Use Your Customer’s Clip Art in Our T-Shirt Designer
Sep/110
Below is a recent testimonial from a customer that knows the value of our Custom Clip Art program at Transfer Express.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
I am not sure that I can express my appreciation to you and the delight that I felt when I went to your website today and saw that I could not only SEE my CCA but that I could put them into Easy Print layouts to view. You guys are AMAZING! This will help my sales tremendously and make my life so much easier. Again, THANK YOU!
Ingrid
From Indiana
What is the Custom Clip Art program?
If your customer has a logo or clip art that they would like to reuse in our customizeable layouts, we can archive it for you. Imagine your customer’s logo or clip art in place of all our eagle clip art or others shown in the Easy Prints® layouts. This gives you the power to offer your customer lots of options. Your archived Custom Clip Arts are viewable online and can be used in our online T-Shirt designer to create a truly custom T-shirt design in seconds.
How to order a Custom Clip Art?
Place an Easy Prints Plus order that includes the artwork you would like to archive. Request what speicific art that you need to be archived. For a flat one time fee of $15, we will assign that logo or clip art a unique number just for you. Once the plus order is complete your Custom Clip Art will appear online and be ready to use!
Got custom art that you need custom transfers for?
Click here to send us the art to get your quote or order started.
Put your custom logo in our layouts
Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 3 – Converting Text to Curves
Aug/110
One of the questions we recommended in Tip 2 that you ask your customers when they provide artwork was to ask about the fonts and to make sure they were converted to curves/outlines. We will cover that in more detail this week since it is probably the most important aspect when sending in custom artwork for screen printing.
Text in artwork needs to be “converted to curves”. This means that once the text is converted, it is no longer text. It becomes a shape or in other words, a piece of art. The benefit of this is that no matter which computer the file is being viewed on, it will appear the same. It is no longer dependent on having the font installed on each computer. This ensures that your artwork looks the same on our computer as it did on yours and the computer your customer created it on.
To convert to curves in CorelDraw®:
- Select your text
- Click the ‘Arrange’ menu
- Choose ‘Convert to Curves’
The 'Convert to Curves' option is located under the 'Arrange' menu in CorelDraw
Make sure you do this for all text that is in the file.
To convert to curves (create outlines) in Adobe Illustrator®:
- Select your text
- Click the ‘Type’ menu
- Choose ‘Create Outlines’
The 'Create Outlines' option is located under the 'Type' menu in Illustrator
Again, make sure you do this for all text that is in the file.
Making sure that your text is converted to curves is extremely important. Watch our video tutorials on converting text to curves and then also reducing the node count afterwards.
Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 2 – Top Questions to Ask Your Customers
Jul/110
A lot of times your own customers provide the art that they would like made into shirts or other apparel. When this occurs, here are some important questions to ask them about the artwork that will help speed up the process and also help to save you money.
Resolution
If the customer gives you a digital file with the artwork, ask them first where the artwork came from. In asking them this question, you will get a better idea of what other questions you may need to ask. If the answer is from the internet, that should give you a red flag right away. Internet graphics are low resolution made for monitor viewing. Printed materials need to be high resolution at full size.
File Type
If they said they created the art themselves, ask which application they used to create it. The best answer would be CorelDraw® or Adobe Illustrator®. This would let you know that the artwork is most likely vector. If they did create the artwork, ask for the native (original) file that they worked in if they did not provide you with it already. We frequently see rasterized images of artwork that were originally created as vector, but were supplied as a flattened bitmap. We then have to rework to get it back to vector. For reference only, ask for a low resolution .jpg to ensure that all fonts did not default – which brings us to the next question.
Fonts
If there is text in the design, ask your customer to supply you with the font names. In case the type does default, having the font names greatly speeds up the process to reset it. Better yet, ask them if the text is converted to curves or outlines. This ensures that the type will not default and the art will be usable.
By asking these few simple questions, you are saving yourself and our designers lots of time which will ensure to keep our processes as speedy as possible to keep orders on schedule.
Example of provided artwork by your customer turned into a screen printed transfer
Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 1 – Software to Create Artwork
Jul/110
Transfer Express’ collection of clip art and layouts is very extensive and continues to grow each year. That being said, you don’t have to be an artist to order our designs. Simply customize and order our Easy Prints® layouts. However, we are seeing an increase in the amount of uploaded art to our web site for custom orders – Easy Prints® Plus. In this new series of blogs, we will give you the Top 5 Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork to help make your experience the best possible for submitting custom artwork to us.
