This design which we printed for NAIDOC is another example of a great logo incorporated into a t-shirt.  First, the hands in the design had the three colours of the Aboriginal flag incorporated into it, then that looked so effective, they thought the text would also look great with bands of colour. A wonderful feature of Photoshop and Illustrator is that anything can become part of your text.  In this case, three blocks of colour were made, and the text typed over the top. Then with the click of a button, the text “cookie-cuttered” the colour blocks on the inside, and excluded everything on the outside. Here’s the finished logo:

Here’s the effect on a t-shirt print:

And lastly, this is an example of placement of a picture inside text…a high resolution photograph of a fuschia placed inside a large leter “F”. The possibilities are endless!

Last blog, we talked about the importance of pixels, and the use of high resolution pictures for printing. For those of us who are asking “Well what is a pixel anyway?” it means “picture element”, which is a literal description of what goes together to make a picture. Every picture is made up of tiny square blocks of colour, which go together to make up the whole….invisible to the naked eye, until you zoom into the picture and look up really close. The more pixels that are packed into a picture, the clearer the picture will be.

If you look at a picture which has a very low count of pixels, you will see the block structures more clearly, and the picture will be blurred and distorted. The edges become very jagged, which makes it impossible to print a nice clear image onto a T-shirt. Below is a sample of the colour blocks of pixels up close:

From looking at this arrangement of colour blocks, it’s impossible to imaging that when zoomed out, it’s actually a picture. Underneath we have a sample of a picture that has been redrawn in Illustrator for a customer’s t-shirt, which is now so packed with pixels, it could be printed onto virtually anything!

Poor resolution affects every aspect of the picture..especially text. Often we receive artwork to print which has text included. Sometimes the actual photograph can be touched up in Photoshop enough to be printed onto a shirt, but the text is another story. Blocky, pixelated text will either need to be redrawn, or replaced in the relevant font. The problem with retyping the text, is often the difficulty in finding some obscure font that has been used, and is not on our system. Unless the customer knows the name of the font, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. If the picture has been taken from a website, then it will be impossible to know the font name. Trolling through thousands of fonts in an internet font library is time consuming, and often non-productive.

Another result of pixelation we mentioned, is that all around the edge of the artwork will be jagged. Sometimes, if the picture is basically printable, we can draw a line right around the artwork to straighten out that jagged pixel line. Adobe Illustrator has a “pen” tool which is used to draw a vector line around the image, which turns the edge into a very high quality product, packed with pixels, and also preventing colour inside the picture from “bleeding” outside the print zone. Here is an example of this method:

Here is the artwork displayed on a sample proof T-Shirt:

Here is what problem-text looks like when it’s presented to us:

As you can see, it’s not a pretty sight. We at Customyourshirt always endeavour to deliver quality printing, on good quality shirts to our customers, but we can only work with what you send us. Now with more and more people buying high-megapixel digital cameras, more of us are learning the importance of high resolution. Those photographs that we view down at the local Camera Club exhibition, or art gallery have been shot with the highest possible pixel count, and then usually enhanced even more later in a photo editing program. If a photographer takes a picture that doesn’t make the grade, he simply deletes it, as he knows it’s not worth the time and effort to make a passable picture out of a dud!

So keep snapping those photographs customers, and creating those amazing artworks, and send them in to us for printing and advertising your products on our wide range of t-shirts and other products, and always keep your pixel quality in mind.

Most of the artwork we receive for printing on t-shirts are in the format of a  JPG. JPG’s are fine if they’re high quality, and print well. However, often customers send artwork with text already on their picture. The more times a JPG is opened, the more it breaks down, pixel-wise, and text becomes very blurry.  If possible it’s best to just send your artwork without the text, and let our graphic art department know what text you’d like to have printed on your shirt. That way, the text will come up crisp and clear. Here’s a sample of  what lines look like when they become pixelated . Pixels are small square blocks of colour, and as the picture breaks down, the square blocks become more visible, and the text or artwork, hard to view:

See what we mean?  In this case, it’s probably better for you to arrange for our art department to re-draw your graphics for a small extra fee, and in case of text, to re-type it.  You will also notice that as well as the image being pixelated, the white background has become mottled and discoloured.  Normally with a high resolution graphic, we remove the background, letting just the t-shirt background show through. But on a low resolution picture like this, the background can not be removed, and makes for a very scruffy design.

To a T-shirt printer, a graphic artist or a photographer, pixels is what it’s all about. There’s nothing like a good high resolution piece of artwork or photograph to make a t-shirt zing!  If you have a message to get across, or your buddy wants his current girlfriend displayed across his chest, there’s nothing worse than having to stand two inches away from his shirt to get the message!

Thus, the same old problem seems to crop up over and over again when you might see a really cool picture or quote on the Web, and think “I’ll just pull that off the Web,  get it printed on my shirt, and I’ll be the coolest dude around!”….This is where the frustration comes in for the artist or printer, as while your design looks great on the Web, you’re going to need a magnifying glass to see it on your shirt. Pictures for the Web are intentionally kept small in resolution, so they will load and come up quickly when you open a webpage.  By comparison, a good quality piece of artwork would take so long to open, you’d lose interest and go to another site….but that’s the kind of picture which we love to print…one that’s bulging with pixels!

Here’s a sample of a picture recently received from a customer, and what it looks like on a scaled sample of one of our shirts:

As you can see, the artwork looks more like a button to push. After contacting the customer, we received a high resolution picture which we were able to print at our full print size of 28cm wide, which saved the day (and the customer’s pride!):