Hey guys, it’s Mike at Printworks Screen Printing. We’re a screen printing and custom graphic design shop in Saint John, New Brunswick, we design and print awesome t-shirts.
I’m going to talk to you today about screen printing, and getting your designs done and getting some apparel purchased and put together correctly for your business.
Comparing printing styles:
1. Directo to Garment (DTG)
2. Vinyl Heat Transfer
3. Screen Printing
The first thing I want to talk about is “How do I print t-shirts”? What are the different printing styles?
There’s 3 main printing styles – the first one is called “DTG” or “Direct to Garment” and it’s basically a large ink-jet printer. You just stick one t-shirt in at a time, it’s easy, it’s fast – but the downsides of DTG is that’s it’s a little bit expensive, you’re using a lot of ink per shirt. It’s really good for online fulfillment where you only need one shirt. You can print them off your DTG printer, pack them up and ship them out and you’re done.
The next method that we want to talk about is vinyl heat transfers. Your logo or any other 2D shape is cut out of vinyl material with a plotter/cutter which actually uses a blade and cuts the image right out. So it has to be somewhat simple graphics, or text – for example, it can’t be a photograph or anything like that. So again there’s ups and downs – vinyl is good for short runs as well where you can just do 1 or 1000 depending on how much time you have. Once you cut your graphic you have to pick out the excess vinyl and then cut out your image. So there is a little bit of extra labour.
The oldest tried-and-true method of decorating your shirts or apparel or bags is called screen printing, which everybody has probably heard but maybe you really don’t know what might be involved in screen printing. We take your design, we go through a few steps in the darkroom and we create screens for our automatic screen printing press (which you see in the background here). The advantages of screen printing are that we can do high volumes with real consistent work, high detail at a low price per shirt. If you had to do, say, 1000 t-shirts screen printing’s your way to go. You’re going to have perfect results every time.
Not everybody’s looking to do 1000 shirts, so there’s lots of different levels to choose from and lots of different methods to do your printing. So if you want to give us a shout over here at Printworks, we can talk more about these methods or we can find something that works for you and your needs and maybe what you might be printing.
Until next time – have a good one!