Prepare Your Designs | One Way Screen Printing

Preparing Your Designs | Sending Your Designs

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Preparing Your Designs for Onew Way Screen Printing

In our digital and online world of the emailing images, and putting up video to Myspace, files are exchanged quickly and easily.
It seems that it should be just as easy to send in some artwork for us to use for your tshirts. But there a few things to remember / consider:

Often we are presented with a sketch and ideas page from customers. This is extremely helpful and gives us a better idea of the direction of the design.

For our purposes, the artwork needs to be clean, crisp and if digital of high resolution original 300dpi

A Word on Microsoft Word

Unfortunately, Microsoft Word is NOT stable enough to send artwork for our purposes. It seems to juggle fonts spacing and placement in effort to get the gist across. But that is quite dangerous for us, as we hope to be printing EXACTLY what you want printed:)

A Checklist of Criteria

Vector Based: Adobe Illustrator (preferred file format)

All items are vectorized
Fonts are turned into outlines

Pixel-Based: Adobe Photoshop
Original Resolution 300 dpi or higher
Original Layers all intact unless not doing so makes the file exceedingly large :)

Supported File Types:

.ai - Adobe Illustrator

.psd - Adobe Photoshop

.jpg - Multiple Program suported

.tiff - Multiple Program Supported

WHAT IS CAMERA READY ART?

This is a print term that describes a design that is ready for printing and does not require any additional preparation. Due to the nature of the screen printing process, specific factors must be considered when preparing a design (described below), and your design may need additional preparation by our art department if it does not meet these requirements.

For a design to be considered camera ready, it must be ready to print from the moment we receive it. All aspects of the design must be fully prepared and ready to be put on a screen with no additional work on our part.

This page will give you some general information on how to prepare your design for screen printing, but you can always leave this up to the professionals at the art department. We will do our best with what you bring us to give you the best finished product possible.

COMPUTER BASED DESIGNS

PIXEL vs. VECTOR

Pixel Based Designs - (Adobe Photoshop)

Pixel based images are a mosaic built from a fixed number of color squares and are best suited for computer screens. Pixel based images are linked to resolution settings and become “jaggy” when enlarged. Very small pixel based images are fundamentally unusable for screen printing and will need to be recreated.

If you are using a pixel based design we need the file to be set at a high resolution. This means that we need the original scan (increasing the resolution after the fact will not work) to be created at 300 dpi (dots per inch) or higher. The lower the resolution, the more distorted the image will look in the final print. Images pulled directly from the internet will most likely be set at 72 dpi, which is far too small to be used in screen printing and will need to be recreated.

Photoshop files, JPEGs, TIFFs, and GIFs are all pixel based.

Vector Based Designs - (Adobe Illustrator)

Vector based images use mathematical equations to create lines/shapes that can be enlarged or reduced without a deterioration in edge quality. Vector designs are much preferred for use in screen printing, and ESPECIALLY for printing text. If you supply us with clean, camera-ready art we can transfer the design into the vector format for printing.

Adobe Illustrator is the most common vector design program.

SOLID TONE VS. HALF TONE

Most designs employ solid tone, bold shapes and lines. This will produce the clearest, cleanest, most striking printed image.

Computers display tone through transparency, but in printing this is not really possible. In order to create the different tones (or shades) of a design screen printing employs a half tone, Think of Pop Art or Newpaper print, where the illusion of tone is created through a pattern of dots. The closer the dots, the denser the tone.

Some aspects work best with a solid tone (such as type and heavy outlines) and vice versa. It is sometimes necessary to employ both processes simultaneously to achieve the best print possible

COLOR HALF TONE

Half tone dots are also used to create the illusion of seamlessly blended shades/tones of color.

4 Color Process

In order to achieve a photo realistic reproduction we use what is known as “4 color process”. This uses the 4 standard print colors of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to create the illusion of all the colors in the rainbow.

Simulation Process

For color images that use a select palette we sometimes use what is know as “simulation process”, which is similar to 4 color process, as half tone dot patterns are used to create the illusion of tone and blending. However, for simulation process only select colors are used, giving the design the starkest, clearest print possible. Simulation process is the preferred method for printing photo realistic imagery onto black shirts, as it takes the black of the shirt into consideration and creates a reproduction that uses the shirt color to create the design.