Tshirt design advice : Colour Separations

Greetings friends.

Colour separation is a hot topic around the Springleap HQ at the moment… so it’s time for us to try impart some advice :) - enjoy!

It seems that many designers who submit to the competition still save their final tshirt designs (no matter how many colours) as a single layer.
This can become an issue not only for t-shirt printing purposes, but also for designers that will need to tweak their designs if we send them back with changes.

First and foremost it’s important that when you send us the artwork for your design that each colour is separated onto its own layer. Name each individual layer after the colour it actually is. This will make things more efficient.

Correct colour separation takes careful foresight and requires you to manually separate each colour, layer by layer.
Photoshop does have the handy ‘colour select tool’ which will make the process that much easier.

Please make sure that your colours do not overlap one another.
Once again, this causes problems on our side. It takes time to fix, which we could put into other important tasks - like making sure the design gets printed quickly and AWESOMELY!. (hat-tip! #win)

So please, when you put your designs together have the foresight to know where each colour will lay. We need to avoid admin here guys and girls.
In the long-run knowing colour separations will be of great use to any designer. Knowing what techniques and requirements are ‘industry standard’ will make you a better designer and a pleasure to work with in the printing industry.

Being a talented designer is the first step to becoming a success…the rest of the steps are undoubtedly technique, wisdom and professional courtesy.

Here is a handy online tutorial to help you with colour separation journey.

“CLICK ON THE VIDEO BELOW”:

Give it a go.

Liked this bit of tshirt design advice on colour separations? tell us!

Duncs.