Some Helpful Tips for Designing Your Own Custom Shirts

If you are going to put on any event today, using custom shirts to promote it is almost a must. Even smaller events, such as bachelor parties and bridal showers now call for custom shirts, because they can be produced so much more affordably then they used to. The one factor that is responsible for so much of the change that has come to the business of custom shirt design, is the advent of digital printing technology. With digital printing there is no longer a need for set up time and labor and no more minimum order requirements.

Newer Technology

Custom shirts are created using a digital printer in much the same way as paper is printed on a digital printer. An image is first scanned  into the printers memory and then the image is transfered from there to the fabric being printed. This completely eliminates the set up time and labor that is required to print using silk screen methods.

Special Ink

Because the ink in a digital printer must be thin to function in the machinery, digital printing works best when it is dark colors being printed on a light colored fabric. Also, because it is a special type of dye that has to be used in a digital printer it can fade quicker then standard ink that is used in the silk screening process.

As Few as One Shirt

However; because it is so easy to have a custom shirt printed with a digital printer, many print shops will do as few as one shirt for you at a very reasonable price. At the same time however, because the actual process is somewhat slower then silk screening, larger orders of digitally printed custom shirts can be more expensive then silk screened shirts.

Light Colors on Dark Fabric

Another area where silk screening is a far better choice over digital printing, is when you are having dark colored custom shirts printed on with light colors. This is because, for proper coverage in these instances a very thick dye must be used. Silk screening is the only process that can use the thicker dyes and colors that are needed to cover dark cloth with light colorers.