My buddy over at EnveeApparel wrote this article and was kind enough to send it to share with my readers. This is a great read for anyone getting into the business!

This article assumes that you (the reader) have already started your company, have designs that you would like to print and have found a printer to work with. It is intended to walk you through the process of your first print and bring up any “did you knows”. Enjoy!

1. Prepare your files for print
2. Select your printing method
3. PRINT!

PREPARE YOUR FILES FOR PRINT

As a clothing company the first thing you should know is that designing for print (4-color process) and designing for t-shirts are two different worlds. Make sure you or your designer make it as easy as possible for your printer to print your shirt without compromising your design. This will not only make it easier for you in the long run but it will give you a better product for your customers because you did not make last minute changes during the process. As a designer and company owner, I am very familiar with how to make my life and my screen printers life a lot easier. Make sure you convert all of your text to outlines, use pantone colors, create your artwork to size (exactly, not bigger or smaller), use vector artwork when possible and expand all stroked lines to at least 0.5 points. What do you need to know before talking with your printer?

• Where the print is going
• How many colors are used
• The Pantone color codes for all colors used
• The type of printing method you are using
• Are you using specialty inks?
• How many units you are printing
• The type of ink you are using

Where the print is goingThe easiest way I have found to indicate where the print will be is to create a line sheet. This will show if you have multiple print locations and if the designs will go over seams (neck, waist etc.). How many colors are usedYour line sheet should also indicate the number of colors used. You can do with by creating a shape and filling it with that color. This will be a helpful visual indicator later on. If you are using multiple colors and halftones please check to make sure your printer can printer halftones and ask how it would be be prepared for them depending on the printing method used. If you do not know what halftones are, that is a topic for another time. The Pantone color codes for all colors usedWhere do you find these you may ask? You or your designer should be using a Pantone swatch book. If you are not, buy one! Most design programs such as Adobe Photoshop come with the Pantone libraries built in. You or your designer can use the color picker tool to sample a color from your design. Once you have done that, double click on the foreground color in your tools pallet. When the menu pops up simply click the color libraries button and use the Pantone Solid Coated library (3-4 digit pantone # followed by a C). This color will be the one you tell your printer to use when printing. If this is confusing to you, you can probably find a more in depth tutorial online or ask your designer. The type of printing method usedThe standard type of T-shirt printing is screen printing, most often used with plastisol ink or water based ink. Simply put, plastisol has a thicker feel on the shirt and water based soaks into the shirt giving it a very soft hand. There is a brief explanation of different printing methods in the section below. Are you using specialty inks or applications?Before, most chosen designs were printed with plastisol inks, some with a chino additive and a few with water based or discharge inks. But now, designers can now use up to 8 colors, specify super glow, puff, high density, suede, UV color change, shimmer, metallic clear, glitter, blister, flock, vinyl, foils, embroider, gradients, simulated process and even belt printing. See the printing method section below for more info.

