Inside Look: Screen Printing
Screen printing: it's a major part of what we do here at
Big City. Even if you've never heard the term, you probably know what a screen printed shirt looks like. Screen printed shirts are used and seen all over, and ours are considered to be some of the highest-quality in the area. But did you ever stop to think about what goes into the process? Most people don't have a clear idea of how we complete our screen printing orders. We love when our customers can get an idea of what we do all day, and because we take care of the entire process in-house — from conception to completion—we're giving you the inside scoop on how we do what we do with our "Inside Look" series. First up is probably the most popular service we offer: screen printing!
If the term "screen printing" seems a bit foreign to you, you're not alone! You might be familiar with the term "silk screening," which is essentially the same process; that term has simply fallen out of fashion, since most screens are now made out of polyester mesh or other synthetic materials, rather than silk. Whatever name you use, this is the process that creates everything from the designs on your kickball team shirts to your favorite novelty tee.
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| We love these fun designs! |
Before a design can be put onto a shirt, you first have to create the screens, which is a multi-step process that we have down to a science. The very first step involves the digital artwork, or what you want your t-shirt design to look like. A customer may already have a high-quality logo or image they want to use on their shirts. However, more often than not, a customer may have just a general concept for the design, and our skilled graphic design team will then turn that idea into reality (or sometimes they'll need to recreate a pre-existing, low-quality image into something that's suitable for printing). The artwork is then turned into a proof to send to the customer, to make sure the design is exactly what they want.
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| A fun customer proof for bachelor party shirts |
After the artwork is approved by the customer, it's printed on a thin piece of film to be used as a design template. Think of this template as a stencil. Each stencil represents a different color in the design. So when a logo contains 4 different colors, each of those colors gets its own stencil. The complete image with all the colors comes together again only when the shirt is completely finished!
Once the film stencils are printed, they are then transferred onto their own screens for printing on t-shirts. To do this, the screens are coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, and the stencils are taped onto the screens. Together, they are put into a machine that exposes them to an extremely bright light (we have a darkroom specifically for this process), which "burns" the stencil onto the screen. Then, the screen is power-washed to make sure none of the emulsion remains. This leaves tiny openings in the screen where the colored ink can be pushed through, which is what creates the design on the shirt.
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| Design on film vs. two screens (which each get a different color) |
The screens are then loaded on the screen printing machine, and each color is printed separately. (
You can see a snippet of this process on our Instagram!) After the shirt has gone around to all the screens with all the different color inks in the design, it's put through the "oven," which dries the ink and cures it to the fabric of the shirt at a very specific temperature. This ensures that the design will not crack or fade over time. After it comes out of the dryer, the shirt is ready to be boxed up and shipped out to the customer!
Got all that? While we'd never expect our customers to be experts (we'd like to keep our jobs, after all!), we love being able to share the process with you. Putting together all these moving pieces is really an art form in itself, and we take a great amount of pride in producing the best quality work we possibly can. No matter whether your order is 1 shirt or 1,000 shirts, we always want you to be 100% satisfied with the result. So what are you waiting for? Call us or
visit our site to get started on an order!
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