Creating T-Shirt Designs

[Barnum]

I would like to design some t-shirts as a birthday present for someone using Adobe Illustrator but I don't know anything about printing on clothing.

Laser and ink transfer printing are kind of cheap looking, especially the kind you see at shopping centers. I would like something that is durable & won't fade and I don't know if iron-on will cut it. Should I stick to die-cut or silk screening process instead? If so, I would prefer to send it to a printer.

A couple of questions off the top of my head -

• What are the guidelines for prepping artwork to a printer?
• Are gradients allowed or should the be converted in halftone dots, or avoided altogether and use solid colors?
• What's the limit of number of colors to use?
• What file format should the design be saved in (.ai, .jpg, .pdf, .psd, .tif)?
• What's the minimum size for line thickness or detail for printing at 100%?
• If I send my artwork to places like threadless.com or mysoti.com do I retain the copyright?

Any recommendations or links to web sites would be appreciated.

 

[decksnap]

Every printer has different requirements... I would work with them to get this information.

The less colors, the less screens, the less money. Although if you have more than four colors I imagine they'll screen in 4cp anyway.

 

[Lau]

decksnap's right – the specifications and file types vary hugely. You're best looking at what each website or printer needs.

Although screenprinting looks great, it's expensive unless you know you're going to sell a lot of t-shirts, so sites like Mysoti are really good for smaller runs or one-offs like you need.

I started a thread about this a while ago here that you might find useful and in the last post you can see some closeups of the shirts from MySoti. It doesn't look exactly like screenprinting but I was really pleased and you can use more colours and it doesn't have to be a vector file.

If you use them you do retain all copyright, whereas on Threadless you do sign a lot of the rights over to them. It's your call – you get paid a lot more upfront from Threadless (if your design gets selected), but you lose your design. If you're doing it for a birthday present Mysoti's definitely your best bet as you can upload it and order it straight away. Threadless is more for t-shirts that other people would want to buy.