Anyone got any experience with having t-shirts made up? I have a logo that I made in Illustrator that we will have printed onto shirts for the swim team.

So I have questions now (haven't found a shirt printer yet so I can't ask them).

1. RGB or CMYK. Which would the screen printer need? Or does it even matter? I've read that printing will need CMYK but what about screen printing?
2. Gradients. The logo has several gradients in it. Can screen printing handle gradients? Each one is a two-color gradient mostly with with one of the colors being white.
3. Image size and resolution. What should it be? 72PDI, 300DPI, 600DPI? What about the pixel measurements?
4. Image file format. Anyone know what a screen printer would need?
5. Anyone know of a screen printer for tee's that they've used in the past and would highly recommend? We're looking at an order of probably 100-250 shirts total.

CMYK

yep, CMYK......that's pretty much the way all printers go...........then if you want anything else printed from that design, you're already setup

put it on cafepress, buy as many as you want then forget about it, for cafepress it's 10 inch X 10 inch, .png, 200 or 300 dpi

There's actually a company I worked with that made T-shirts up for the haunted house I work for that requested the layered PSD file in RGB formats.

I dont see why... but that's what they asked for.

Just a heads up.

What logo did you end up coming up with? I was going to give it a wing, but saw the cool one you found, and didn't do anything after that.

The T-shirts we had made up for our business were text only, so I just had to send the font to the screen printer and he did the rest for us. It was easy peasy.

CMYK

I think most t shirt printers dont like gradients very much.

I think EPS or another vector format is the best.

Find a printer and talk to him. It doesn't have to be CMYK. Depending on your graphic it may be a different number of colors/duotones/indexed colors etc. It's not unheard of to have 9-10 separate colors.

Professionals will probably use a dedicated silk-screen separations software like FastFilms ($900) or QuickSeps ($400)

buy a ten color screen printer, job done,

I've got a couple that we've made. One is a re-working of the logo I found (changed the hands shape, water shape, etc. and added the "WR"). The other is the goggles & "WR" logo. My son felt that the goggles looked better in greyscale so that's what I went with.

The end-of-season banquet is tonight and we'll go over the logos then. For now I'm trying to get my ducks in a row for when we go to actually order the shirts.

1. CMYK, printing is always CMYK
2. I avoid gradients wherever I can.
3. and 4. You did the logo in illustrator, so you should have a path-file, that you can save as an Illustrator-PDF 1:1 size, thats easy for the plotter to understand.
5. now I see, that you didnt meant to flock a tee... anyway, in case of plotting sujets onto tees, see 1 to 4 I am tired...

I tend to agree with what VOK's is saying - even though there are "SPECIFIC WAYS TO DO IT PROFESSIONALLY" I have found that each different printer I deal with has certain little quirks and preferences.

Any decent printer will be happy to give you a list, or talk to you, regarding their preferences.

Yes, 98% of the time it will be CMYK. But they will definately have their desires as to which format (PDF, EPS, PSD, low-rez JPEG) that they prefer to work from.

So PICK UP DAT PHONE, AMIGO!!!

I humbly beg to differ. Printing is definitely not ALWAYS CMYK. Would you really use CMYK separations (with raster dots all over) to print this on a T-shirt, or would you rather separate the 3 colors and print them solid?

paths with solid colors, the producing-file in cmyk...wrong?