T-shirt printing - how to send us your T-shirt design
This page explains the ways in which you can submit your design for screen printing. Screen printing is an analogue process so please don't expect your design to be perfectly reproduced after it's developed onto a screen and printed onto fabric. This is part of the beauty of screen printing.
Step One - Choosing your design
1. Image
When choosing your design try to avoid photographic images and illustrations with lots of lines and/or shading. Colour gradients are difficult to exactly reproduce since the artwork must be changed into half-tone dots of different sizes. Bold images with blocks of colour tend to give the best results.
2. Size
Please supply your artwork at the print size you require. Print size can be up to 45 cm x 35 cm in portrait for adult T-shirts.
3. Position
Please indicate the position of your design on this T-shirt template OR specify clearly in correspondence.
4. Lines
Lines must be drawn at a minimum of approximately 0.75 point for dark ink on light-coloured tees and 1.5 points for white or coloured ink on dark-coloured tees. (Thinner lines cannot be properly reproduced.) If you're not sure please email the file for advice.
5. Fonts
If your vector artwork contains text, please ensure that the text is converted to outlines.
Step Two - What colours do you want to use in your design?
Description
Please provide the best colour description you can when supplying your artwork, i.e. lemon yellow, golden yellow, mustard yellow...
Colour matching
If it is crucial that your design requires specific colours please do one of the following so we can match the colour as closely as possible:
- Email a colour image in CMYK (not RGB) format but remember that colours/shades do look different from screen to screen.
- Send a hard copy in the post
- Specify the Pantone colour reference number at the time of ordering
More Than One Colour?
If your design is more than one colour and you can carry out the colour separation yourself, please layer up the artwork file. We are happy to carry out simple colour separation for free but, for complex colour separation we may charge you. Don't worry, if this is necessary, we'll contact you first to confirm that you're happy to go ahead.
Step Three - Submitting your designs
Electronically (by email or on CD)
Please supply your artwork in one of the following file formats:
JPEG, TIFF, PDF, PSD (Photoshop), AI (Illustrator), EPS.
Raster images (non-vector) should be at least 300 dpi when viewing the design at the actual size you want it printed. Please note that the artwork must be created at minimum 300 dpi, not created at a lower resolution and then changed to 300 dpi in Photoshop. We cannot take responsibility for poor print quality if the file is of lower resolution than this.
If the size and quality of the image is not good enough for the size of the print your require, we may have to recreate the image as a vector file. Depending on the complexity of the image, this may incur an additional design work fee. But don't worry - if this is necessary we will contact you first to inform you of any extra costs and confirm that you are happy to go ahead with the printing.
If the file is 50 MB or less in size, please email it to info@idressmyself.co.uk. If the file is larger than 10 MB we would prefer to receive a zip file. Alternatively, CDs should be posted to us at I Dress Myself, The Engine House, The Silk Mill, Saxonvale, Frome, BA11 1PT. Please note that we do not undertake to return CDs.
If you have questions on the above, please contact us for further information and/or advice.
