Solving the Customer Artwork Dilemma

Decide in advance how much time you're willing to invest in making customer artwork print-ready. May 02, 2011
By Dan Corcoran, Contributing Writer

This image is a great example of a design where using three colors vs. only one color allows for smoother tones.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every piece of artwork a screen printing shop received was ready to be printed? Unfortunately, as any experienced shop owner knows, this rarely happens.

You can categorize the most common types of unusable artwork that you receive into three categories. The first is artwork that was used for graphics. Examples of this are a business card, postcard or maybe a banner.

The second type of artwork is a tiny, low-resolution image pulled off of the Internet. In the wireless electronic age, many people think you just press a button and a shirt comes out the other side. They don’t understand that they can’t submit a tiny image.

The third type is an Adobe Photoshop file submitted by a beginner. Typically, this is artwork from someone who has absolutely no idea of what he’s doing. He builds a graphic with 50 layers and so many issues that you don’t even know where to begin to fix it.

So with any new customer, there are artwork education issues that must be dealt with. The first thing I check when I receive artwork is the resolution. If it’s not big enough, I immediately contact the customer to request larger artwork. I encourage customers always to submit artwork that is at least 300 dpi. Usually, you can successfully print at a lower resolution, but it’s best to train customers to bring in 300 dpi artwork because then they also can use it for graphics if they want to.

If the artwork is at a high enough resolution, then I start checking for other problems. For example, I check to see if there are any artifacts remaining from enlarging the .jpg file. If so, I try to soften these with a bit of blur in my image editor.

Next, I’ll increase the saturation of the colors since this will make the image pop more on the shirt. Washed-out colors tend to have a heavy grey component that makes them harder to separate from similar colors. Increasing saturation will make the color separations process easier.

I usually increase the contrast of the image. Since I am printing on a substrate that is not as smooth as paper, I can’t get the subtle shadows, highlights and tonal blends that can be achieved when printing on paper. I can compensate for these limitations and give the image more definition by bumping up the contrast.

During this step, I make sure that the black areas in the image are true 100% black, since I do not want to have a 95% halftone in those deep black areas.

Beyond these typical enhancements, I correct any blatant artist errors that may become even more noticeable when printed. One common mistake is fuzzy text, often the result of rasterizing a font at a low resolution. I’ll try to isolate the text and sharpen the edges with a combination of blur and the indispensible Photoshop tool called “Curves.”  I’ll use this same method to clean up fuzzy line art and pencil drawings, and use the highlight slider in the Curves dialog to remove any stray pencil marks and paper creases.

Another less frequent fix is the “out-of-control vector file.” Screen printers love vectors because they have sharp edges, no resolution issues and are easy to separate. In fact, some screen printing shops only will accept vector artwork.

Every now and then, a piece of vector art will come in with millions of paths and points, objects with broken paths, transparencies, gradients and more. I’ve tried to pick these files apart more than once and have found a simple solution to avoid the frustration. Just take that vector file and paste it into your raster-based image editor. Voila! All of the weird vector problems are gone, and you can separate this file like you would any other pixel-based image.

Check and Re-Check
Remember that with any type of new art, you need to evaluate it at its lowest common denominator because it potentially contains all kinds of problems and pitfalls. I find tons of mistakes every day in customers’ artwork and if I’m not careful, one can easily crop up as a problem in production.

In fact, just recently we had a one-color job where this happened. I got some pretty simple artwork from a novice designer. My thought was, “Well, who can mess this up?,” and I didn’t check it as carefully as I should have. Consequently, I didn’t notice some strange things that occurred behind the scenes. Once we got the art on press, we had an area fill that shouldn’t have. No one (art or production) noticed it in advance. The lesson learned was even the simplest artwork can be a problem if you don’t thoroughly check it.

Spot-color art can be checked fairly easily; however, when customers bring in designs with fine lines and gradients, things get trickier. It seems to me that in the 1990s, everyone went crazy with gradients. Everything had to have a beveled edge, be embossed or look chromed with reflections and shades.

This type of design is harder to print and needs more colors to make it look good, which can be hard to communicate to clients. They don’t understand why you need five to seven colors to make a shield look like real chrome, and they don’t want to pay for additional colors.  

The way we handle this issue is showing them examples of how the artwork will look with one color, and then with three colors (the way we prefer to do it). If they are price sensitive, they may insist on keeping it one color, but they often will trust our judgment and give us permission to use three. If they insist on a one-color limit, then we will add disclaimers to their estimate and mockup, making it clear that they chose not to follow our suggestion. If they are not happy with the result, we cannot be held liable.

Pricing It Right
We do not offer custom design for our customers, so they need to bring finished art to us.  This holds true for our custom and contract clients. We clean up art and make it production friendly. There are steps that we do to artwork as part of our service, but when a design needs a lot of attention, we charge an hourly rate. We build in about 15 minutes of time into our pricing, and once it starts running past that, we charge accordingly.

Sometimes we end up spending much more time than estimated on the artwork. If we anticipate this upon starting the job, we contact the customer and let him know that it will cost more than expected. Often, we spend extra time because we are testing a new separation technique, so we do not charge the customer for this time.

We are stricter about charging art time for contract customers. Since contract jobs are operating at far lower margins than custom orders, we need those clients to submit print-ready art. The profitability on contract orders can dry up really fast if you are not careful.

We do not treat our art department as a profit center. All of our profit is made from printing. This makes ordering easy from the customers’ perspective. They can expect to pay for the prints and not be surprised by extra line items. Typically, we spend 15 to 20 minutes per design making it production friendly.

Production and graphic artists can be some of the highest paid employees in a screen printing organization, so each shop must evaluate its own payroll and determine how much, if any, profit needs to be generated by the art department. Just remember that your customer is buying printed apparel from you, so you may consider rolling any print costs into your final per-piece price so that it is easy for the customer to understand.

Dan Corcoran is the co-owner of Forward Printing, Oakland, Calif. The shop has three owners and two employees. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Dan at dan@forwardprinting.com or visit forwardprinting.com. 



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