T-shirt Printing Design

March 3, 2021

Here at Great West Graphics, we provide services for t-shirt printing and design. We’re a company located in Vancouver, British Columbia specializing in apparel branding and production. Because we’ve been doing this since 1980, we want to share our tips and tricks on what to consider when designing a t-shirt.

1. Sizing

The first thing that you want to consider is sizing. Sizing is important to apparel designing as shirt sizes vary throughout. Apparel can go from XS-5XL and range from ladies, men, unisex, youth, and toddler. An overly large or small logo will affect the way the design will on the canvas. Therefore selecting the correct size is key in producing a well balanced design. The standard size for a full front logo would be 10″- 12″ wide, while a center chest logo will be around 6″- 8″ wide. For a left or right logo, the standard size will be around 3″- 4″ wide. But consider what sizes your clothing will be. If there are larger sizes in your order, you can go slightly above the suggested and vice versa for smaller sizing. As a result, be mindful of what size you’re looking for.

2. Image Quality

Image quality is crucial to designing apparel as it is required for smooth and crisp printing. At Great West Graphics, we accept high quality 300 DPI images or vectored artwork. A vectored artwork is an artwork built from shapes, points, lines, and curves. Oppose from images, which are made from pixels. To find out if your artwork is vectored or not, just zoom to the max on an edge. If you see pixels, the artwork is an image and not a vector. Vectored artwork is usually seen in AI, EPS, or PDF format. One thing to note, do not copy and place images into a file and save it as these formats. At the end, it will not change the images into vectored art. To learn more about vectored art, click here to see this article.

3. Colours

Many people do not realize this but colour is crucial in designing a shirt. Our company provides clients with stock colours, in which we do not charge to use. However, we are also able to mix any PMS colour on the chart. Therefore if your artwork has an uncommon colour, we will be able to help mix it for you. Some things to consider when designing and printing your artwork is what t-shirt colour you will be printing on. This is crucial in producing apparel as colour contrast and colour schemes all play a factor.

Even though we all want our artwork to have the perfect colours, one thing to consider when screen printing is the cost. The more colours in your artwork means the more expensive it will be to print. For this reason, we recommend less colours for screen printing and more colours for DTG printing.

4. Composition

The composition of an artwork is a huge factor in deciding how your final t-shirt will look. An overly complex design will cause the artwork to look crowded and busy. In screen printing it should be considered that it will look different from on screen. Due to the way screen printing is, very thin lines, or thin negative space will not show up. Therefore composing your artwork as balanced, easy to comprehend, and aesthetically pleasing will be essential.

To see our works in custom screen printing, head over to our social media pages, where we regularly post images of work. Click on the following links to our Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. If you need information in regards to our printing process, please see our blog to find out more about us. Our selection of garments and products can be viewed on our website by navigating through the product page.