Hello and welcome to this weeks lesson on Think’s two main print methods for custom apparel. There are lots of ways to get ink on shirts but we use two of the highest quality industry standards.
So how do we choose how we’ll print your shirts? Well, it’s got a lot to do with what type of artwork you have but before we jump into it I’ll describe the two print methods we use for most projects.
SCREEN PRINT
SP is what you’ll most often see in any retail store or when you get an event or concert tee somewhere. It’s ink pushed through a silk screen with the outwork knocked out of it — to put in very simple terms.
Artwork for screen print is separated by color and so screens are made for each individual color. When it comes time to print we just stack the colors on top of each other to get your tee looking good!
DIRECT TO GARMENT
DTG is a newer technology that is becoming very popular in the garment printing community. It makes printing complex and color-rich art easier. It works a lot like a desktop printer. The shirts are loaded onto a platen and we hit a big green button on our machine that allows for the image to printed directly to the garment. The only real limitation comes with the types of apparel you can use. Cotton is key for getting the best results on these types of shirts. The more cotton the cleaner the print!
LET’S TALK ARTWORK
If your artwork is simple and graphical then it’s easier and much more cost-effective to print using screen print. If you’re using a photograph or something with a lot of color gradients then DTG might be more effective. The image on the top of this blog post shows that we can do gradients on both DTG and SP but they have very different results.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg but I hope that you’ve learned something about DTG and SP today!
