Reply To: Report from Scandinavia

[Glenn Millam]

Rezwan wrote: By “they” use an inkjet based process are you referring to Cafepress? Are you sure you can’t have the starburst over transparency (not white) and it will print out OK on black? Like fireworks against a night sky?

Regarding the back design, perhaps you can have that in different colors so that it matches the front. If a person gets the yellow peace symbol T-shirt, the back will have a yellow oval with writing in it, etc.

If you read their instructions on how to prepare art for Black T-shirts, you’ll see how they describe how to delete transparent pixels out of Photoshop artwork. Transparent art will be flattened, and will print as if its opaque, sort of like a GIF file that doesn’t have a “clear” pixel color defined, which shows up on a web page as if it had a white box around it.

What this suggests to me is that they do not use their normal “direct” printing process for black T-shirts. They must use a more conventional one like silkscreening, which must be more expensive. Another thing that suggests it is that, to sell black t-shirts, you must now become a “premium” member. This suggests they want some money before they invest in creating screens and making t-shirts with a multi-pass process like silkscreening. By becoming a “premium” member, you will be driven to sell the kind of volume that lets them recoup their prepress costs.

About the backs, your idea of multiple colors to match the fronts sounds pretty cool. Colors should be darker on light shirts and vice-versa for black shirts. I’ll make some variants and post them here.