Designing artwork for screen printing differs from other types of design, due to certain limitations of the screen printing process.
The following information outlines the screen printing process and the requirements necessary for submitting your designs. If in doubt get in touch first.
At a Glance: (scroll down for details)
Vector art to be submitted in Adobe Illustrator AI.
Raster art in Photoshop PSD at a minimum resolution of 300 pixels/inch at the actual print size.
Other files accepted: EPS, TIFF and PDF.
The design must contain no more than four different colours.
These should be spot colours, (solid blocks of colour) created in RGB (or CMYK for critical colour matching).
Lines should be no finer than 3 pixels.
No gradients, shadows, or photographic images.
All text must be converted to outlines / embedded.
If your design is on paper, please contact us and we’ll see what we can do.
Programs and Format:
We can accept artwork in the following formats via e-mail or on CD-R (we don’t return CD-R’s, but your artwork will be kept on file).
AI (Illustrator), EPS, PSD (Photoshop), TIFF, PDF.
Sending your artwork as AI (Adobe Illustrator) allows for easy resizing of an image if necessary.
Any raster images (based on pixels, e.g. Photoshop), need to be created at a minimum resolution of 300 pixels/inch and must be submitted at the actual size of the required print.
Any artwork at a lower resolution will result in a poor quality print.
Files larger than 1Meg in size should be Zipped or Stuffed.
If you’re worried about the quality of your image, (for example, you want to increase the size of a raster image), send it to us for inspection, chances are we’ll be able to recreate it as a vector file, allowing for easy resizing.
We may need to charge for this, depending on the complexity. We’ll always let you know.
Maximum of Four Colours:
In order to appreciate the limit on colours, a quick explanation of the print process is necessary.
Each colour requires a separate screen to be created to correspond to that colour. Each screen must then be perfectly registered over the other to ensure no overprinting of colours occurs.
Screens are placed in individual sprung clamp arms on a ‘carousel’ which allows rotation of the screens.
Shirts are placed on a print ‘platen’ and each screen is rotated and lowered over the shirt in turn.
A rubber squeegee is pulled through that screen’s ink pushing it through the mesh and on to the shirt.
That screen is then carefully raised and the next ‘colour’ screen is then swung round, lowered and printed.
The more colours printed, the more likely you are to have a registration problem, due to the fabric moving, or shrinking (some colour combinations require partial heat drying between colours), or slight differences in print pressure.
Also when using water-based inks, the time taken between each colour screen needs to be minimised, to reduce the chance of inks drying in the screen.
It’s wise, therefore, to limit the amount of colours to ensure high quality results, by happy coincidence, fewer colours tend to produce more striking images. Less is more.
Print Colours:
Try and be as descriptive as possible when specifying print colours.
For critical colour matching, submit your artwork in CMYK mode, post a hard copy or specify a Pantone colour.
Gradients:
At present we do not print artwork containing gradients or photographic images, so try and stick to solid blocks of colour when submitting your design.
Your thinnest lines should be no less than 3 pixels:
Screens are produced by coating the mesh surface with a photo reactive emulsion.
Artwork is printed as dense black images on to transparent film and placed on an exposure glass.
The screen is then placed on top and exposed to ultra violet light.
The light
‘fixes’ the emulsion surrounding the design and where the artwork image blocked the light, the emulsion remains ‘un-fixed’ and is washed out with water, resulting in open mesh in the image area to allow for printing.
Since the mesh in the screen has a definite number of threads per cm, lines need to be created at, or above, a minimum pixel width in order to expose correctly.
For hand printing the minimum line size reliable reproduced is 3 pixels at 300dpi.
Colour Separation:
If you can perform this yourself, please submit your artwork separated into layers or as separate files for each colour.
We’re happy to carry out colour separations, simple images at no cost, though we may need to charge for more complex jobs.
We’ll always consult you before starting work.
Convert your Text to Outlines:
There are literally thousands of fonts available these days, so it is necessary for all text to be converted to outlines, this will embed the font in your artwork and allow us to view the design as intended.
Size & Position:
We can print images up to a maximum of 280mm x 380mm.
Please specify the print position as accurately as you can, we can email a t-shirt template to you if your require.
Note: We’re not able to print across seams.