In the past year I’ve learned quite a few things that I didn’t know about t-shirts, and t-shirt printing that I thought I would share with anyone who’s either already designing their own shirts, or just getting started.

If you’re printing your shirts using a direct to garment type of solution you need not worry about many of these tips such as reducing the colors, but for those of you using screen printing, like we are at Assault Shirts, I think you’ll find most of these tips and resources very helpful.

Reducing image colors in preparation for a screen printing in Photoshop

Throughout many of our t-shirt designs we’ve had to reduce the amount of colors in an image in order to make it fit into the color scheme of our design.

Reducing the amount of colors also makes it cheaper to print, and it gives you a better idea of what your design is going to look like once it’s been screen printed. We used this technique in our 1984 T-Shirt design as well as our One Year As A Lion T-Shirt.  The key to reducing an image’s amount of colors for screen printing is the Posterize image adjustment. To demonstrate, I’ll use this image of Johnny Depp as the iconic Chicago gangster, John Dillinger.

Image > Adjustments > Posterize…

Posterize reduces the amount of colors in your image to the number of levels you specify. Depending on what kind of a look you are going for you can reduce the amount of colors once, or sometimes twice to get the desired look for your image. I’m sure you can even reduce it further, but I generally use 3 or 4 levels.

To posterize your image, first make sure you are on the selected layer you want to posterize. Then, go to Image> Adjustments> Posterize…

After posterizing your image, you can either desaturate it or try varying the amount of levels within the Posterize settings to get the desired effect. Here’s a few other options I managed to come up with:

You can also bring your image into Illustrator, and start to trace the image so it doesn’t look so crispy which you’ll find  may have a better effect than what I’ve outlined above. I personally am all-Photoshop guy so I prefer to keep everything in Photoshop, but Live Trace in Illustrator is another popular method for vectorizing an image.

New Document Presets for Screen Printing T-Shirts

The two document presets for the two sizes of screens that we use are:

18x23 canvas with 300 dpi resolution in CMYK color mode

With the large image sizes it may make sense to start at a resolution of 150dpi if the computer you are working on is a bit older. You can also use a Fill Layer for a background rather than a raster background layer to reduce your document file size. I do this with all my designs so my working file isn’t a 2gb fail whale waiting to happen.

Getting Pantone color codes for exact color matches with your printer

In order to guarantee your designs colors are matching and actually printable you need to send your pantone colors for every color in your design to your printer. Rather than let them do the color work for you, you should send the colors pantone codes.

To do this,  use the eye-dropper tool by selecting it in the tool palette or by hitting the “i” key and then clicking on the color in the design.

After you have the color selected, in your tool palette double click the color, and your color picker will open with the color you just eye dropped. Generally, this color will still be an RGB or CMYK color and isn’t the pantone color code we want. To get the approximate pantone color code, click on the “color libraries” button.

This will open up your color libraries window and the eye dropped color should be selected. The P542 C is what you want to send to the printer along with every other color code associated with your design.

2 minute color separation in Photoshop

Our printers have always done the color separation for us after we send them the high resolution images, but in case you need to do color separation on your own here’s the easiest and quickest way to accomplish that:

• Select the Magic Wand Tool in the tool palette (or hit the “w” key”)
• Uncheck “Contiguous” in the tool options area

• Click a color on your design
  

• Create a new layer and fill it by hitting cntrl + backspace or alt + backspace (depending on what color you want to fill it with the foreground or background)
• Repeat this for each color in your design and you should have each color separated on it’s own layer! (Here’s my design with new colors all separated on their own layers below)

I also found several detailed step by step Youtube videos which outline the above process using similar techniques:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmspWZqbc2Q

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uydc2VmfvQ

T-Shirt placement templates and mock ups

To ensure your printer gets your shirt printed with the correct shirt placement you should place your design on an actual shirt. This should be included with your high resolution shirt files that you send to your printer.

In the past we’ve used a combination of the below sources for t-shirt templates and mockups:

• Photoshop T-Shirt Custom Shape -- Download Use this custom shape as a background and place your shirt design atop it and mask out the outside area.
• Go Media’s Arsenal T-Shirt Templates are a the best way to get a photo realistic idea of what your designs will look like. They’re worth every penny.
• Color Overload’s Men’s T-Shirt Templates Another PSD with an assortment of color t-shirt templates to use for creating mockups from Color Overload
• Assault Shirts Product Page Photoshop Mockups This is our T-Shirt mock-up that we use on our product pages at Assault Shirts. It’s my personal favorite and can be used for shirts of all colors in the American Apparel style.

Related Links & Resources

• T-Shirt Forums Graphics & Design Help
• Designer’s Guide to Apparel Printing from Go Media
• Emptees T-Shirt Resources -- Great assortment of downloads and resources

I recently took an hour out of my day to figure out how Ustream works and do a live broadcast with some SEO and Blog Tips for all the small t-shirt and apparel websites out there. It went live on Ustream, and is now found at Watch Tee-V. I packed as many tips and tricks into one hour as I could think of, and answered a few questions along the way.