SELECT YOUR PRINTING METHOD

The process of screen printing can seem intimidating the first time you approach it with no past experience. Make sure the screen printer you have chosen is very friendly as your printer can prove to be an invaluable asset in your first venture and moving forward. When I did my first print my screen printer taught me how to keep the small detail during print, choose my inks correctly based on the shirt and when inks would work best for the look I was going for. After you become familiar with your screen printer and how they work, the process of printing can become seamless. There are many printing methods with their pros and cons. I will inform you of the methods but ultimately it is your choice. Printing method typesThere is a brief explanation of different printing methods used below. All pros and cons were gathered by a collective effort at T-Shirt Forums. Screening Printing – Creating screens pressed up against cloth to place paint onto shirts one color per screen. Pros: cost effective, high quality, professional, durability. Cons: each color requires a separate screen, messy, need to print many shirts at once with the same design to be feasible. Heat Press/INKJET/LASER Transfers – Print transparent inks using a computer onto a special piece of paper. Use heat to adhere the ink and paper onto the cloth. Pros: easy to print multi colors and complex designs, does not require different colors to be applied separately, great for small orders, easily customize different shirts. Cons: heavy feel of transfer, the cloth is the brightest part of the design: works well on white shirts, but doesn’t work on dark shirts, cracks, fades away easily. Heat Press/Plastisol Transfers – Where you have plastisol ink printed onto transfer paper so it can easily be added to the garment via a heat press. Vinyl Cutters – Use a machine to cut out designs on special solid color sheets of vinyl. Use heat to adhere cut vinyl to adhere vinyl to paper. Pros: high quality, durability, easily customize different shirts, great for small orders. Cons: have to separate and cut out each color independently, doesn’t work well for designs with complex patterns or designs that show a lot of background of the shirt inside the design. Direct to Garment – Print inks directly onto cloth. Pros: reduces steps, patterns doesn’t have heavy feel like screen printing, great for small orders, easily customize different shirts. Cons: the cloth is the brightest part of the design: works well on white shirts. There is more of a challenge to the DTG operator to get dark prints to come out correctly, but it can be done. Dye Sublimation – Dye sub is great for full color designs on white or light colored garments. It has no feel to the design but is a little trickier to master than inkjet heat transfers. Also, it tends to be a bit more expensive. You can also use this process on non textile products such as mugs, mousepads, tile, puzzles, coasters, key chains, etc. Dye sub is used only on man made fabrics like polyester (with various results on blends and pre-treated fabrics). You cannot print on 100% cotton t-shirts with dye sub. Specialty ink application list I have gathered the below information from Threadless. Super glow – is what it sounds like… glow-in-the-dark ink, on steroids. It is very transparent and looks “water-color-ish”. Super glow is really cool on light color shirts because it has a tonal clear effect that glows. It’s great if you want to play around with the idea of hidden messages or design elements. Keep in mind that it’s not 100% transparent, so elements in super glow will show up slightly even when not glowing. Puff – is a rounded, raised ink that’s best when used with organic shapes and lines. Hard edges and angles are often softened or lost when printed with puff. It can hold some detail, however the finer the detail or smaller the line, the less it “puffs”. Puff isn’t effective for large fill areas due to its heaviness, and the area won’t appear as puffed. High density – ink raised, square stack ink. It’s much better than puff for elements that have hard edges or angles. Similar to puff, areas of fine detail or with elements that come to a point don’t translate well. It’s also not recommended for fill areas, as the center of the fill tends to “sink”. Essentially, high density ink would be used if you don’t want the “rounded, raised” look of puff, but wanted a “squared, raised” look. High density ink also can be printed in “clear”, which produces a darkened, tonal effect on a tee. Pretty neat stuff! Suede – ink isn’t actually suede, but a raised ink with a fuzzy nap reminiscent of suede leather. It’s pretty fun to play with texture and raised design elements as it softens geometric shapes. There needs to be a certain thickness (1/8″ – 1/4″ at least) to any line work so the nap is visible – otherwise it looks like puff. Not good with really large fills or super fine detail. UV Color Change – To begin with, UV Color Change ink doesn’t work on dark tees at all. If you’re still interested in using it… read on! With this ink, colors disappear indoors but appear when exposed to any ultraviolet light. The colors achieved are bright but tend to lack vividness of regular inks due to their translucent nature. Color remains true on light colored tees such as white, cream or silver. The ink will appear on other light shirt colors, but is unpredictable. In other words, the shirt color affects the color of the ink. Shimmer – is basically sparkly, metallic ink. It’s available in silver, bronze, black and gold. We’ve previously experimented with special formulas for a pinkish-red shimmer and a bluish-aqua shimmer, but the results ended up looking like grayed-out, non-sparkly versions of the color. It does not hold super-fine detail well and starts to look flat grey in areas of finer detail. Metallic Clear – This ink is really cool when printed on top of any ink color. It can be printed on its own also and produces a darkened tonal effect with sparkles on some shirt colors. Glitter – ink has a fairly dense concentration of tiny glitter flakes. It’s available in a range of basic “crayon colors”. We don’t recommend it for tiny details. When it’s printed over another ink, or directly onto a tee, the underlying color can slightly show through the glitter. Blister – Think puff with dimples. This is super cool, especially when it’s “stacked up” for some great sculptured texture. You want to have a decent fill area or line thickness to allow ink to texture up. Keep in mind that it does tend to get heavy on a shirt, so large fill areas could end up being uncomfortable to wear. Gradients and gradient blends – tend to print with a banding effect similar to how it appears in an Illustrator file. Even if you transfer the file to Photoshop, gradients create a troublesome issue to overcome, so it’s best to create nice smooth gradients in Photoshop. Gradients can be achieved by using half-tones as well. The lightest halftone that can be printed is about 10%. Sometimes we can accept less than a 10% half-tone, but it really depends on the individual artwork. If need be, we can simulate “process” (CMYK) to achieve very fine gradients or images with high tonal quality such as stylized photography or photo-realistic elements. Embroidery – In addition to the inks and heat applications you can also now spruce up your designs with a good old fashioned needle and thread. Belt printing – was really popular back in the 70’s and has been making a comeback lately. A belt printer uses huge screens that cover the entire front and back of the garment. It’s great for all-over pattern printing, but can be used in many other creative ways. Belt printing works best on designs with a limited color palette that don’t require tight registration. One thing to keep in mind when designing for a belt printed tee is that the colors used in your design should never touch each other because registration is never exact. For this reason, one-color designs are recommended. Also, the same design will vary slightly from shirt to shirt when belt printing is used, due to the shirt size and how it’s placed on the printer. These characteristics give each individual belt printed shirt a unique look.

