Silkscreen t-shirt printing is one of the printing options that you want to consider if you are looking for something cost-efficient and durable for your custom t shirts! Whether it is a corporate polo tee printing or for your personal use, the technique behind silkscreen printing enables simple designs to be printed quickly.
Silkscreen printing is a process of printing various designs using a silkscreen mesh which acts like a stencil. The process includes design preparation, screen preparation, and the actual printing of the design onto the apparel. Here are some cost saving tips to help you place your customised tee shirt printing order easily and successfully.
1. Print In Bulk for Cost-Efficiency
The silk screen printing method of printing enjoys economy of scale when printing in large quantities, which means as you print a large quantity of t shirts, the lower the price of printing for each t shirt. There is only a one time set up fee for the screen and the same screen can be used for a large quantity of t shirts.
2. Factor In Production Time
For every customised tee shirt printing journey, it is pivotal to give enough time for print production so that the tees can be received in time for the important event or special occasion. Enquire about the lead time and buffer in some additional days to allow for successful tee distribution to the recipients.
Comparing the silkscreen printing process to a heat transfer printing process, silk screening a t shirt takes about 5 minutes while heat transfer printing can take about 25 minutes per tee. Silk screen printing the t shirt is fast, however time is needed to cure the ink to ensure durability of the print. Whilst silk screen printing is not an instant process, it is indeed one of the faster ways to print a bulk quantity of t shirts.
3. Vectorise Your Artwork Or Design
To enable the prints on your t shirts to look sharp and neat, we recommend that the artwork is saved as vector file format. Clean and neat linework allows the artwork to be prepared for silk screen printing without compromising on quality. A vectorized file format should be either Adobe Illustrator, PDF, EPS or SVG. The files should contain editable paths or shapes, that can be scaled without suffering from pixelation. If you only have the artwork file as a high resolution JPG or PNG file, our in-house designers can provide a service to convert them to a vector format.
4. Reduce The Number of Colours In Your Design
Colourful designs are indeed nice to have but the number of colours in a design will increase the cost of producing the t shirts. For silk screen printing, the more colours utilized, the more expensive it will be. This is because a separate screen needs to be created for each colour used, and this will undoubtedly increase your cost.
5. Reduce The Number Of Print Positions
Every position of a t shirt that has to be printed requires an additional printing block. For example, an orange color print for the front and an orange color print at the back is considered a 2 print locations print job. Hence minimizing the locations of printing will help you to reduce the price of your customised tee shirt printing order.
Are You Ready To Create Your Own Design?
Here at Ark Industries, as one of the leading silk screen printing service providers in Singapore, we are trusted by major brands such as adidas, Under Armour and Yupoong Flexfit to do embellishments on their products be it caps, bags, polo or jackets.
If you have any questions about your artwork or t shirts order, we have our team of designers and printing specialists who will be able to advise you! Drop us an email at info@ark.sg or just give us a call at +65 6352 0988.
