3 Ways to Print & Brand Your T-Shirt – Custom Shirt Printing LA

If you’re looking for custom t-shirt printing in LA with a certain special look or material for your family reunion or you’re planning on printing and ordering 20,000 t-shirts for your company’s sponsored marathon.

No need to worry, we’ll try and answer your questions and give you some useful information on choosing the print method that works best for your budget and time frame

I’ll share with you the three most popular ways to go about when looking to print shirts and hopefully answer most of your questions you might be thinking of when looking to print your next creative design.

1. Screen Printing

Screen printing is the oldest and most popular way of getting your custom designs printed on a multitude of promotional items like shirts, tote bags, foam cups, posters and plenty of other merchandise you can sell, buy or give away.

Just look around and you’ll find everyday items printed using this method.

Screen printing is still the best and fastest way to produce large orders of prints for a reasonable price.

This is depending on how many colors you use on the shirt, style, and quality of the garment.

My recommendation if you are looking to print a logo on a basic color t shirt is to keep it simple.

If budget is your concern, try a one-color print. This requires 1 single screen and is the most affordable compared to a 6 color print job that requires 6 screens instead of 1 screen.

 A screen is used to print out the stencil of your logo or design on to the shirt. But first, the screen needs to be prepared and set up for the print job.

The setup and preparation of each screen is the most time consuming and technical part of the print process, so if you have more than one color to be printed on the shirt you can expect your pricing to be a bit higher than a one-color print.

The material cost and time involved in creating a single screen is the least fun in the printing process and laborious for the printer.

The more colors you have on your T-Shirt design, the higher the cost and longer turnaround time for your shirts to be done.

The pricing calculation for screens and set up is due to material cost used to prepare the screens, the chemicals and time it takes the printer to create a single stencil for the shirt. 

It’s not a glamorous job but somebody has to do it.

There are several benefits when it comes to screen printing your designs using this method.

The main advantage of screen printing is that you can have a permanent printed t shirt that will last a lifetime if taken care of on a good quality shirt.

You can wash it hundreds of times and the will remain the same in color vibrancy, the shirt might fade or tear before the print begins to give way.

This gives the shirt a unique and vintage look that has stood the test of the tumble dry.

The other benefit is your cost per shirt. When printed in quantities of 25 or more, the more shirts you print the less you’ll usually pay because this balances out production costs and materials used when printing in bulk.

Our recommendation for using screen printing as your best option is when you print more than 25 shirts using the same logo and design.

2. DTG / Direct to Garment 

Direct to Garment or better known as DTG is the latest and greatest in apparel printing technology since the Silk Screen Press.

This is by far the best route to go with when looking to print photo-realistic images or any high detailed gradient color images on a shirt or garment.

The quality and feel of the print is soft and the levels of detail you get is unmatched when it comes to any other type of printing for apparel.

A DTG print is your best option when you want to do single shirts with multiple colors or a small test run for your start-up clothing brand. DTG is the fastest way to print multiple colors with no set up fees involved.

Another cool thing about printing with DTG is that it’s fast and usually done within 1 or 2 days eliminating the long lead time you get when using the silkscreen method.

However, before you get all excited there are some limitations when it comes to DTG printing, the biggest one is the type of materials to use when printing and for best results in color vibrancy.

We recommend using 100% cotton t shirts when priting DTG. Polyester blend t shirts when printed using DTG will tend to dull out and won’t have that crisp detail and pop in color.

This is due to the polyester fabric not absorbing the ink as well as the 100% cotton material. Since polyester is made from a plastic substance the ink will not stick as much as it does with cotton.

All in all, if you want to print just one shirt with multiple bright colors and awesome gradients DTG is the best option for you.

3. Vinyl Printing 

Vinyl Printing is pretty straight forward, you’ll usually see this type of print on baseball, basketball and football jerseys for small orders and single color prints with simple designs.

Perfect for printing single shirts with names and numbers, teams and clubs the material is sturdy and has a long durability depending on the vinyl used.

This type of print does not need ink or chemical use at all so the fade is minimal compared to screen print and DTG. 

A vinyl sheet is usually cut out on 12″ x 15″  on a plotter with the design stencil and heat pressed on the garment.

The main benefit in printing vinyl compared to screen printing and DTG are the multitude super bright colors, like fluorescent pink, neon green, sparkling gold and a lot of other unique effects you can’t get with the DTG and screenprint.

Another benefit of printing with vinyl is that you’re not limited with the type of material you can print on, 100% cotton, 50/50 blends, polyester and other noncotton products.

The turnaround time is fairly quick as well, usually, for a shirt it’s typically done in a day since there are no set up with chemicals or screens like there is in screen printing.

So hopefully we’ve answered some of your questions and concerns about the different ways of printing cool shirts for your next project, feel free to email us your question to info@laprintanddesign.com  Los Angeles Print and Design proudly serves the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Culver City.