All About Screen Printing Artwork: Vector VS Non-vector
Art work for screen printing should always be in vector format (sometimes you can use a very high resolution photoshop image). Vector format is digitally drawn art that uses your original image as a reference. When an image is vectorized properly it can be resized to any size and not lose its image quality. When you zoom in on a jpeg you will notice that the edges get blurry, which makes for a bad film output. When you zoom in on a vector the lines will stay nice and crisp. A tip to remember: how you see your image on a computer screen, is how it will print out. When you zoom in close on your design, if the edges are blurry, pixelated or grainy, that is how it will also look when it’s printed out for screen printing.
Example:
You can see that in the vectorized image the lines are nice and smooth, where as in the unvectorized image, the lines are blurry. Vectorizing is done in either Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, so if you have either of those programs, you can watch some of the many YouTube videos on how to vectorize images. Or, we offer our vectorizing service. When an image is properly vectorized it will be in either a pdf, Ai, or corel file format. Jpeg and .PNG file formats are not vector compatible.
Trapping artwork
What is trapping?
Trapping artwork is done in the designing process, in Ai or whatever program you may be using. It is done by adding an extra stroke or "outline" to your artwork so that it slightly overlaps any other color it is touching.
Why Trap Artwork?
Trapping artwork helps in the printing process whenever there are colors touching each other. No press will ever hold absolutely perfect registration, and screen printer variables come into play. When artwork is trapped it ensures that the colors will be touching, as well as allows a little bit of room for error without any of the shirt color shining through the cracks.
Trapping artwork is a very good trick to know for multi-color printing, and is very simple to do. There are tutorials all over the internet explaining in detail how this process is done for screen printing.