So you have your artwork or logo and you are ready to get it printed onto shirts. But, is your logo in the proper format for screen printing?

At Poco Shirt Printing, we usually ask for a copy of your artwork before giving you the price quote because we need to see your logo for us to pricing accurately. We want to see the number of colors on the artwork and also the way the colors mingle with each other. For production, we would require you to submit us the native file or a high-resolution file in order for us to prepare it for the stencil.

Most screen printers, if not all, would prefer a vector format file for your artwork. And this kind of artwork is the product of Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, just to name the top two popular design software in the industry.

And then if vector is not available, a “Photoshop file” is prefer. Like jpg, tif, psd, etc, this file can be the photo straight from you camera or a scanned image. It can also be an image straight from the Internet.

In screen printing shirts, there are few ways of printing artwork onto a shirt. We have screen printing (or silkscreen printing), direct-to-garment (DTG), and heat press (iron-on). A vector file artwork will be a lot easier to prepare for a stencil for screen printing than a Photoshop file. In DTG, it can be either vector or Photoshop file and either one works the same. And for heat-press, there are three flavors. They are vinyl heat transfer, transfer paper heat-press, and sublimation process. For the vinyl heat transfer, a vector file format is most preferred. In the other two printing processes, either vector or Photoshop file format works.