I’m going to teach you the 5 most important money saving hacks i’ve learnt to reducing your screen printing production costs when starting a clothing line or t-shirt business. These tips will ultimately make you more money.
How much money can you make? In our real world examples (found towards the bottom of this post) by simply following these five tips we doubled our profit from $6 a t-shirt to $12.16! Continue reading “5 money saving hacks when starting a clothing line” »
Hit a dead end? Looking for the perfect inspiration for your next t-shirt tag?
Finding the right inside t-shirt tag design is challenging. Not only is the inside tag designed to give your customer the essential information, it’s also an attention to detail that reflects who you are as a brand.
To get you inspired or help you get over your annoying “designer’s block,” we have carefully curated a list of 26 outstanding t-shirt sizing and care tags. If you are looking for pre-made t-shirt tags, check out this download. Continue reading “26 Outstanding Inside T-Shirt Tag Examples to Inspire Your Next Design” »
This is where clothing brands really set themselves apart from one another – in their attention to details. Most clothing companies will stand for something, whether that’s mass manufacturing, bespoke creations, limited editions, high end design or specific genre graphics, whatever it is, you can generally tell what kind of label it is by what kind of label they use.
Continue reading “Inside Tag Printing low-down – Legal requirements, Tag Templates and more” »
When printing light coloured inks directly onto dark coloured garments with opaque color inks, like plastisol inks, the colors lose their intensity. To get around this, it’s best practice to first print a layer of white ink, known as an underbase. The underbase is printed first then dried to the touch with a heat gun or flash-curing machine before the rest of the color screens are printed. By using this method the colours will hold their vibrancy.
When screen printing multiple colors it can be very hard to align the print areas of each screen perfectly, even if the screens are aligned perfectly the white ink underbase can bleed a little, you would then see hints of white where there shouldn’t be. For this reason the underbase artwork is reduced in size slightly, this is called “choking” the artwork.
Choking the underbase gives the screen-printer a little bit of room to completely hide the underbase so it’s invisible to the naked eye.
Continue reading “Creating an Underbase in Adobe Illustrator – Screen Printing 101” »
Did you know that some factories electrify t-shirts to create a flock t-shirt graphic? Me neither!
There are three ways (that we know of) to produce a flock print on a t-shirt or garment. In this definitive designers guide to flock printing we will go over the differences, art requirements, available colors and best practices for flock printing from a graphic/apparel designer’s point of view, but before that, what is flock or flocking?
Continue reading “Flock Printing – The Definitive Apparel 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 Apparel Designers Guide” »
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 designers guide for apparel creation” »
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 “Puff Ink – The definitive designers guide for apparel creation” »
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!” »
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” »
If the phrase “time is money” weighs heavily on everything we do in business then it makes sense to put every task we do under the microscope, evaluate it, and then proceed to find ways of speeding up or cutting out those tasks. Saving time on repetitive tasks is the key, and for me the greatest time saving came when I re-engineered our humble job sheet.
When I was employed as a pre press graphics artist at my local screen printing shop I was in charge of not just creating the artwork to go on the garment but also breaking down the artwork into individual colours to produce films called “positives”. These films were then sent to the screen technician to produce the screens that the printers would then use to create the images we see on most printable garments. It was my job to explain to the screen printers exactly how the artwork should be printed. Sounds easy, but there’s a lot of specific information requested by customers or clothing companies that I need to interpret and then ensure it gets carried out so we don’t end up with thousands of misspelt garments. Anyway…to cut a long story short, I developed a quicker way to produce the screen printer’s jobsheets by setting them up in Adobe Illustrator, creating symbols of the ink types and static information in a way that I could just click and drag it to the job sheet. After using the jobsheet for a couple of days I found it greatly sped the whole process up, but still needed refining. Over the next few weeks I kept tweaking and refining the design till I came up with what you now see below.
The job sheet contains all necessary information:
All in all, it’s a lot of work for one job and when considering our print shop had multiple automatic and hand printing machines keeping up with the workload was tough.
If you own a screen printing facility, or are in fact the ‘art guy’ at your print shop I feel your pain, that’s why I’m giving this jobsheet away for free. My hope is that it saves a lot of time for you too. Most importantly this jobsheet gives the printers all the crucial information they need to print the job right the first time.
Enjoy!
This free resource contains:
Download – Free Screen Printing Job Sheet ( .Ai + .Eps )
P.s. I thought I’d mention that the job sheet works flawlessly with any of our Vector garment template packs. Jobsheet + Vector templates = Even more time saving. Just add the templates to the Adobe Illustrator symbols library then you’re ready to click and drag the garment templates straight into the job sheet. Here’s a quick video on how to add our templates to the symbols library.
