6 Great Tips On How To Prepare Artwork for T-Shirt Printing

Published on Thursday, December 4, 2008 – 12:00 am

Recently I have been posting about sweet t-shirt designs (here & here) so I thought this would be a good time to share this guest article. Blake from YouDesignIt, a t-shirt printing company, will guide us through some tips for preparing artwork for T-Shirt printing.

As many of you probably already know, doing graphic design, and doing graphic design specifically for t-shirt printing can be two totally different beasts. Have you ever worked extremely hard for long hours on a t-shirt design for yourself or a client, only to have the printer tell you that your design won’t work for t-shirt printing? This problem is not that uncommon and I would like to provide you with a few easy tips on how to prepare your artwork for printing on t-shirts.

1. Use PMS Colors in Your Artwork

You may typically do artwork in RGB and CMYK color modes, but to ensure the most accurate colors with a silk screener, definitely use PMS colors in your artwork. This also makes the colour separations a lot easier and more accurate. Here is a link on how to work with Pantone in Illustrator.

On a side note, the printer should not charge you extra for PMS color matching. That is an old fashion way to get more money because you are actually doing them a favour by being more particular for accuracy.

2. Convert All of Your Text to Outlines

Sometimes your artwork may call for a very obscure font or maybe even a custom designed font. When sending your artwork off for print, the last thing you want to to see, is a substituted font in your design. By converting the text to outlines, any computer that opens the artwork will view the text as an image.  Therefore, no substitutions will be made.

To convert text to outlines right click on the text with the selection tool and then click Create Outlines.

3. Create Your Artwork at Actual Size

Do not trust the printer’s judgment without discussing it with them first. I am a printer… so why would I say that? Because the vision you have of the end product can be very different than what the printer has assumed as your vision. The safest way to defend yourself in this situation is to create the artwork in its final size. Don’t know what size you want to use? Slap a ruler to the shirt you are wearing. Sounds simple, but it works.

You can set the artwork size in the Document Setup menu, found under File.

4. Use Vector Artwork As Much As Possible

This is not an argument over raster versus vector, just more of a suggestion to use vector artwork when possible. It makes colour separations easier and the print comes out cleaner in the small details. This is a general rule for the everyday jobs and not an automatic in all situations.

5. Expand Your Strokes

If you have properly set all of your colors to PMS swatches, then the color separations software will have no problem. This is more of a human error that occurs because sometimes strokes are overlooked. I put this tip at #5 because it is one that can save you from a small mistake ruining an otherwise great project.

To expand your strokes select what you want to expand then go to Object > Expand.

6. Set Your Half-Tones with PMS Colors

This one goes along with Tip #1. Sometimes your design and/or budget may call for the use of halftones to save on the amount of colours printed. The best way to do this is to slide the colour scale down to a percentage of the PMS colour. The colour separations software used by the printer should handle the rest.

In the image below, notice in the top right corner, the number 40? Usually that is 100%. Change it to 40% to set a 40% half tone.

These six great tips on how to prepare your t-shirt design for printing should cover the majority of the problems you might face. This kind of preparation should ensure a faster turnaround time and a much more accurate print.

Do you have any more t-shirt printing tips or questions? Share them below.



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27 Responses to “6 Great Tips On How To Prepare Artwork for T-Shirt Printing”

  1. Andrew Kelsall on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    Great tips, I have one too…

    Tip #7

    GROUP YOUR VECTOR OBJECTS TOGETHER

    You wouldn’t believe the amount of times either myself or the printer (yeah) have mistakenly moved a vector element in a native Illustrator file, so alwaYs group the elements together and lock the layer(s)

  2. Aaron Irizarry on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    Great tips Jacob! I have quite a bit of shirt design lined up so i am gonna keep these handy!

  3. Preston Lee on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    We always ask our customers to learn how to use the layers palette in Adobe Illustrator. Most people dont even know it exists like in Photoshop. This helps us when it comes to graphics organization and color separation.

    Thanks for the post.

  4. Kelly | Purple Lemon Designs on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    These are VERY helpful tips. They are things that I usually think of, but it is nice to see the list…I also think the tips about the PMS colors & halftones are brilliant and well explained.

    THANKS a million!

  5. Syuxx on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    wow, now that what make me want to make my on tees.
    thanks for the tips!

  6. Angie Bowen on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    Thanks so much Jacob. We’re planning to do t-shirts at Dead Wings and I’m still in the learning process for print design so this was extremely helpful!

  7. Ben Jikoiono on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    a good article you got here jacob.. thanks for the tips. I happened to stumble on your site.. its cool mahn. A lot of great resources for people starting out..

    a big vinaka(thanks) from Fiji.. keep up the awesome work..

  8. Mike Cerdeiros on Dec 4, 2008 said:

    this is right up my alley thanks so much!!

  9. Teeopia | t-shirt utopia on Dec 5, 2008 said:

    Very well explained and easy to understand.

  10. Levi Blackman on Dec 6, 2008 said:

    Fantastic tutorial. I am working on building my own t-shirt website and have had a lot of problems with my graphics and tshirt quality. I had no idea about most of this stuff, so thanks.

    Do you have any suggestions on designs that work well on t-shirts? How fine of detail can we get into with our designs?

  11. OllieJ on Dec 6, 2008 said:

    Along with what Preston Lee mentioned about using the layers palette of Illustrator, whenever possible assign your spot colors to their own layers.

  12. Steve - Eightyone Design on Dec 9, 2008 said:

    Definitely agree with Ollie J - always split your separations on to separate layers!

    I am not so sure about the PMS thing on clothing. In our experience pantone colours can come out looking VERY different when printed on fabric (the worst we have found is trying to achieve a stone / ecru like colour from pantones!). The best way we have found (although it is more expensive) is to provide the manufacturer with actual swatches of fabric and prints for them to match the colour to. We have a whole library of t-shirts that we buy when we see a certain colour we like. They all have squares cut in to them now as we take swatches to send out to the manufacturers but we find providing a physical sample is much easier to show them what we are trying to achieve, the PMS in clothing really has not worked for us!

  13. Andris on Dec 12, 2008 said:

    I’m planning to do some t-shirt-design for my singer-/songwriter-project. so this comes just at the right time. thanx for that.

  14. minanube on Jan 16, 2009 said:

    thanks for the rockin tips :D

  15. Shane on Feb 7, 2009 said:

    Might be a dumb question but here goes.

    If I want to use a service like http://www.wordans.com/ and want my shirt to be of a photographic nature, what resolution should my graphics be to match the final output resolution?

    I know that my image will be something around 11″X11″ but what’s the typical resolution?

    And since I’m going with a photographic look instead of a logo type design, I’m assuming there will use some sort of an iron-on type of deal right?

    Thank you for your time,
    Shane

  16. Jacob Cass on Feb 8, 2009 said:

    Shane, personally I am not entirely sure but my recommedation is to contact the printer you are going to be using. They will give you their advice and needs.

  17. Priyanka on Mar 31, 2009 said:

    Cool article! Just tweeted it; quite sure our designers at Inkfruit would love these tips!

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