October 2008

Screen-Printing Basics

 

We’ve got it all covered: the process; available inks; what fabrics can be screen printed on; and top tips for working with contract screen printers

By Thomas Trimingham

Screen printing is a simple, economical solution for mass-producing decorated apparel. Once you understand the basics, organizing and ordering screen-printed logos and designs is a simple process. The key to understanding the fundamentals of screen printing is to become familiar with its vocabulary and how the terms are used to describe the process, so you can effectively talk to your clients.

Every decorating process has built-in limitations that need to be addressed so the distributor or screen printer doesn’t make promises to the client that can’t be fulfilled. The biggest hurdle in screen-printed orders is the volume vs. color issue. Setting up the printing press with screens and inks has an initial setup cost that must be built into the pricing. Unless a customer is ordering a certain number of garments for each color in a design, the cost can balloon with press fees on a small garment order.

It’s crucially important to address this issue early on in qualifying an order for screen printing, so that time isn’t wasted on orders that aren’t going to be enough quantity per color to make a realistic printing job. On the other side of the issue, you should know the price points even on the lower quantities, because some customers will be willing to absorb this cost if they just don’t want the feel of a transfer or if they need to match a previous print job.

Understanding the terms, learning the limitations and then highlighting the benefits will help you promote screen printing to your client’s greatest advantage. Working with a quality screen printer should be a pleasure, not a headache. Knowing the difference between a serious and fly-by-night printing operation takes time and experience, so you can learn from and build a relationship with a printer that values quality and appreciates the details. There are certain basic components that you should look for when deciding which printer is best for your clients.

Choose a printer
For a distributor, selecting the right screen printer (or printers) to work with can be a challenge, as you have to vet printers you may not have worked with before. Here are some factors to consider when evaluating screen printers:

1. Reliability: Getting the products back when you expect them is a non-negotiable concern and it’s one that you should always check on through references before you commit to that printer.
     
2. Estimating: An experienced printer should be able to accurately estimate the cost of goods and services. Whether or not he charges for shipping, screens, setup fees, ink mixing and separations can make a big difference in final costs. Whenever possible, get a firm estimate before committing to a printing job.
     
3. Art services: A good screen printer should have access to either an in-house artist who can properly separate colors or prepare the work for quality screen printing, or outsource the work to a reliable service that understands screen-printing artwork.
     
4. Customer service: A good question to ask a printer’s references is, “How does this printer handle a mistake or problems with orders?” Trouble with printing jobs can come from a variety or sources, but the real issue is how the printer acts when he makes an error.
      
5. Longevity: This is a serious consideration these days. It’s tough when you find a screen printer who beats all of the competition’s pricing, but then suddenly goes out of business. Many times this is no accident. Screen printers who are too arbitrary in their pricing and don’t seem to have a good handle on cash flow can create havoc when everything falls apart. A smart move is to check credit history and any complaints with the Better Business Bureau.

Screen-printing terms
When you’ve selected a printer and it’s time to start brokering work to him, it helps tremendously to be able to speak the “printer language,” so you can communicate effectively between the printer and your clients. Here are some basic printing terms used:

1. Underbase: An underbase is commonly defined as the print that goes underneath another color to brighten it up. White ink is the most common underbase.
     
2. Trapping: The trapping in a design relates to the overlapping of colors that is necessary to offset any variations in printing registration. A black outline will commonly be slightly trapped over a lighter color to insure the garment doesn’t show through during printing variation.
     
3. Registration: This relates to the alignment of the colors in the image and to how well they stay in their proper positions to accurately reproduce the image.
     
4. Separations: Multi-color screen prints require that the artwork be properly separated so that each color has its own screen that will recombine in the final print to recreate the original image onto the garment. Detailed illustrations and complicated artwork can be expensive and time-consuming to separate, but good-quality separations will save considerable costs in press time and can sometimes eliminate unnecessary colors.
   

Once you understand the basic terminology, then you have to understand screen printing’s limitations, so you can guide your customer toward a solution that will cause the least number of problems and create the best final product. “When a distributor comes to us to purchase screen printing, we have to make sure he understands the process so he knows exactly what the costs are and then has the knowledge to go back to his customers with,” says Maurice Chalonec, president and CEO of RCSilk. “One of the biggest challenges we have with clients is explaining how screen printing is different from other printing processes, how every color is a screen instead of all the colors being printed at once, and how this affects the pricing and the way artwork is set up.”

Artwork limitations
Another limitation with screen printing is in artwork reproduction. “It’s a challenge to describe to clients how their artwork is going to vary on different-colored garments, and how the underbase works in the artwork or what might have to be changed to make the art work on a colored shirt,” Chalonec says. “We have an extensive system set up for approvals, so that every step of the process is covered and clients know their rights and responsibilities.”

Images that work great as digital or offset prints will show loss in edge quality if the artwork is just converted to screen printing without a care for how the process works. Certain logos may have effects or rendering that will suffer from conversion to the low dpi that screen printing can hold.

A better way is to have an experienced screen-printing artist address the file and use the right combination of colors and printing techniques to rebuild the image with the process in mind.

Preparing artwork for screen printing can be an art, so it takes experience to know what the best method is for recreating an image on a shirt. Separating a complicated logo may seem, on an initial review of the image, to need a lot of colors. A careful revision of the file with combining colors ends up recreating the image in a screen print that only requires three colors to duplicate.

Tom Henely, owner of Horizontals Saloon in Wonder Lake, IL, regularly orders apparel from a wide variety of sources. “Having the artwork prepared right for screen printing makes all the difference,” he says. “You can take the same basic design and print it on three different colored shirts, and if the art isn’t designed well, it’ll look bad on two of them. I pay a little more for artwork to be created just for screen printing, but it works out a lot better when everything runs smoothly.”

A final limitation of screen printing on garments is that the heat required to cure the inks can cause problems with some heat-sensitive apparel. Certain items that are manufactured with nylon or spandex can be very heat sensitive, and may melt, shrink or change composition (become hard and crunchy) in the dryer. It’s always a smart choice to contact the apparel supplier when screen printing on a new product style that may be heat sensitive. Even if the process looks like it’ll be okay, it’s still prudent to print and wash a test item before committing to a full production run.

Avoid These Bloopers Here are five mistakes distributors make in ordering screen-printing work – and how you can to avoid them: 1. Not ordering enough shirts for every color in the design: Consider ordering at least a dozen shirts per color in the design, or pricing gets out of sight. 2. Changing shirt color at the last minute: Shirt color is a major consideration for screen printing, and often separations of the designs are specific for a select color of shirt. Always select shirt colors with the understanding that they’re integrated into the process. 3. Reordering a small quantity and expecting the same pricing as a large initial order: The setup is a fixed cost that has to be broken down across the span of an order. Ordering fewer products allows for less amortization of the setup cost, and increases each shirt’s price. 4. Insisting on providing the artwork ready to print to avoid art fees: On simple designs this can work out, but it’s very rare that an artist who doesn’t work on screen-printed graphics will understand how to properly prepare or separate artwork for screen printing. Using an experienced screen-printing artist will save money and create a better product if the artwork is complicated. 5. Placing the order on Friday for a Monday delivery with no clear approval method: Rush orders are more common than ever, but with every rush order is a higher chance of problems. Make sure there’s a clear and well-defined approval process to help avoid costly, last-minute mistakes.

Cool Specialty Inks Let’s review five screen-printing specialty inks and how they’re commonly used: 1. Glitter: Several methods of glitter are very popular. There’s coverage glitter, which looks like a heavy ’70s transfer. Another version is sprinkled or dusted glitter, which is dusted onto a wet print right before it goes through the dryer. Dusted glitter is also called “sugar glitter” when it is made from clear poly flakes. 2. Puff/high density: These prints create a volume of ink that’s raised off of the shirt surface. This effect is popular as an accent print and as an underbase to deboss parts of a design. 3. Gel: This effect of a large, glossy, clear deposit is a popular accent on boys’ apparel, such as over printed type on water droplets. Some apparel buyers call them “goop” prints. 4. Foil: This special effect uses an adhesive print that is then heat-stamped with a metallic foil sheet that adheres to the adhesive print and creates a shiny, chrome surface on the print. This style is popular in tourist locations, but is surging into some retail lines as well. 5. Waterbase/discharge: One of the hottest special effects is using a waterbase ink that soaks into the shirt and bleaches out the dye in the shirt to create a super-soft print with virtually no feel to it at all. Another advantage to this style is it prints well across seams and off the edges of a shirt in oversize printing.

Thomas Trimingham has more than 16 years of experience in screen printing as an award-winning artist, separator and industry consultant. Contact: www.art4screen.com.