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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 gold foil, creating and screen printing the effect.