The first tip this week starts at the beginning. It deals with software for creating and/or editing custom artwork. There are many programs you may use to do this, however, there are really two main programs we would suggest using – CorelDraw® or Adobe Illustrator®. These programs are great in the graphic arts industry including art for screen printing.
Create custom artwork for screen printing in CorelDraw (left) or Illustrator (right).
The Graphic Software
CorelDraw and Illustrator are programs that professionals use. However, you can learn them just as easily. Both of the creators of these programs allow you to download a free 30 day trial. This gives you a free opportunity to play with the programs and get your feet wet. Test out each program to see which one you may prefer. Spending a few minutes in the program everyday will allow you to get accustomed to it and by the end of the 30 day trial, you may have decided that yes, this is something you can do and would like to purchase.
Resources
While learning the programs, there are many resources online for free to help you if you get stuck on a particular problem. Search the internet or YouTube, and there are many videos and tutorials to view for almost any situation in either of these two programs.
Great info at:
AdvancedArtist.com
Sending Us Your Creations
Did you make something you need transfers of? Uploading artwork to our web site is very easy. On the upper navigation tabs, click on the “Send Us Your Artwork” tab. Upon signing in, click on the “Upload File” button. From there, simply fill out the information in the form and browse for your saved artwork file on your computer. And voila, it’s that easy! Once your art is reviewed we will call you to discuss your quote or order.
Get screen printed plastisol and digital transfers made from you artwork
Now go get your free 30 day trial and experiment! Who knows, you may have some skills you never knew you had…
Important Links:
CorelDRAW X5 Information
CorelDraw® Artwork Tip – Powerclip
Apr/090
Have you ever wondered how artwork is created where shape or images are inside type? This is a feature in CorelDraw® called Powerclipping.
Here are the basic steps.
- Select the objects to insert into other text/object.
- Select the EFFECTS menu then choose POWERCLIP.
- You will then get an arrow – Point to the object the objects you want to insert them.
- To edit right click on the text and choose “edit contents”
Below is a video that shows how to put the shapes in and edit them. This type of art with shape inside text works great for screen printed transfers.
Making t-shirts from Your Artwork
Mar/090
Are you sign shop or embroidery business trying to learn graphics software to make shirts from you or your customers artwork? Since technology moves so fast most Graphic Designers are in the same position as you are.
Here are some graphics software educational resources we recommend:
- CorelDraw.com
- Adobe.com
- Macromonster.com
- T-shirtforums.com
- AdvancedArtist.com
- CorelDrawPro.com
- Lynda.com – highly recommended – subscription based
- Photoshopuser.com – highly recommended – subscription based
Photoshopuser.com is a great resource of tutorials & networking about information about Photoshop®. Some our Designers have attended their multi-day seminars and have raved about it. If you are using Photoshop® to create full color artwork for our digital CAD-PRINTZ™, you can’t go wrong with a subscritpion to (NAPP) Photoshopuser.com!
Here is a link to the Transfer Express’ artwork guidlines for our plastisol screen printed & digital transfers.
And don’t forget, if you don’t have time to learn the graphics software we offer our “no artwork needed” Easy Prints® designs that you can customize online with our Easy View™ design tool.
Make a Separated Outline in CorelDraw®
Jan/090
Some Dealers of Transfer Express that order screen printed transfers like to make their own custom artwork. Creating artwork in CorelDraw® can be very intimidating. Below is a video tutorial on how to create a “separarted outline” in CorelDraw®. We used CorelDraw X3 in the video. In this video we assumed your “duplicate distance” is set a 0, 0.
Here are the basic steps:
- Create a text object
- Add an outline by right clicking on a color in the color palette.
- Hit your F12 key to adjust the thickness of the outline (set at .2 inches)
- Don’t click off the text object – use the shortcut of Control-D to duplicate the text object
- Click the arrange menu, then order then send to back of the page
- Keep the object selected and right click on another color to in palette
- Hit your F12 increase the outline on the duplicate object to .4
- Adjust character spacing as needed
View more video tutorials here.
