Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 2 – Top Questions to Ask Your Customers

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