6 Secrets to Successful Screen Print Transfer Art

Learn Tips and Tricks for creating effective artwork designs for screen printed heat transfers

1. Count Your Colors

Traditional spot color screen printed heat transfers will become more costly as you add more colors to your design because each color in your artwork will require an additional screen. Keep this in mind when you create your artwork. By limiting the number of colors in your design, you will keep your costs down and your profits up.

Don’t worry - with a little creativity you can still create eye-popping designs that will make a huge impact with only single-color artwork.

Single-color designs can still make a huge impact.

2. Line Weight Matters

You’ll want to be sure all of your line weights meet the minimum requirements for a successful print. Each transfer product will have its own set of artwork requirements when it comes to minimum line weight. Near the bottom of every product page on our website is a collapsible section detailing art specifications.

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3. Knock It Out

Another trick to keeping costs down while making a big impact is to strategically use the shirt color in your design. Use areas of “knockout” to add dimension. When done right, this can make a simple 2-color design appear more like a 3-color design. Again, you’ll want to check the product’s art requirements for minimum gaps allowed for successful printing. 

This 2-color artwork gives the appearance of a 3-color design using the black garment color in the design.

4. Gap It, Trap It, or Back It Up

Talk with your sales rep about how to set-up your artwork for each transfer product. The better understanding you have of the process, the better your end product will turn out. Some main set-up methods are: gapping, trapping, and backing up.

Gapping means no two ink colors are touching. There is shirt or knockout area in-between the colors. Trapping is a technique used to compensate for any possible misregistration. Essentially, one color will overlap another color. A backup is used primarily for a screen printed transfer with powder adhesive to ensure the entire design is backed. This is when one color is backing the entire design. A backup can either be contoured, meaning you will be able to see an outline, or butt registered, meaning it will fall directly behind the image.

This 2-color design is gapped, with no two ink colors touching.

5. Consider Your Kerning

Kerning is a typography term for adjusting the space between characters in a proportional font to make them visually correct. Not all fonts (especially those free ones!) will look visually pleasing as typed. You may need to adjust your kerning to account for extra spacing needed between specific letters.

6. Utilize Halftones

A favorite trick for creating the illusion of a multi-color design while keeping costs down is to utilize halftones. In your artwork, use a tint or transparency to represent a specific percentage of a color. You can even use multiple percentages or a gradient effect. During the production process, these percentages will be converted to a series of variously sized dots of ink. The size of the dot will depend on the percentage of color depicted in your art file.  

This single-color design has a photo-realistic look with halftones that were created using percentages of white.