I want to buy one – just one – custom-printed shirt online at a reasonable price (say, under $20). I would use an iron-on print, but I’ve tried those three times and burned them each time… :smack:
So, I’m looking for a recommendation for a quality printing company. I just want text on it, preferably in two colors, but I’d be just as satisfied with solely black. I’ve got the design up in Photoshop, so format isn’t really a problem. Has anyone had an exceptionally good experience with an online company?
I don’t know if they do online orders but I love my hometown t-shirt print shop. They’ll do anything, they have a great sense of humor, and they are just great, great guys. They have a website and an e-mail address, so I can’t imagine they would refuse to do an order over the web. (If they did, for some reason, you could mail the design to me and I’ll walk in and go do it.)
It might not be under $20 - I think the last unique print I did there was something like $22.
Oh, if this counts as advertising, mods, feel free to delete the link and people can e-mail me for it. They don’t pay me or anything, I just really enjoy them.
I can NOT over-recommend CafePress. I’ve had stores with them for going on 2 years, and I’ve never had a customer complaint (with thousands in sales).
The quality is entirely dependent on the quality of the image you provide-- 300 dpi printing would be ideal, and on a t-shirt with an 8x10 space for an image, that would mean your source image should be 2400x3000 pixels, though they let you change the quality, size, etc. It was with CafePress that I first learned to never underestimate the power of vector graphics.
Sorry for the hijack, but I’m interested in doing some t-shirts with my band’s logo, and I want to create a high quality image. I created the logo in PowerPoint, but when I save it to jpeg, the quality isn’t so hot. Is there some way I can kick up the quality a notch, or a very cheap graphics software with which I can re-create the logo? Thanks!
Another recommendation for CafePress. I’ve done some shirts though them and not had a problem; they’ve held up quite well.
Cheap (free, actually) graphics software: The Gimp.
Assuming that Powerpoint can create graphics that start off with sufficient quality (and I’ve never used PowerPoint much, so I don’t know how well it serves that purpose), one key to getting sufficiently-high quality in exported images is to use a high-enough resolution.
Figure out how large the final image will be, in inches or centimetres, when it is printed. Also find out the recommended resolution (in dots per inch or dots per centimetre) for your printed image. The T-shirt shop or print shop should be able to tell you this.
Once you know these two items, you can multiply the image dimensions (in inches or centimetres) by the recommended number of dots per inch or centimetre to get how many dots long each dimension of the image will be. Then you tell your image software to export uoir image to a TIFF or BMP of that size.
Example: your desired printed image size is 8 x 10 inches on your shirt. Your T-shirt shop recommends a print resolution of 150 dots per inch. Multiplying these out, you get an image resolution of (8 x 150) dots by (10 x 150) dots, or 1200 x 1500 dots. You then export an image from your software of 1200 x 1500 pixels.
Image file formats… do NOT use JPEG if you have a lot of areas of flat colour with abrupt colour changes at their edges. JPEGS were designed for compressing photographs, which have many relatively-gradual colour changes, and the compression used in them does not play well with sharp edges such as you might find in logos. Far better to use TIFFs or PNGs or even BMPs, though BMPs will be very large.
CafePress’ image help page, which gives an example of Why JPEGs are Bad when dealing with sharp edges.
http://neighborhoodies.com/ has quickly built a great rep. They offer a ton of styles of shirt (from tees to ringer tees to hoodies to baseball shirts to…), a ton of fonts, and even different variations on how the stuff is printed to the shirt.
I use CafePress too. When they were really getting started (I’m talking like 2001 here) their quality wasn’t so hot, but things have improved a ton then. The t-shirt printing now is pretty damn good; my bf regularly wears a couple of things from my shop and the designs are still in good shape. The storeowners put a lot of pressure on them to keep quality up to standards.
For the record, I’ve also ordered several of the other products they carry and their other stuff is quite nice too (I got my mom one of my tile boxes as a Christmas gift with her favourite painting of mine on it, and she loved it). Really, how the printing comes out is like someone else said – it depends on how good your original image is. I always go a bit higher than their maximum dpi to make sure I’m covered, and you want to make sure your design looks OK in CYMK colour as well as RGB. You have to upload RGB but it gets converted when they print it. Depending on how you created your image, that can make a difference.
I have used Zazzle.com for several different custom shirts and posters, and woudl recommend them. They are pretty fast and have pretty good quailty and selection, and a great online designer tool that makes it easy.
This may be obvious, but did you check the phonebook? I think most towns have a local place where they print shirts, do embroidery, and the like. See if you can find out where the high school has their shirts made…
His website isn’t great, but the service is excellent. Several times, I’ve given him less than a week’s notice, and not only did he come through, but he printed and shipped the shirts within 24 hours to save me shipping costs.
Not sure if he does single shirt runs, but give him a call and find out.
Adveritising, primarily. Though I’ve yet to spend a penny on it, I advertise primarily in LJ groups devoted to the subject matter, Yahoo! groups, USENET, etc.
As far as creativity, I’ll shoot you off an e-mail link to one of my stores, and you can judge for yourself, since I’m not sure if it would be considered advertising or not.
