Franklin Dattein

Introduction

I have started thinking about producing some Kiteboarding T-Shirts and perhaps start a small Kite Wear Company about six months ago. As a software developer, I am comfortable with computers and I thought I could do the designs myself, after watching some Illustrators Tutorials on the internet. I quickly realized that I was completely wrong. I have no skills neither talent to create artistic designs. Thus, I went to the Auto Tracing Tools, such as Corel Trace and some others.
Their result were even worse than my manually generated designs.
I had no choice, if I wanted to produce high quality t-shirts, I would have to hire a professional designer.

I did some budged estimates and I almost gave up due to the high cost to produce a vector design. It was about U$100,00.  To be honest it is not  that expensive for an established company. However, I don’t have a company, I was not even thinking about opening one. I was willing to produce small quantities of 5 or 10 different designs. In this case, the U$100,00 for images would be too expensive.
In order to produce T-shirts with good quality and an affordable price, we have to find and talented and affordable  designer and a base image to start.

Requirements

This paragraph is to explain what are the requirements involved in the life-cycle of the t-shirt production, such as tools, prototyping, vectorization, printing, colors, fabric types and cuts.

- Basic understanding of vectorization tools like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw
- A good designer capable of producing vector images
- A way to prototype before producing large quantities
- A good silk screen company
- A good fabric provider

Tools

You can’t use regular images like JPGs to print using silk-screen, this image needs to be converted to the vector format.
The Silk Screen process consists in the separation of every color in an image and printing them one after the other. so, it requires you to provide a way to print every color in separete
There are some tools that can convert an image to vector automatically, such as Coral Trace, but unfortunately the result is almost always with low quality.

I prefer to use Adobe Illustrator because it is user friendly, but keep in mind that most of the silk-screen companies only have Corel.

Finding a good designer

I have no doubt that hiring a consultant designer is the best way to get exactly what you want and with high quality. However, professional designers are usually expensive and not suitable for small projects. I have found consultants charging an average of U$100,00 per job. By job I mean, a complete T-shirt design without review limitations.
So, I started browsing the web for cheap alternatives, as always. In this journey I have passed through several designers, charging from U$5,00 to U$40,00. Most of them are natural from India, China and Russia, Pakistan, etc.

- PGConversion.com:
These guys are amazing. They charge U$26,00 to convert and JPG to vector and U$40,00 to convert and JPG and add their creativity to a complete T-shirt design. They also offer unlimited reviews in this price.
My first try with them was to convert and picture to a vector and that was the result after 2 or 3 reviews:

Before

After

In a second try I gave them a more complex image to be converted and asked (and payed more) them to use their creativity. It took about 20 reviews, has cost U$40,00 but the resulting vector was pretty good.
Although the result is very good, it is a JPG to Vector conversion as usual, without many creativity. I had to provide all the elements in the picture:

Base image

First version. (Nice, but too many colors for a T-Shirt)

Final version after about 20 reviews.

- RentACoder.com:
ReantACoder is a auction web-site for developers. You can offer you skills and hire skilled developer and designers. They provide a very good interface to add your requirements and instructions on how to get them done well and without frustration.
The main advantage of RaC is the price. You can get vectors as low as U$5,00. Off course you get what you pay for.
I have asked for samples in all my auctions. If you don’t ask for a sample you might get an “auto-traced vector”.
It is worth the try, specially if you image is simple.
The conversion below has a cartoons style and its cost was only U$10,00.

Before

After

Prototyping

The Silk Screen companies usually require you to print a minimum quantity of 20 units. Imagine if there is a small mistake in the entire production. You would end up with 20 brand new pijamas.
Fortunately there are two good ways to prototype. Imaging prototyping and with a Inkjet printer.

The imaging prototyping is simple as putting your art over a clena T-shirt picture in your preferred image editor. You can use this clean pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankllin/tags/tshirtbackground/ (These are not the best T-shirt color in the world. I would appreciate you someone could provide me other colors)

After that you can print a sample in a  T-shirt Printer and avoid the most common mistakes. There is a “T-Shirt Kiosk” in a shopping mall closer to my home, which has a Brother GT-541 printer and charges U$12,00 per t-shirt. The result is usually poor, lacks for the white color and the cost is slightly higher than Silk Screen, but the advantage is that you can print a single unit before sending your artwork for production.

These are the mistakes that I look when prototyping:

• Position and alignment of the image.
• If the combination of colors fits well in the fabric.
• If my art has more details than a printing can handle.

Finally,  a good Silk Screen Company has to provide a sample. If they don’t provide you samples, find another company. Believe me, without a sample you build a collection of pijamas.

Printing with Silk Screen

A t-shirt is generally printed with silk-screen, which requires every color to be printed separetelly. that is why we need to use vectors and not flat images, so the colors can be separated and printed one by one.

ps. I write this blog in English willing to practice my Eglish writting skills. I will appreciate if you post a comment either with fixes or pieces of advice.