Printing T-Shirts

It's t-shirt printing season! With the warm weather upon us, you can hear the t-shirt printing presses humming, as they crank out loads of t-shirts for sports tournaments, company barbecues, and your favorite corner bar. T-shirts have become a universal symbol of good times and brand awareness worldwide. The resposibility of printing of those t-shirts should not be taken lightly. When your t-shirt printing project comes off poorly, you put your brand in a bad light.

So what do you do when your organization comes to you with the task of printing t-shirts? First off, don't panic. By following some simple steps, you can save yourself lots of heartache and dollars. Having worked on a good number of t-shirt designs over the years, I've penned a list of things that I've learned about printing t-shirts (and often the hard way) ...

• Screen printing is the best technique for serious jobs. If you are doing one-off shirts, heat transfer paper is fine ... and it's great for working out your design ideas, too. When the time comes to do a big run of shirts, you'll likely go the screen printing route.
• Leave plenty of time for your t-shirts to be printed. Find out the drop dead date for delivery of the printed t-shirts. Then, add in a week's worth of cushion and work the schedule backwards.
• Limit the number of colors in your design. Simply put, the more colors you print on a t-shirt, the higher the cost for each shirt. Cutting down on the number of colors can save you a considerable amount of money.
• Create the artwork in a vector drawing program. You want to do your computer design work in a vector drawing program, such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or Macromedia Freehand. Do not use a paint program such as Photoshop or PaintShopPro. Generally speaking, the stencils need to be cut from lines (vectors), rather than pixels (paint).
• Have a design pro handle the prep work. You may have designed a killer logo. But now you need to make sure that it will print properly and economically. If you are working with a good t-shirt printer, you should be able to hand off your design and have them take care of all of the technical details. But you should also know that they may very well charge you for that service.
• Take pre-orders. If you can get folks to commit to reserving their shirts before you place the order, you will save in the long run. Don't order more shirts than you need.
• Get a couple of printing quotes. If you've never used a t-shirt printer before, you should definitely get the job quoted at more than one shop. Make sure that the shops are quoting on exactly the same job, however. It's too easy for one shop to low ball another by substituting a less expensive shirt.
• Be wary of fancy t-shirt blanks. There are endless choices for t-shirt blanks--from plain white to tie-dyes and other fancy stuff--but the whites and basic solid colors will cause you the least grief. Availability in all sizes is often an issue.
• Investigate your suppliers. Ask to speak to existing clients, whether you use a screen printing shop that's local or one that you find on the Internet. A good recommendation goes a long way.
• Find a great t-shirt printer. Easier said than done. (See above) Make service and quality a priority over the lowest price and you'll come out ahead of the game. Like they say, "quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten."
• Don't overlook the shipping and delivery costs. If you print locally, delivery shouldn't be an issue. But if you print your t-shirts with a company over the Internet, shipping costs may be substantial. Factor this in!