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Take Control of Your Artwork Ready for Screen

I think everyone grew up being told sayings like ‘if you prepare to fail, you will fail to prepare.’ or ‘measure twice, cut once!’ Well these lessons are just as relevant when preparing your artwork for screen printing. Although our fantastic design team is on hand to guide you, we want to help you to succeed.

Part of the service we provide requires print ready artwork and often this saying is misinterpreted or not understood. We want to put this to bed once and for all by creating the ultimate checklist for you to use before submitting your artwork.

This checklist is for the program Illustrator (AI), as we mostly use vectorised artwork. Although this is the preferred program to create print ready artwork within the industry, we do accept other files from programs like Photoshop (PS). This is due to PS working best with photographic imagery where as the majority of printing is text or spot colours that is best created in AI.

Generally speaking as long as it’s a high quality image saved at print size it should be fine. However if you can spend the extra cash to have your design vectorised you wont regret it, you also get to keep the high quality version on file. We can help you out with this; just ask one of our staff how to get started.

1. Send trough your print ready (AI) files over email by saving them as a PDF or EPS file. This will allow you to send them over email far quicker as it doesn’t take up as much space:

2. Then when we open your artwork this is what we can expect to see (below). This client has 3 designs, check to see that all the designs are on separate layers:

3. It’s handy if you do NOT group everything together as shown in the first image (1)

Please group the artwork (2) and the garment (3) separately as shown below:

(1)

(2)

(3)

4. Have you selected a pantone colour?

For colour accuracy this is very important, as there can be confusion when checking colours in real life to a computer screen?

5. It’s not massively important but its good to get into the habit of saving artwork files at print size. Please find this by selecting the design and then heading to the top bar to set the size:

6. ALL text in your artwork you MUST be converted to outlines, please find this in TYPE – CREATE OUTLINES. This is very important as if your text is in a specific font we will not see it if its not outlined: