Online you will find many websites from garment printers offering to print your custom t-shirt. One such company is http://www.nyctshirtfactory.com. This article will educate you as to how these shirts are printed, what designs work best and how to digitally format your art for the best possible finished product.

When you are ordering a single custom tee shirt, especially if the design is a photograph, what you are not getting is a traditionally silkscreened tee shirt. Silkscreen printing requires a different screen for every color, while it is efficient and inexpensive to silkscreen hundreds or thousands of shirts, it's very expensive to silkscreen just one. Instead you will be getting a shirt that has been printed on directly with a digital printer similar to your inkjet printer, or a shirt that has inkjet artwork printed on a transfer paper that is heat pressed to a shirt. The best companies use digital printers designed exclusively for printing tshirts. Nyctshirtfactory.com uses a top of the line Kornit printer that delivers full process color that is as permanent and durable as a silk screen print. The paper transfers are less permanent and often theres a white rectangle on the shirt behind the printed image.

Let's assume you are working with a company with a quality digital printer. What sort of design works best? You may be used to paper and working within a rectangual space. But the 'space' you need to think of, is that of the tee shirt itself! Rectangles are okay, but open designs with transparent background tend to look the best on a tee shirt.

When it comes to color, think of the color of the shirt you want the design printed on. Not all printers will offer printing on color or dark shirts, so check first. If the shirt is white this isn't so much an issue. But if the shirt has colored rings on the collar and sleeve or if the shirt is colored, perhaps blue or red - this should be taken into consideration. In the case of colored rings on collar and sleeves, it's always a good idea to have that same color prominant in your design. If it's a color shirt, you want color in the design that will contrast or be harmonious. Simply, a harmonious color is similar to the color of the shirt, an orange design on a red shirt for example. The most contrast is the 'opposite' color from that of the shirt, usually the opposite color is too 'loud' and a 'split complement' would work better. Opposiste color combinations are: yellow/purple, red/green, orange/blue. The split complement would be a color similar to the opposite color, but less 'loud' : green and purple or green and orange are split complement combinations.

Many of the custom tee shirt printers have online programs that allow you to design and upload artwork from your computer's web browser. The art you create in such a program will almost always work very well, but the art you upload is where problems can occur. An image that looks great online, will look terrible when scaled large and printed on a tee shirt. And online designer programs encourage you to upload web formatted images, which can mislead you. Images need to be of a very small file size to be fast to view online, and these compressed images look very good online. But the web formats, especially the popular 'jepg' format are very destructive to image quality in order to get the file size small. The web resolution, 72 pixels per inch, is too small for printing something large.

Your digital camera may also save images in jpeg format (to save space so you can take more photos), these images are usually so large in height and width, that they can be used for quality printing because there is enough visual information for a higher resolution image at a smaller height and width.

If you are doing your own design, knocking out the background, and making it large in resolution and height and width, it should print well. By 'large', the Kornit printer suggests an image be no less than 200 pixels per inch at the height and width you meant to print at. Taking a smaller image and adding resolution to it in a graphics application does not help, it will look no better than scaling up the original image and adding no resolution to it. You need to create the artwork at a large size to begin with, then it will print well.

What format? Web formats destroy image quality? Not all. there is ONE format that doesn't damage image quality to reduce file size: PNG. If you are working with photos or full color detail, PNG24, for 24 bit color, will give you full quality and a very good looking transparancy where you want the color of the shirt to show through. PNG24 is a web format, it can be uploaded to any online program that accepts art uploads.

Now you know everything you need to know to order a dynamite custom tee shirt. What if your tee shirt is so cool, all your friends want one too? Some companies, like Nyctshirtfactory.com will allow you participate in a program where your design is made publically available for anyone to purchase, and you make money anytime there's a sale! You retain all rights to your artwork too!

Michael R. Cooke
admin@nyctshirtfactory
http://www.nyctshirtfactory.com