Proper Artwork for custom tees
Proper artwork for custom tees is where the quality of screen printing starts. We can only work with what our customers provide us in regards to artwork and as experienced as we are in the custom t-shirt screen printing business, we aren’t always miracle workers. Yes, we can typically make around 90% of customer artwork viable but depending on the quality, or lack thereof, artwork fees can be an additional charge that add to the price of the shirts.
Ideally, artwork should be in what’s called a vector format. Vector artwork is artwork that can be scaled, color separated, and completely manipulated with the right graphic software. The joke in our industry is that if our customers can’t open the artwork file, that’s the file we need. Typically the person who is ordering custom shirts is not the graphic artist. They’ll either contract that service out or have in-house person. Sometimes we get the files and are in contact with the graphic artist, other times everything goes through the person ordering the shirts. So when they happens, they won’t have software on their computer to open the proper artwork which is how we know that’s what we need. The orgin file extensions of proper artwork is going to be .ai or .eps for Adoboe Illustrator artwork or .cdr for Corel Draw. These are the most common graphic software titles where vector artwork is created. These are not proper artwork for custom tees.
Often times we are working with a parent, teacher, or small business and they have a logo or design, but they don’t have access to vector artwork. So what we received is a raster image. These are jpegs, bitmpaps, tiff files, and png files. These can’t be color separated and when they are scaled they get pixalated. That’s the stair stepping look on the borders of designs and they lack the clear crisp look a vector file will have.
Best practices if you are looking for custom printed t-shirts is to send us the artwork you have and we’ll let you know if it is proper artwork for custom tees.