Design Process
This website has a lot of information about many aspects of designing for screen printing, but you don’t need to take it all in at once. Instead, here are my recommended steps for both designing your piece and working through this site. Remember, we won’t have much time together in class to really do most of this, so if you’re anything like me and need a week to be happy with a design, I’d suggest starting soon!
The short version
1. Get inspired → Inspiration Gallery
2. Pick your placement → Placement
3. Sketch → One-Color Mindset
4. Draw it → Ways to Make Your Design
5. Double-check details → Keeping It Printable
That’s the whole thing. Want more on any step? Read on, otherwise, go make something.
Heads up: you’re not limited to a single design! You’ll build two 16×20 frames, and each one’s printable space (about 12×16) can hold one big design or a few smaller ones or a mix, whatever you can fit. Picked a big design but there’s room to spare? Tuck a small one in beside it. That said, there’s zero pressure to cram them full, if you’ve got one design you love, that’s perfect, and you can always keep the second frame open for experimenting. Just know the room is there if you want it. (More on fitting and spacing multiple designs over on Placement.)
If you take away one thing from this whole site
Your design needs to end up black and white. Not the final color of the ink, true black on white. That’s the single most important part, more than size, more than anything else. Everything on this page is helpful; Black on White is the rule.
One more thing on color while we’re here: our ink works best dark-on-light, dark ink on a lighter garment. If you’re inspired to flip it (light ink on a dark shirt), that’s very cool and very doable, just know it mostly limits you to white ink, so let me know ahead of time and we’ll work out a plan together. (We’ve got a handful of ink colors on hand, see the What to Know Before Class page for the full list and where to grab others.)
1. Get inspired
Before you draw anything, gather fuel. Flip through the inspiration gallery, look at prints you love out in the world, screenshot stuff, doodle in the margins. The best designs usually start as a pile of “ooh, I like that.”
→ Go look: Inspiration Gallery
2. Pick your placement(s)
Now decide where your design lives, left chest, full front, back, a tote, a poster, and roughly how big. It’s handy to settle this before you get deep into sketching, because it tells you the proportions you’re working with: a wide-and-short upper-back design is a totally different shape than a tall full-front one. Knowing your box first means you sketch into it. That said, the proportions you find are just food for thought, you don’t have to follow them at all. They’re a starting point, not a cage.
3. Sketch it out
Play with ideas, try different techniques, and get a feel for what you want to see. As you go, keep the one-color mindset in your back pocket: think in solid shapes and lines, think about what you’re not printing (negative space), and remember it’s all one ink. If you’re feeling ambitious about halftones or two colors, now’s the moment to peek at Going Deeper.
→ How to think about it: The One-Color Mindset
→ Feeling ambitious? Going Deeper
4. Draw it!!!
This is where your sketch becomes the real thing. Pick whatever tool fits how you work, vector, raster, paper we scan, or drawing straight on the acetate, they all work. Build it at your final print size (a 10″ design is a 10″ file), and get it to true black and white.
That’s the deliverable: a black-and-white design at the size it’ll print. How you get there is totally up to you.
→ Pick your path: Ways to Make Your Design
5. Double-check your details
Last pass: look at your thinnest lines, smallest gaps, and tiniest details. Anything too fine can drop out when it’s printed, so this is the moment to beef up hair-thin bits and open up tight gaps. A couple minutes here saves a “wait, where’d that line go?” moment later. Then you’re ready to bring it in!
→ The check: Keeping It Printable
A few extra tips
- Big forms are your backbone. Large shapes are what catch the eye from across a room, let them carry the design. Smaller details reward a closer look, so keep in mind they’re for the people standing near you, not the ones across the street. You don’t have to cut detail, just know your big shapes do the heavy lifting.
- Watch heavy ink coverage. A big, solid, ink-heavy design can make a shirt stiff and hot to wear (the dreaded “sweat patch” feeling). If you want a big design but not all that ink, try working in some purposeful distress, halftones, or areas of negative space; it breaks up the solid coverage so the garment breathes, and often looks cooler too.
- It has to become solid black. However you design, pencil, pixels, vector, whatever, make sure your final artwork can become a solid black image. That’s what we need to properly transfer it onto a screen.
- If a detail’s too small, cut it, don’t just size up. When something’s too fine to print, the instinct is to blow the whole design bigger. But often that detail wasn’t pulling its weight anyway. We can sometimes get precious about tiny details that don’t really add to the piece, try removing it and see if you even miss it.
- Keep an editable file. Save a version you can still change, especially your halftones, for any last-minute tweaks once you’re in the studio with your hands messy. You never know what might spark a new idea or change.
That’s the whole process: get inspired, pick your spot, sketch, make it in black and white at size, and check your details. Follow the thread and you’ll walk in with a design that’s ready to go! And if anything’s fuzzy, read these pages, do some extra research, and never hesitate to reach out. Let’s make something you love.