PRINT!

Congratulations, you did everything right and your printer hasn’t kicked you out for being a rookie! This means you are going to print the long awaited, highly anticipated tees. Make sure when you order your shirts you have a few extras for each color so that you can run some samples before going to print. This is needed especially when using discharge as a printing method because the color result varies on the shirt color. You don’t want dozens or even hundreds of shirts misprinted. Most printers use one of their own sample shirts before printing but the result can also vary based on manufacturer. When you bring your garments to the printer it would probably be a good idea to have them separated first (if you are local) instead of shipping direct. This will avoid confusion later. I personally separate my garments by sex>design>color>size. Once you have the design ready, and the files and shirts at the printer, you are ready to go! — Robert Hartland – In addition to running his fashion and lifestyle blog, He also owns Envee Apparel – Artistic Men’s and Womens T-Shirts. Please send him an email if you have any questions or just want to say thanks.

Recently I did a poll for the Best Young Brands of 2008 and the winner was Electric Zombie. I have wanted to do an interview with Kyle for a while and since his brand won the voting I figured it would be good to go ahead and do it. Aside from running EZ he works as a graphic designer doing band merch full time and freelance. Check out the following interview to get insight on both the brand owner end as well as the designer end…

Before we really get into it what do you normally do while not working
on either band merch or Electric Zombie?

I don’t think there’s a time I’m not really doing any of those things.
My typical day to day goes something like this…
8:00 – wake up, get ready for work
9:00ish – start working at equal vision records
5:30-6:00 – go home, make dinner, check emails
7:00-8:00 -  watch Scrubs
8:00 – 11:00 – freelance
12:00 – go to bed
REPEAT…
I usually don’t freelance on Monday, and Thursday and Friday nights.
Saturdays I run errands and usually end up freelancing for a few hours.
Sunday I freelance all day. I usually don’t do much. I find everything
boring. I’m a pretty boring person. I just watch movies and go
shopping ( I know that sound’s a little girlie)
I like the life I have. I need to do it while I still can. Who know’s
when all of this will stop.

I know you are a big fan of the horror genre, is this how you get
inspiration for your work?

Not really. I use that inspiration for EZ or other bands that may fit
into that style. If you look at my work, there’s hardly any guts and
gore, even though that’s what I’m known for. I use everything around
me as inspiration. Other peoples work inspire me to try harder and
push myself. I just pay attention to what people say and do and it
automatically triggers an idea. The day to day life is my inspiration,
even though I don’t do much else other than work work work.

What advice can you give for new bands or clothing lines for
contacting designers to get work done?

Have an idea of what you want. It really bugs me when they email and
ask a million questions, but when it comes down to what they want,
they 80% of the time don’t have an idea. “Do your thing man” or “we
trust you, hahaha and sometimes lol”.
Don’t scoop up reject designs either. Sometimes it’s convenient, but
in all actuality I think it’s a weak move. Sometimes a design can be
changed to fit, but just slapping on “said clients” name or logo is a
cop out.
We all have an imagination, it’s time everyone uses it.
oh and stop going to emptees.com and using it as a super market. Just
because a guy is hot for a moment and gets shirts of the day doesn’t
mean that person will rack in the dough. Take me for example. Ive had
what 2-3. Look at my portfolio.

What are some things you like and dislike to hear when taking on new projects?

