When you come up with an idea, especially one that's design related, it can be tempting to jump straight in and try to turn it into a reality. However, with everything, especially when it comes to something as nuanced as a t-shirt design and screen printing, it's worth taking a second to ensure that your vision is practical and can be turned into an impressive end result.
To help you make your dream a reality, we decided to give some tips we've learned from years of industry experience to help you optimise your design for t-shirt screen printing.
If the feel of the t-shirt is important to you, it's important to consider how the design will affect that. Material that's printed on is naturally thicker than plain material and can often have a bit of a sheen to it.
It's important to keep this in mind before making a design that involves printing on the whole t-shirt. It'll significantly affect how the t-shirt feels compared to one with a small logo on the side. Of course, it's about finding a middle ground between the two without compromising too much on either your design or how the t-shirt feels to wear.
Screen printing is a great method for putting designs on t-shirts. It's reliable, produces impressive results, and can be quite durable. As a result of how the process works, you often can't make print gradients in your colour. If you want to incorporate something like this into your t-shirt design, it's not impossible - you have to use different tones that are then printed side by side to create a similar effect. It's often simpler and more effective to go with plain blocks of colour though, and it can also work out a fair bit cheaper than going for overly complex designs.
If possible, a lot of screen printing providers recommend sticking to around three different colours for each side of the t-shirt. It's possible to use a lot more than that, but it can lead to significant increases in costs.
A great way of optimising your t-shirt design is to use the colour of the fabric in the design itself. A simple example might be that if you want to print in white and grey, it would make a lot of sense to use black fabric.
You can get a lot more complex than that, of course. If you're unsure about what colours to go with, a great source of inspiration can be the colour wheel. If you want to avoid colours that might clash, then you should try to avoid using colours that are next to one another on the wheel. To find colours that complement one another, it's a great idea to use colours that are on the opposing side of the wheel.
It's important that your digital file is a high enough resolution so that no details are lost during the printing process. While it might look great on your smartphone screen, if the file isn't high-res, once you've blown it up to print it on the t-shirt, it can look terrible.
Make sure that the design doesn't lose its quality when you zoom in on details, especially on the file that you intend on sending to the t-shirt printing service you've chosen. Depending on the software you've used to make the design, it'll likely provide you with different file options - make sure you use the appropriate option for the system the printers are using.
Screen printing doesn't work like digital printing - it doesn't match each pixel to the file you're printing from. As a result, if you try to print your t-shirt from a photo, it likely won't come out very well. The photo could be an incredibly high-quality image, but that won't help make the t-shirt come out any better - in fact, it could make it worse.
That's because the screen printing process is limited to just using a few colours rather than the thousands of different tones found in a photograph. As a result, it's important that you create your design using a suitable tool that treats colours more like solid blocks. Doing this ensures that the t-shirt will come out just as you intended, avoiding any unhappy accidents.
If you've decided to include text in your t-shirt design, chances are you want people to be able to read it. A common mistake is to use text that is simply too small. While obviously, small text is harder to read, it also wears quicker - thin lines are likely to peel and fade more than thicker ones, especially on porous materials like fabric. To ensure readability makes sure that the text is big enough and in a font that people can actually decipher. If the text is going to be incorporated into the graphic design itself, rather than next to it, then make sure that it doesn't detract from the design and the design doesn't obscure any of the letters.
Again, it's also crucial that you use a colour for your lettering that really stands out against the colour of the t-shirt. While white letters might look striking against black, placing them on top of a very light blue can become illegible. Following these tips will have you well on your way to making the perfect t-shirt design. The service you've chosen should be able to help you a little when it comes to finalising the end design, but of course, it's best to get things as perfect as you can before sending them over.
