So I've decided to offer our art approval template to you guys I just
want to let you guys know that this will help funder channel and I know this will
be super helpful that way you can look more professional not only that you
won't end up printing a job and all your profit going out the window
because you didn't get that art approval so I'm going to show you how this art
approval template works let's go ahead and dive right in when you purchase our
approval proof template when you download it from our website essentially
you'll get a a ITN file and dot AIT what that is is a template file in Adobe
Illustrator when you open it up every single time it will create a new
document and I'll show that here in a moment but also you'll get it in cs4 cs5
and cs6 it should work with just about everything you guys have out there if
you need it in an older format just let us know and we can send it to you but
I'm going to go ahead and open up the AIT file and as you'll see it opens up a
new document untitled 3 so there really isn't any way that you're going to save
over this template file and completely ruin it so that's something you don't
have to worry about and if you're using cs6 cs5 or cs4 be sure to save it as a
illustrator template file and you just go to save as and just click your format
options here and save it as a illustrator template file ok so we have
our template open here the first thing that I do want to show you is we have
our branding in there however you can put your own branding there is a layer
right here that says branding here so that is for you to put your own branding
put your logo you can create some sort of background but feel free to put your
branding in there and make it your own template the next big thing are the
t-shirts right so if I select the the front or the back of this t-shirt I can
go over to my swatch palette and change this to whatever color I want to and it
still retains the look of a natural t-shirt it's not an illustrator drawn
t-shirt it has a photographic look to it and you can go
over to your colors and make it whatever specific color you want to not only that
if you look here we have color t-shirts on one layer here we also have a
standard black t-shirt as well so blacks a pretty popular color so we have that
ready to go as well not only that we do have a heathered layer set way if
someone is ordering a heathered shirt let's say someone is ordering a sports
gray t-shirt and there you go now we have a sports grey shirt the other thing
I do want to talk about is the actual template file that is going to have the
overall look and theme of this particular template I do recommend you
go down here to the bottom and put your own name here now these are some terms
and conditions which we like to include in our proofs that way it covers our
butt and if someone does happen to approve this proof and we print the
shirts the way they are you know if we print a couple hundred shirts and they
say hey that's not the correct art but we send this over to them and they
approve it then that's not on us that's on them right one of the first things
you will notice that up at the top left-hand we have a Pio and invoice
number and all these fields are editable it's that way you can go in and just
fill these things in so let's say for instance this job here is fifty fifteen
right let's just say our customer is Shannon the shop gnome or a client as
she would say Shannon the shop gnome you could put your your customers name
you can change this to a business name however you want to cater that again
that's on this template layer if you wanted to change this to business name
you can do that and I'll go back and lock this the next thing we have on here
is the order date generally for us we do about a 10 business day turnaround what
we're going to do is just go in here and we're going to the fill in
and this is on our our Fields layer so every single one of these fields is on
the fields layer and you can go in here today's date is the 25th and let's say
two weeks from now they need their order will be the 8th and let's say this
particular client ordered 36 shirts so we'll put that in there so that way
we're all on the same page about how many shirts they ordered so the next
thing we have here is whether it's a reorder or not we have no and you have
yes if it is a reorder go up to the fields here and just scroll down and
you'll see that we have all this labeled so you can see we have this little X if
I turn off no it goes away if it is a reorder just click on that where it says
yes this little eye icon here which will turn it on that way it is visible as we
go through this you'll see that each of these fields that you can turn on
they're in order by these layers here so the first options here so that way you
don't have to go in and manually draw these things in so let's just say it's a
reorder so we got yes checked here additional services so you might have
someone that wants a screen printed neck label let's just go ahead and say for
the sake of this demonstration right here screen and if you want to you can
add some more to this if you wanted to put a screen printed neck label you can
do that for me I know that in the sequential or the
from top to bottom that this is my option here so let's say it has that
option let's say it has the option to fold in poly bag and add a size sticker
to it as well so the next thing is folding let's say that there's a color
change let's go ahead and select that now there is a box here we can go ahead
