it’s important to know what colors will come out the best. Since the digital T-shirt printing technology is relatively new and growing, there are definitely some colors that print much better than others. Here’s a list of our recommendations for the top five printed colors for digital T-shirt printing:

1. Black

2. Forest Green

3. Navy Blue

4. Red

5. Royal Blue

The easy pattern to see for these colors is that they are all dark/darker colors. The digital printing technology is making strides to be just as good as t-shirt screen printing and is getting closer every day. We contact all of our customers before printing to make you aware of any suggestions that we may have to make your custom printed t shirt the best it can be.