If you’re worried about climcat quality – don’t be. T-shirt printing has come a long way over the years. Most of the online t-shirt printers use cutting edge printing techniques that result in professional quality tees. Forget about limitations – if you can think it you can make it. The t-shirt design you come up with may dictate the printing method used or you may design your shirt with the end result in mind.

For instance if you are creating a t shirt with a simple one color slogan or maybe a few colors to create  a cool grunge look then your shirt will probably be printed using the screen printing technique. This is the oldest and most common printing method for shirts. For those of you who are familiar with offset printing there are a lot of similarities between printing labels with pantone colors and setting up art for screen printing. Instead of using plates your image colors are stenciled onto a mesh and ink is then applied to the t-shirt by passing through the screen. In general screen printing is good for printing between 1 and 6 colors.

Just like the paper printing industry the t-shirt printing has made huge advances. Offset printing has gone from burning plates used for ink separation to digital direct to plate. This has really made offset printing much more efficient by reducing the number of steps to press. The same thing has happened with t-shirt printing. There is now a process called “direct to garment printing” which uses a specialized inkjet printer to print your design directly onto the t-shirt without the need for screen separations. This is really cool, because the very same ink that is used for screen printing is used for direct to garment printing but you have more flexibility in the detail of your design and the number of colors you can use.