CMYK separations (top) vs. Spot separations

I'm actually contemplating CafePress now. I looked and see that they have a bulk discount option from your own store. So I could setup the store for the team and then the swimmers and/or students/families could order the shirts through that store.

I've contacted them about the use of gradients and how they would appear when printed. They use several printing methods so I need to know which one would be needed when putting a gradient on the shirt.

Their preferred file format is a 10"x10" PNG file for front/back printing.

Here's the early renditions of the logos. More work will be done on them as needed. I really need to figure out how to clean-up the goggles so they look better. They look really cool printed off on the color laser and covering a full legal-sized paper.

sure is, that you will need a method, that can bring white color onto a f.e. black background. I think thats the clue, this and the gradients (I hate them generally, these suckers just make problems...). White color does mean in printing "no color -> color of the shirt" (exc. when you print in solid colors, but I never heard of a pantone textile printer). You have also to plan, that the transfer to textils might bring a loss of details, rounder corners, in opposite to printing on paper. If I were you, I would kick out the gradients (I learned that they were a relict of the 90ies), use the logo with the swimmer instead of the goggles (they need too many colors), and flock it with thermo-transfer with plotted path-files. You will have a red, black and blue layer of flock-folio. Thats how I would solve this situation. But there might be smarter ways...let us know, please.

CMYK in EPS format to the right printer and you'll love the results!!!!

1. after readin all the other threads prolly the best thing is to set it all up by spot colors as vokaris said. this is really easy to do in illustrator AND is a lot easier for the printer to seperate the colors... cause... theyre already seperated
2. you can do gradients but is a lil tricky... let the printer figure that one out hehehhe.
3. what they said... illustrator or eps
4. dittos
5. i know one guy who use to work here. his shirts are pre stretched and all. he did a couple shirts for me for work that came out nice.

if ya go with cafepress.com... non of that stuff above matters... RGB and PNG it at 200 dpi with canvas set to 10x10. gradients wont matter. only gets silly when yer printing on colored t shirts.

ding ding ding ding

also.. if ya go with cafepress make black RGB black

Wow. Thanks for all the feedback and advice! You guy and gals ROCK!

We had the banquet last night and the team (and coaches) really liked the logos. I was officially put in charge of the shirts for next year.

And one other cool thing... MY SON WAS NAMED CAPTAIN OF THE TEAM FOR NEXT YEAR! WOOT!

While were on this topic...

Does it matter if you made the image in PS as an RGB and it needs to be converted to CMYK vector? Is this possible?

One more question, the image I have has a res of 600, what is the difference between 70 and 600 and others?

Edit: I mean, I know what it means but which is better for T-shirt print?

For vector graphics it's better to make the design in a vector program (obviously) - Illustrator, CorelDraw, etc. If the artworks is raster (JPG, TIFF< PNG) and you need to convert it to vectors, you either redraw the thing in the vector program or use some automated alternatives:
- Photoshop - make selections, convert to paths, export paths to Illustrator
- Illustrator LiveTrace (CS2/CS3)
- CorelTrace
- http://vectormagic.com/ (not free anymore)

There is no such thing as CMYK vector format. You can make vector shapes in Illustrator and set the document preferences to CMYK format. This will give you the CMYK values of the colors and make separations if you'll be printing on an offset printer (or using other CMYK-based printing processes). As discussed above, it you're going for screen printing, depending on the design, you may end up using any number of colors, not necessarily Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (i.e. pink and orange)

Resolution: Rule of thumb on the file resolution is twice the lpi (the halftone screen) resolution of the output device.

Typical Halftone Resolutions
Screen Printing 45-65 lpi
Laser Printer (300dpi) 65 lpi
Laser Printer (600dpi) 85-105 lpi
Offset Press (newsprint paper) 85 lpi
Offset Press (coated paper) 85-185 lpi

i.e. if you're going for screen printing, working at more than 150dpi is an overkill. It doesn't hurt to work at 600 dpi, but it makes no difference. NOTE: this applies to images that will be separated into halftone screens (printing a photo with CMYK colors). If you are going to separate spot colors (i.e. pink and orange) with sharp outlines, work in vector or at high dpi's

It's nice to learn things like this. Will come in handy many ways I'm sure.

I learned more from the people on this site than I have in class, haha

Seems like about a year back I had to use Cafepress to make Tshirts for a class .. required to make something to upload to cafepress. Anyways I had remember myfile size was something like a 6000 x 6000px format but was a jpg not a png. Seems like the dpi was set at about 300. I did not to my recollection use a png but I could be wrong.

the help file on image loading at Cafepress says Cafepress supports several picture file formats. png, jpg tiff, psd, bmp and eps - and According to this it says whatever file format you want please save all image files in RGB color mode.
also on the FAQ's it says that the max file size is 7mb for a jpg and for a png= 4mb
they also have an image workshop to help you get all the sizes and resolutions down.. and go with 300 dpi.

Here
http://help.cafepress.com/hc/s-74058960/cmd/kbresource/kb-5435373
for some reason this comes up an error but I went to the faq's here
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/images/aspx

or go to the home page and hit the customer service link and or faq's in the search... I found it easy but these links aren't working for some reason.