Fluorescent Ink – The Definitive T-Shirt Designers Guide Back in the 80’s apparel design was all about bright fluorescent (also know as neon) prints or bright fluorescent fabric colors, fast forward from the 80’s and a lot has changed. These days the clothing market isn’t flooded with brightly colored, in your face, neon colors, rather fluorescent colors are subtly used in graphic designs to draw your eye to a specific part of the design. Continue reading Fluorescent Ink – The Definitive T-Shirt Designers Guide
High Density Ink – The definitive print guide for clothing design Seeing a High Density print for the first time, my initial thoughts were, “that’s amazing! how’d they do that? When and how can I try this?” The 3D text protruding from the t-shirt graphic engaged my creative curiosity and so I delved into the wonderful world of High Density Inks! Continue reading High Density Ink – The definitive print guide for clothing design
310+ Apparel Mockup Templates – Vector Master Collection We’ve built, refined and launched our greatest collection of vector clothing templates to date. PrePress Toolkit Vector mockups are a fresh set of re-imagined clothing templates that allow for ease of editing and super quick deployment… but what makes a good clothing mockup great? Continue reading 310+ Apparel Mockup Templates – Vector Master Collection
Screen Printing Puff Ink – The definitive designers guide. Puff Ink is a standout favourite, literally! Puff ink (as the name implies) expands on all sides once exposed to heat at 310°F (155°C). This specialty screen printing ink is created by combining regular plastisol ink with a puff additive. There needs to be enough puff ink laid down on a garment in order for it to expand enough to notice, a general rule of thumb is so not have any lines or small details in your artwork that are less than 1pt. Continue reading Screen Printing Puff Ink – The definitive designers guide.
Plastisol, Waterbase, Discharge…Oh My! The 3 main screen printing ink types and what you need to know My number one tip for creating garment graphics is to start with the end product in mind and work backwards from there. Having said that, before actually diving into designing the graphic you need to commit to understanding the different screen printing ink types available to you, as it will then allow you to achieve the design style you have envisaged without wasting valuable time. A classic example of knowing your craft (and something that actually happened to us), was one design that had a very fine, distress texture throughout it. We wanted the print to feel soft to touch, so we specked the artwork to use water base ink. When printed, the delicate details dried up in the screen, rendering them basically invisible, it appeared to be a flat color design with only the roughest sections of the texture shown. A better solution would have been to make the texture twice as thick, so that even if the finer details dried up a little it wouldn’t completely disappear or become one large ambiguous splotch. In this master class we will take a look at the different types of ink for screen printing. There are three main types of screen printing ink that all inks are derived from. So it won’t take long to learn the key points and knock your next t-shirt design out of the park! Continue reading Plastisol, Waterbase, Discharge…Oh My!
Screen Printing Metallic Inks: The Definitive Designers Guide. In this definitive designers guide to metallic inks, we cover: creating a metallic ink effect in Adobe Illustrator, screen printing with metallic inks, proper garment care instructions and there’s even a free high-resolution metallic ink texture giveaway. Continue reading Screen Printing Metallic Inks: The Definitive Designers Guide.
10+ Gold Foil T-Shirt Designs – Hand selected for your inspiration We have scoured the web and hand selected a set of 10+ gold foil t-shirt designs to spark inspiration and also showcase what can be achieved with gold foil in t-shirt printing. If you are interested in knowing more about screen printing with gold foil or how to create a gold foil effect in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, check out or post Gold Foil: The definitive designers guide to gold foil, creating and screen printing the effect. Continue reading 10+ Gold Foil T-Shirt Designs – Hand selected for your inspiration
Gold Foil: The definitive designers guide to custom foil printing t-shirts In this Gold Foil: The definitive designers guide to gold foil, creating and screen printing the effect. We get hands-on with creating a gold foil effect in both Illustrator and photoshop. We go in depth on how the gold foil effect is garment screen printed and explain the pros and cons of this printing technique. To top things off with deliver proper garment care instructions when dealing with Gold Foil prints. Continue reading Gold Foil: The definitive designers guide to custom foil printing t-shirts
Trucker hat mockups and more! Last summer our design department set a massive goal; To set the benchmark for the next generation of trucker hat mockups and all types of head wear. If we may say so…we smashed this goal out of the park! Not only do each of our mockups offer a front, back and side profile, but we developed the first ever, 45 degree angled template profile! The angled profile, (that is trending on high-end ecommerce stores like nike.com), allows you to easily insert your own artwork as a flat 2D layer. The template then seamlessly warps and moulds the artwork to the fabric on the correct viewing plane. After achieving success in the apparel department, we directed our attention to the headwear. After having our new templates released for a short time, we began receiving really positive feedback from our PrePress Toolkit design community about our work. We appreciate the good and the bad, but feedback that lets us know what our clients like and are looking for, motivates us to produce even better, newer, fresher products than anyone else out there. Quote: “I used to use (company name removed as PrePress isn’t into defacing). But I used to think they are top-notch until I found you guys. You guys are too awesome so I decided to buy the entire bundle” Nelson Chu Feedback like the example above, showed us that people were expecting big things from the PrePress Team and we wanted to deliver, so… Continue reading Trucker hat mockups and more!
21 Christmas T-Shirt Design Inspirations Ahh… I can feel Christmas in the air! Christmas is truly the most wonderful time of the year, that’s if you’ve planned ahead and finished every project you’ve been tasked with leading up to the end of the year. Otherwise, Christmas can be the most stressful time of the year for us graphic designers. I can remember many times feeling the excitement in the air that Christmas was upon us and at the same time knowing that I had a month work to complete in a few weeks before the holidays could begin. Being inspired to design can be hard when you are time poor, so to help a brother/sister out we have gathered together a collection of 20 images to inspire your next Christmas holiday t-shirt design. Our hope is that as you peruse through these images, you’ll be able to catch the spirit of Christmas and intern create a magical t-shirt design for the season. Good luck! Handy tip: Cranking up the volume on your favourite Christmas carols during the design process can mentally get yourself into the christmas spirit. Personally, we love A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi, look it up on iTunes, you wont be disappointed. Merry Christmas to you, and as always, happy designing! Continue reading 21 Christmas T-Shirt Design Inspirations
10+ Men’s Shirt Mockup Templates, Hoodies and more. Men’s Ghosted T-Shirt Template – Photoreal Mockup Pack This men’s shirt mockup template pack comes with front, back and side profiles as well as the all new angled front and angled back profiles. PrePress Toolkit is proud to be the first to offer a fully editable angled mockup template. Through the use of Smart Objects layers, all you need to do is add your artwork and the template will do the hard work of setting your artwork onto the t-shirt. All files are compatible with Photoshop CS3 and newer versions including Photoshop CC. Download T-Shirt Template Here. Also available in Vector format (AI + EPS files). Click here for Vector Pack. Also available as part of the Apparel Studio Bundle. (save $120) Continue reading 10+ Men’s Shirt Mockup Templates, Hoodies and more.
Top 6 design inspiration web sources for apparel graphic design Epic t-shirt graphic designs don’t just fall out of thin air! That’s why we built this list of websites that we frequent often for creative design inspiration. We recognise that design inspiration can come from anywhere and at any time, however over the years we have realised that nine times out of ten we are under strict time constraints and randomly browsing the internet hoping to stumble across a design concept that fits the design brief can take hours and hours. This list has been tried, tested and refined over the years and is always our first go-to when we have a t-shirt graphic to design or a new vector art pack for the web store. Download this post in PDF format (319 KBs) Continue reading Top 6 design inspiration web sources for apparel graphic design
