When deciding which customized t-shirts to buy, you must take into account three things: your budget, your art source, and your desired decorating method.

I’d like to address the art source first. When we refer to your art source we are referring to the file that you will present to us to print your customized t-shirts. If you are going to make a small quantity personalized t-shirts, file type is not so important. If you are going to do high volume spot color prints on customized t-shirts, we will screen print your order. For cheap screen printing on t-shirts we require “vector files”. Vector files for t-shirt printing are generated by Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw applications. These files are scalable.

If you will be doing full color customized t-shirts we will most likely print you job digitally. We are masters at printing on black t-shirts digitally. For digital printing on personalized t-shirts we can work with jpeg, png, Illustrator, Corel, and Photoshop files. If you are presenting us with Photoshop file please work on a transparent background with layers. We have a full service art department on hand for helping our customers make custom t-shirts.

The next factor is your desired decorating method. The options are screen printing or digital printing on t-shirts. Screen printing is the least expensive method when doing large volume. You MUST have the file types mention above for us to screen print t-shirts. Digital printing is slightly more expensive than screen printing but has no set-up fees. By doing digital printing on customized t-shirts you can print full color images with no minimum. This is great when reorders of smaller quantities may not be accepted by production.     

The final factor is budget. The best value for standard weight personalized custom t-shirts are Hanes and Gildan shirts. Both offer great alternative styles to American Apparel and other fashion brands. Hanes offers the best fashion tee in their style 4980. If you need a super heavy 6.1 oz tee we recommend the Gildan G2000.

Call customer service for the best advice at 800-709-2380.

02/02/2010