If you need t-shirts printed, you’ve come to the right place! PSI wants to align its results to your vision of the perfect screen printed t-shirt for your needs, so let us help you convey your ideas. Before you jump in though there are a few things to know to make sure you get the results you want. Here are just a few steps to consider…

Step 1) Choose a T-Shirt Friendly Design

Your design, be it a photograph, a drawing and/or text, can be as complicated or as simple as you want, but please note that just as humans can only fly with the help of surfboards, hang gliders and airplanes, screenprinted t shirts are created with screen printers, ink, and by humans, not magic. Thus, if you want your design to look great it must be compatible with the technology and materials that PSI Screenprinting use as well as fundamental elements of design and color.

Some points to remember when choosing colors, fonts, and t-shirts:

-A dark t shirt printed with light ink can sometimes cause a screenprint to look translucent. This does not mean it shouldn’t be done, but choose your ink and colors wisely. When printing colours onto dark t-shirts a white base of ink is laid down first to print the colours on to. If this isn’t done your colours won’t show up on the dark t shirt. For example, with a water-based ink, yellow over black can look off-green. With Plastisol, ink it will be very washed out and not vibrant.

-Detailed t shirt designs screen printed on a low contrast background, such as maroon ink on black t-shirt, will not show up as well as, say, black ink on white t shirt…but any colour will go well on white…except white of course.

-PSI Screenprinting use Adobe Illustrator to turn your bitmap designs into vector graphics, which means they will have clean lines and can be resized without losing their resolution. Another thing to keep in mind when designing your tshirt is that the font you choose must be a font that we have installed on our computers. The best way to get around that is to convert your fonts to outlines or curves, depending on which software you are using, yourself before sending it to us. If you are not sure, contact us beforehand and we can easily step you through this.

Step 2) Choose Your T Shirt Sizes
There is nothing more frustrating than that t-shirt of your favorite band…that you can’t even squeeze over your head; or, all 16 members of the girls’ netball team wearing XL uniforms. Make sure you order a variety of sizes that correspond to the demographic who will be wearing them.

Step 3) Choose Your Quantity
How many t-shirts do you need? Be sure to order enough tshirts the first time around because it will be cheaper for you in the long run. If you are ordering for a big event, a team, or organization, keep in mind that a couple extra t-shirts is better than being one short on game day!

We can help you with all of these. Just get in contact us via phone, email or our contact forms and we will step you through it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Blog, Screen Printing, Tricks & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.