For those of our customers who like to play around in Photoshop, a good tip for prepare your artwork for silkscreening, is to reduce the amount of colours in your picture, to make it easier to print
With other types of printing, it’s fine to use photographs, the higher in resolution the better, and there are no issues with the amount of colours. But screenprints look the most effective when they’re made using flat colours with a limited palette.
Reducing the amount of colors also makes it cheaper to print, and it gives
you a better idea of what your design is going to look like once it’s been screen printed.
The key to reducing an image’s amount of colors for screen printing is the Posterize image adjustment.
Some other photo enhancing programs give these options now, as well as Photoshop, so you can play around with your photos and get some amazing results.
Bring up the image you want to use, and go to : Image > Adjustments > Posterize on the tool bar. The Posterize filter reduces the amount of colors in your image to the number of levels you specify.
Depending on what kind of a look you are going for you can reduce the amount of colors once, or sometimes twice to get the desired look for your image. I’m sure you can even reduce it further, but I generally use 3 or 4 levels.
To posterize your image, first make sure you are on the selected layer you want to posterize.
Then, go to Image> Adjustments> Posterize…
After posterizing your image, you can either desaturate it or try varying the amount of levels
within the Posterize settings to get the desired effect. Here’s an example of a black and white picture of Paul McCartney, one of the famed members of The Beatles. The first picture has been changed from colour to black and white, then in the second picture, the posterizing filter has been used, and you will notice the amount of tones have been reduced and simplified, which will make an outstanding screenprint for a Tee shirt:
Paul McCartney
Paul Posterized
You can see the marked difference between the two pictures, and the screenprinter will much more easily pick up the simplified colours (if in colour) and tones and your tee-shirt will be much more striking. There are many other methods of simplifying your pictures for print, this is just one of them….and just goes to prove….LESS IS MORE!
There’s nothing like combining tee-shirts and technology! There are some brilliant tee-shirt designs out there, and the sky’s the limit for innovation. Here’s a design that incorporates an actual Wi-fi detector. For anyone who’s ever walked all over the city with a laptop or ipad, looking for wi-fi access, this is a great idea…..If you wear your trusty wi-fi detector shirt next time you go out, it will display all the wi-fi hotspots, and give the signal strength! The glowing bars on the front of the shirt dynamically change as the surrounding wi-fi signal strength fluctuates.
Wi-fi Dectector Shirt
The above title is another funny example of things we’ve seen printed on T-shirts. You can have so much fun with text on Tees, but some of the funniest designs are mistakes and mis-translations. We’ve included a few more this week, some from Tee shirts, and some from badly translated signs.
Creepy Mistranslation
You Can Shirt This Have
No thanks…that’s ok, you can keep it!:-)
Uneasy Spirituality
Well….the text is nice and clear, but the meaning is a bit obscure!
Explosive Dog
Everyone stand clear! Explosive Dog on the loose….maybe a new terrorist weapon? Funny how the absence of one “s” can give text a whole new meaning.
We wish you all are Merry Christmas, and hope that all our customers are giving their loved ones some of our great tee-shirts, polos, or rashies as gifts this Season
Well, the year is roaring to an end, and we’re faced with what gifts to buy for cousins, kids, uncles, friends, etc. What better gift for a hot Aussie Christmas than a high quality cotton tee, printed with a fun message, or family photograph? Here are a few fun design ideas we found:
Today we’ve got some more funny tee-shirt designs…some of them are using nice fonts, and eye-striking designs, but woeful translation brings a comic twist for the Western reader. Here are a few more samples of tee-shirt artwork worn by people totally oblivious to their meaning:
Smelly Smell
Seduction Tee
Some of us had be very careful before buying tee-shirts with Asian writing on them…find out what they really say, before wearing!
Back Hair Tee
Wordy Jumble Tee
But the thing to notice with a lot of these tee designs is that the fonts, colour and general construction make them very noticeable, which is what a customer aims for when printing on a tee-shirt. This tee above says absolutely nothing of any value, yet the owner of the shirt was obviously motivated to buy it because of maybe a mixture of a few things…the font type, the colour, the placement and text size? Here at Customyourshirt, we love all things “T-Shirt”, and love to see what folks from other countries like to print on their tees. Some of the funniest artwork comes via cross-cultural misunderstanding, particularly between Asia and the West. It’s a matter of “if it looks good, it must be cool”. We’ve collected a few samples of what happens when people don’t understand the text of another language. Some samples are unprintable, so we’ve kept it clean. It makes us wonder what on earth our own shirts actually say, when we buy a shirt with Chinese or Japanese text 
Sample T-Shirt Design from Asia
Christmas Mish-Mash
Tell It Like It Is
New York Don't Love You!
Here are just a few samples of what happens when we don’t understand a language, and go off to buy a tee-shirt. Some shirts obviously have blocks of text lifted from books or magazines, and placed artistically on the shirt, without the slightest understanding of the text meaning. …hope you enjoy these, we’ll put some more up later.
There’s so much you can say on a t-shirt, both with the type of font you use, and it’s placement on the shirt, the colour, and the composition. Back in the days before computers, lettering was always done by hand, and was a long and arduous task to create print. …but today there are thousands of fonts you can choose, and thousands more being created. Then once you type your text onto your template, the possibilities are endless. You can turn your text into a vector image, and tweak it into a completely different shape if you want…you can make it three dimensional, put shadows, embossing around it, or if you choose a wide text, you can fill it with pictures or textures.
Here are a few samples of some of the possibilities when you’re thinking of getting some tee shirts, or polo shirts printed, maybe for a birthday gift, or special occasion, or even for a whole football team!
Creative Logo
African Soul Logo
These two logos show great creativity and good balance between the illustration and the lettering. You’ll notice that in the African logo, the red dot shape over the “i” is repeated behind the African drum, and pulls the picture together really well. The same shape is repeated again with the orange “o” in “soul”
Royal All Stars Logo
This logo has an unusual mix of two fonts which are completely different. The word “Royal” and the crown go together, as a symbol of royalty, with the text done in an old English calligraphic font, but the font for “All Stars” is done in a ”Varsity” type font, which is used for sports related printing.
Christmas Design
This design idea would look great on a whole range of products for Christmas presents..including tee shirts, coolers, caps, mousemats etc. and is easy for us to print for you. Just send in your Christmas, or other photos, of high resolution, and we’ll do the rest. Let us know which of our products you’d like it printed onto, and what you’d like the text to say, and we’ll encapsulate your photograph into the print. Christmas isn’t far off now, so go onto our website www.customyourshirt.com choose from our extensive range of products, and get your order in plenty of time for Christmas. If you have other ideas for your own designs, contact us and talk to us about it.
We’ve been working on some cool designs for Halloween this year, and thought we’d give you a preview of what they’ll look like printed on some of our great tee-shirts. You can either send in your own designs, or get our help in designing your ideas, or you can choose from some of our vector designs. If you’d like to get a group together of family or friends this year, for something different, check out some of these designs, and we’ll put some more up later…
Bats Anyone?
Happy HalloweenMini Witch