Even if you’re not in the t-shirt design industry I still think you’ll find some good tips in there.

Don’t Forget

Assault will be at the Belmont Arts and Music festival this weekend in Roscoe Village in Chicago! Great deals on EVERY shirt in EVERY size that we have in stock plus a chance to get to meet Craig and I face to face!

Josh Smith, the designer behind one of my most favorite websites, Hydro 74 informed me that the first, “Back in Black T-Shirt Show” took place a few weeks ago, and some nice footage from the show has surfaced online at Vimeo. If you haven’t seen it yet check it out below, but definitely check out his design portfolio. It’s a constant source of inspiration for me and a lot of other designers out there. You can also find Josh on Twitter.

Back in Black T-Shirt Show from Solid Motive on Vimeo.

The Back In Black T-shirt show was hosted at Palehorse Gallery in St. Pete, FL on Nov 22nd, 2008. This show had an excellent turnout, and showcased the work of talented apparel artists, and illustrators from both sides of the Atlantic. The lineup included:
Dan Mumford
God Machine
HorseBites
Hydro 74
Iron Forge Press
Jeff Hamada
Jimiyo
Los Fokos
Munk One
Pale Horse
Pencil Bomb
Ray Frenden
Rob Schwager
Shanesart
Tech Vector
Tristan Eaton
Julie West
YWFT (Mike Cina)
Zenvironments

If they ever come any closer to Chicago, I’ll definitely try to catch the show. The shirts look amazing!

Rise Against is a constant source of inspiration for many of our t-shirt designs and ideals. Their videos are equally as powerful and moving as most of their music and the new, “Audience of One” video is no exception. They posted it on MySpace Video today–check it out:

Rise Against – Audience of One

Boomtown Rats - I Don't like Mondays

If you’re anything like me, you don’t like Mondays….or any weekday for that matter.  In honor of this super crappy day, I want to share the following video with you (along with some play by play highlights by yours truly).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yteMugRAc0

This guy REALLY doesn’t like Mondays.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel his pain; however, starting each week off by watching this video helps me feel a little better about myself – and the upcoming week.  Really, anyone who not only spends their time and talent (I use this word loosely) to not only write this song, but also to make a fully produced music video about their hatred of Mondays has some serious issues.  Anywho, its a totally sweet video, and here are some of my favorite parts:

00:06 This intro reminds me of a early ’70′s TV show, a la HR PuffnStuff  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-yLYz6ejqw / Pink Floyd music video  (sweet facial expression shot @ 03:44

01:17 This girl obviously loves Mondays and is disgusted by this song…..

01:43 HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!

01:50 Those dudes scared the hell out of him. WAIT!!!  They did it again. AND AGAIN!!!!!  Will he ever learn?

02:11 Whats happening off screen that we aren’t seeing???

I’m gonna stop my commentary here.  Leave a comment with your favorite part and ENJOY!!!!!!!

I came across this very well done spoof video of the Dove Evolution video that became so viral some time ago. It’s a humorous jab at the Dove video and carries a very interesting message that, “no one wants to look at ugly people”.

I don’t know about you, but they basically seem to have compressed my run-of-the-mill Saturday night into a 30 second video, and the end result is not pretty, and was it me or did the slob’s head get bigger? Or was it just that his hair got somewhat shorter?

These guys have definitely won me over, be sure to subscribe to their newsletter on their main page for more updates, I did.

Check out the Slob Evolution Video in High Resolution Here

Just got a chance to see the Lakai Fully Flared skate video intro on youtube. It’s about 5 minutes long clip with a badass soundtrack coupled with some awesome pyrotechnic explosions courtesy of Spike Jonze. The video was directed by Ty Evans and features M83 -- “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun”. It’s a great song that I’m putting on my iTunes as we speak. Check out the vid below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHX8jezNBTk

After a few long weeks months of starting of a business (and all the complications that go with it), I have finally made myself available to come here and post. I’m not good with technology. I’m not good with marketing. I don’t know what it means when Timmy yells at me for trying to transfer him a 4.7MB .bmp file. And I certainly am not good with blogs. BUT, I am good at running a business and its operations. Timmy sucks at that stuff. But he’s good at what I’m bad at. Unfortunately, Timmy is good at 4 things whilst I’m only good at 2. I’m mainly making this post to appease him, so if you were stupid enough to read this far, I recommend that you stop reading now.

With Assault, my main job is going to be the handling of orders. I don’t know how I got lucky enough to get this task, but I did. In doing this, my goal is to implement a system that will allow me to leverage my skill sets thus, making me more efficient. Assault is an enterprise that cares. With direct lines of communication to the owners, we have enabled our customers to communicate directly with us….and this has NOTHING to do with the fact that Timmy and I are the only employees. This simple fact is a result of us streamlining our organization to a horizontal structure. We want to get things done. We want to think outside the box. We want to be dynamic. We want to synergize. We are the next generation company. We are building a client-centric brand….oh ya, we also wanna sell some shirts and stick it to the man. Now watch this cool video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5zRe8wa4pM