Great question! Print-ready refers to the quality of the image you provide to us for screen printing. Unlike printing most paper products and photos, screen printing mostly uses the colors in your design rather than mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black(Key) inks like your printer at home. In order to prepare an image for screen printing we need to make sure that we got the best image quality to do so. Below are a few attributes to keep in mind.
– Vector Art works great! Common vector file types are .ai, .eps, .pdf (if derived from a vector-based program.)
– Photos or Raster Images should be full resolution (300dpi) and at least the size you’d like it printed
– Some acceptable Raster files are .psd, .jpeg, .tiff, .png, .bmp, .pdf (if derived from a raster-based program.)
– All text in artwork files should be outlined or converted to shapes unless you’re able to provide font files.
This is crucial! Knowing the difference between these two image types will spare many potential headaches in having to reconstruct images to achieve optimal print quality (especially if you’re paying a design for their time!)
Raster images are the most commonly used. They are comprised of Pixels (those little dots on your screen you see when you zoom way in.) Photographs and heavily shaded images are typically created as raster images as it allows for the smoothest blending of colors. Think of painting with water colors; you can blend colors, without limit, and even make them softer to create highlights and you end with a single, uniform image. A large painting looks great when it’s scaled down in size, but small images look blurry and low quality when increased in size.
Vector Art, however, is quite different. Rather than stacking pixels, vector images use shapes and lines generate the graphic. Vector images have a limitless ability to be increased in size. This is especially great for Text-based designs and cartoon style images that have bold outlines and solid areas of color. Most logos and text are created using Vector Based artwork software such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw.
Not really. Setting up a design takes a lot of work. For this reason, we’ll go as low as 12 shirts per design. If you really need shirts and can’t hit the minimums, give us a call and we’ll check the available options.
Depends. Most custom t-shirts are printed in 5 business days from the time we get the thumbs up on the design, the price and we collect payment. We can always rush a job but that’ll cost a little more.
We create a screen for every color in your design and then we have to set that screen up. We love printing crazy colorful stuff but it takes some extra work, time and screens and we’ve got to pass that cost along. Everybody does it – we promise.
Nope. Our pricing is transparent up front. We don’t charge screen fees for standard printing and in the off chance we have to charge for artwork or something, you’ll know as soon as we do.
Yep. We have different pricing for customers that provide their own garments. That is considered contract printing and is the only time we charge screen fees. If you’re not familiar with apparel printing contact us to talk about bringing in your own garments.
That depends. We’ll need to know how many garments you want, what garments you want, the number of colors in your design and how many prints you want per garment. Use our Get A Quote form for a speedy custom response for your your project or give us a call if you’d rather talk through it with someone. We’ll get you an estimate right away.