“Can you knock this out by tomorrrow”
“What if we buy a bunch of designs from you, could we get it for an
embarassing low price?”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN’T HAVE IT DONE BY THIS TIME?! I have other
designers that I can go to that can get this done, TOMORROW!”

Last year you launched your brand Electric Zombie and it took off
great. How hard was it juggling that with your other work and personal
life?

Not really at the time I had a lot of positive people behind me. I’d
fold shirts while watching tv. Sometimes my girlfriend would help.
Things like that. I mean it’s really not that hard to get things
together. The hardest thing I think is organizing everything. Doing
the art and ordering the shirts is the easy part. I wish I still had
more time to promote, or the money for that matter. I just do my
thing.  I never really put EZ first. I kind of just do it as a hobby
and I feel really lucky to have had the success I’ve had

I have to say that I am really impressed with what I have seen from EZ
so far.You do a great job with packaging, promotions, and
giveaways. Can we expect the same for ‘09 or was that mainly to get the
initial word out about the brand?

I’ve got a few more things in store. One of which will happen when the
new line drops in a few weeks. I’ve got lots of cool and new things in
store. I am super excited about it, you’ll just have to wait and
seeeeeee!

What are your thoughts on the apparel industry right now, from both a
designer and a brand owners stand point?

I think that it’s a little overwhelming. I hate the fact that people
see one persons success and think they’ll have the same
results. I think that if you aren’t already in this industry in some
sort of form you’re just going to make it way hard for yourself.
Im sick of people going to emptees.com and just grabbing up rejects or
using the same people. In fact I decided to not print a design from my
new line because other companies like Dekay and Zombie Liquorice are all
using him. Everyone tries to nab whoever is hot for the moment. I mean
whats so great about having the same person do the same thing for
everyone else? Get your own damn idea and find your own people. The
internet is an amazing thing, it gives you many doors to open.
I just hope that with this so called economic problem we’re in, it
will weed out all the shitty companies. I’ve got my fingers crossed on that one!

What clothing brands are you currently into?

Third World, Mishka, Obey, Drop Dead. I was into 410bc big time, I’m
not sure what’s going on with them but they’ve been MIA for a while
now. It actually made me forget to send shirts to Mike from 410,
(writing a note down now, ha!)

If you were not designing merch or running EZ what else could you see
yourself doing career wise?

I honestly have no idea. I’d prob be back working at Hot topic or
working at Starbucks or a movie store or something. It’s actually a
question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. “How long will I be
popular for merch design?” “When I start a family, will I have
time for freelance or EZ?” “I’m probably going to have to get a part
time job at target or something, fuckkkkkkk”
I’m pretty nervous. I say this year is a make or break it year for me,
if EZ doesnt take off (even more so I guess), I’ll step back a
little. If freelance doesn’t pick up, I’ll focus more on EZ, if both
fail, It’s time to ask my girlfriend to contribute more and Look for a
second job, ughhhh

What little bit of knowledge would you like to share with those
reading who are considering starting a brand of their own?

Do your homework, realllllyyy think about it. Try and brand yourself,
do something different. There’s a lot of companies out there who are
popping up now doing the same thing I’m doing, what Glamour Kills is
doing and it’s ultimately going to fail. I’d say do yourself a favor
and DON’T start it. If it does indeed take off, you have no idea what
you’re getting yourself into

Any plugs or last things you would like to add before we end this?

I just want to say that I am way proud of my guys over at theblackaxe.com
and want to thank them for being awesome cyber buddies and great
people to work with. I also want to give props to Pyknic for staying
on top of their game and really succeeding this year. I honestly
thought the whole “food” thing was a little iffie with success, but I
think they still have a really awesome thing going.

Be sure to check out the suprises in store coming very very soon! My
new uhhhh Winter/Spring (sprinter?) line comes out Friday February
13th! WOOOOO

These are my picks for the stand out brands of the year. These are all young companies that are taking the industry by storm.

*Update Electric Zombie has won the poll for the best young brand of ‘08. We saw a lot of good stuff this following year but I have to agree that EZ was one of the stand outs for sure. I hope the next year is just as good or better for all of you!
Keep doing what you do,
-Hillman (MadeByMAS)

AlrightOk
DeKay
Electric Zombie
Fuzzy Ink
Linty Fresh
Mediocore
Prestigious
Rethink
Slugabed
Snakes & Suits
Suffoca
The Horror Project
Word!
Zombie Liquorice
410BC