Business Unleashed

For t-shirt printing and other promotional garments and merchandise, screen printing is often employed using one of three different methods. ‘Spot Colour’ printing is widely used and works well with many types of graphics. Spot colour printing is the most suitable method used for the printing of graphics that are not photographic in nature.

Ink colours used in remaking graphic images, are usually Pantone, as specified by the graphic designer. Pantone coated or uncoated colour references are chosen to specify the ink colours of the design. The Pantone system is a global standard for colour matching where every colour is assigned a unique designation.

Branded promotional garments, or other merchandise where color identify and uniformity must stay constant, are particularly well suited for spot color printing.

“4 Colour Process” is another method of t-shirt printing. This printing process is utilised primarily with photographic designs and sketches comprised of a broad variety of hues, shades and gradations. Book and magazine images are also printed by the same 4 colour process.

The inks, though they are translucent, will merge together on the white background, which will reproduce the tones and hues of the original. It is a lot harder to process on fabric than it is on paper. However, the actual method used is mostly the same.

If you are going to use this kind of t-shirt printing it will obviously only work on white garments and will not work for coloured fabrics.

The cost for the print set up is going to be a lot higher than that of simple spot colour designs and is only good for the bigger print runs of 100+. When the t-shirt printers make full coloured images and put them on coloured fabrics this is called ‘Simulated process’. Much like spot colour printing, the art is divided into tones and colours to preserve the essential qualities of the original.

This is a standard method used by all printers and most popular for example with the reproduction of heavy metal and fantasy imagery taken from CD cover artwork and reproduced onto black t-shirts for band merchandise. This is the most expensive form of printing and as such used only on larger print runs due to the higher set up costs involving the colour separations and larger number of colours used to print the images.