Did you know? We are now accepting customized designs to print on glass, mugs, and T-shirts, while still having our custom printed beach towels and wood camp signs! So, we wanted to give you some tips and best practices professional graphic designers use to print crispy clear custom designs. These are very easy to implement on your own and you don’t even need any fancy software!
Use CMYK Color
Printers use a different set of colors compared to our laptop screens. They are known as CMYK colors. Not having your images set to these color channels is the main reason why people find their printed products different from their design. You can easily find free online tools to convert your digital image from RGB to CMYK.
Surface Curves
The surface has a huge difference. Each size of mugs and glassware has different surface curves, whereas T-shirts or wood signs have a flat surface. The best way to see how your cool design would look is by printing it out on paper and taping it up to mimic a curved surface.
Material Texture Matters
Are you printing on gloss, matte, or satin surfaces? How “bright” your surface is may change how your design looks. For example, a frosted glass print would have more weight compared to images printed on clear glass.
Use Stronger Colors
One of the most common problems with online printing is your final product looks washed out. That’s probably because the colors on your design always look sharper on a digital screen even after you convert the colors. So, if you don’t design for a living, stick with brighter, stronger colors instead of grey tones or pastels. Colors with higher vibrance are just easier to play with, that’s all.
Play With the Background
Utilizing the background color can sometimes create amazing designs! For example, you can use the background as the filler color, and create cool cut-out effects. This method works great with patterns and chic illustrations.
Wrap Around Design vs. Floating Design
Should you wrap your design all the way around, or float an image in the center? That’s a good question to ask.
For people printing anniversary or business items, floating designs are more realistic. For example, you can use inspirational quotes or your business logo. Meanwhile, printing for personal use definitely gives you more options and you shouldn’t be afraid of exploring larger, wrap-around designs.
Why Work With Us
There are so many reasons why you should directly print your designs with us. For one, we don’t have a printing set-up cost. After all, normal people aren’t ordering 100 mugs at a time — what for?! However, we still have larger bundled packages for those wanting customer cups for the whole fam!
Also, we spare you the headache of working with an online printing platform, that somehow the preview never looks the same as the final product. Did you put the image in the right place? Is anything getting cut out? Did the website understand how you wanted the image to look?
Forget about that. When you print with us, you get to talk to a real human being who actually understands what you’re talking about.
Featured Image Credit: Unsplash