and just hit T on the keyboard and let's say we want to change it from red to
black so we have that information in there as well let's say perhaps it's a
specialty ink so we're gonna scroll down and we're
gonna click on specialty let's say perhaps maybe it's a puff ink so we're
just gonna hit return and we're gonna type in puff so we have all that covered
now moving on this can be used for screen printing embroidery this just
happens to be what we do the most stuff we're gonna collapse this but you can go
over to your template layer let's say for instance you do quite a bit of HDTV
work you don't really offer screen excuse me embroidery but you do screen
printing an HDTV you can go ahead and have this option you can change that up
that way it will cater to your own business and let's say you do
sublimation you can cater this to your particular business that's one of the
great things about this so in this case we're doing screen printing right so
we're gonna leave that alone going back to the fields like I said you can change
this to whatever you want it to be for us our main thing is screen printing and
embroidery occasionally we do HDTV but you can click that option on right there
ok now moving on we have our ink and thread colors again you can just kind of
cater this to however you want to but we have this all set ups that way you can
easily change it and just go back to your template layer but for us let's say
that our client Shannon the shop gnome once this logo printed on the front
and I'm going to take that and I'm going to put it onto my Fields layer so I'm
just gonna paste that in there and she just wants some t-shirts with this
particular logo which is our logo and perhaps she wants something else on the
bag that way she can represent herself I'm
Shannon the shop gnome this is going on the back of shirt this is the art that I
want and looking at this art already know that I have a white base going down
at least everybody's prints Al's gonna be a little different so let's just say
we're gonna put a white base down would CMYK printing right okay so over here at
ink colors I know that I have five ink colors and for the sake of this
demonstration let's just say it's six colors I'm gonna do a white base with a
white highlight so we're gonna turn on all of these colors here and I'll show
you exactly how to do that so let's just calm white we'll just call that our base
and we know the next thing in the print order and you'll notice that it's number
one too you know all the way through six and this is not only for the client but
for ourselves as well the print order in which we're going to do this so if we're
doing CMYK the next color I would do is yellow we would do magenta we would do
cyan we would do black and then we would do white so there we have our six colors
and the next thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna go up to my fields layer again
and if you scroll down you you'll see that there are the six colors colors one
through six so I turn all those on and you'll notice as I turn those on that we
now have boxes here so we can select this box here and we can go over and
make that yellow we can come here and we'll make this magenta we'll make this
cyan we'll make this one black and we'll just leave this one alone because it's
white now that we have all of our colors all situated
and lists it out the next thing we have that is really cool and will help save
you guys some errors down the line is this particular pre-press checklist okay
so what we tend to do in our own shops we count the shirts we'll organize them
by size make sure everything is there one of the big things you want to do is
check your art to the approved proof because you never know when your client
might send you a couple different pieces of art and you happen to burn the
incorrect piece of art onto the screen so you want to check the proof that your
client approved next thing you want to do is check for typos next thing is you
want to make sure your spot colors are correct whether it's your your house
colors or your PMS colors that's a something you definitely want to check
for placement matches the mock-up whether it's you know a chest print a
side print it's down towards the bottom left chest whatever the case may be you
definitely want to check that and make sure it matches the approved proof next
thing job's registered correctly registration is very important you don't
want to have that white peeking out from underneath that red top print or in this
case our CMYK print you just want to make sure everything's registered nice
and tight your jobs free of pinholes and last but
not least you have your registration marks taped off you're ready to go for
production one of the last things I want to mention here is we have our front and
back sizes so you can go in here and let's say we want to make this a
standard print of 10 inches wide what I'd like to do is just type in the size
here I'll let it scale up and we'll see what it is so if you look here 5.3 5.3 9
so let's just call it 5.4 I'm going to hit command Z to undo that we said 10
inches wide the next thing is maybe we want this print here to be 10 inches
tall so we can just type in 10 inches and so we got 5.5
for the width so we'll put in 5.5 10 inches tall and now we're all set to
send this off to our client for approval thanks for tuning in if you have any
questions feel free to email us or give us a call we'll be happy to answer your
questions until next time we'll see you later