Hmm, What should I design and how?

One of the questions I get the most from first time customers is what kinds of things should I design, and how?  Trust me…once you get your feet wet creating your own designs for print you’ll be hooked, and you’ll find inspiration for new projects everywhere.  One of the quickest and easiest ways to get started with a new project is to use our online design tool.  I’ve loaded the designer with lots of graphic elements that you can use to create an image for print, and more are being added all the time so you’ll have a large selection to choose from.  You can also upload your own images, which you can use as a finished product, or as a base to add other graphic and text elements to.  Don’t be afraid to explore all of the options that the designer has to offer!  You can easily change the background color of your items, adjust the colors of your graphics, choose different fonts and sizes for your text, and more!  Experiment with the advanced options, which allow you to choose different borders and shapes for your graphics, select gradients, different color effects, and filters.  You can warp your text, rotate it, enlarge it, add a stroke to it, and so much more.  You don’t have to be a graphic designer to get a great image, you just have to experiment and you may just be surprised!

sreenpn

Other ways to start creating designs are to use an image that you already have and love and make it into a printed product.  Scan in a picture of your childs new drawing, snap a picture of something that you think is beautiful, search the web for free graphics and arrange them until you’re pleased with the result ( be careful to check the copyrights of any images you don’t create yourself – you don’t want to get into trouble for using an image illegally!!).  If you have a graphic design program such as photoshop, take an image and play around with the different filters, these can change a graphic into something else entirely with awesome results.  Don’t have photoshop?  There are plenty of free graphic software downloads out there, one that I’ve used is GIMP, and I’ve posted about it here.  Try it out and in no time you can be creating graphics like a pro!  So now that we know what to do, get out there and start creating!!

Edited: June 16th, 2009

Preparing your files for print

In this post, I’ll go through some suggetions you can use to get the best results when ordering printed fabric from Eye Candey.  Our goal is to have the colors in your fabrics look as similar as possible to your image file.  Please remember that it is not possible for any printer to reproduce colors as vivid and saturated as what you would see on a computer monitor.  (Please see our post on Color Matching 101 for more information on color matching).  The following are the things we’ll need from you to print your designs:

  • A high resolution image file.  You can submit your images to us in either  JPEG, PNG, or TIFF format.  If submitting a TIFF file, do not compress the image.  We recommend your files be created with a resolution of 150 dpi or higher.  (No cheating here – do not try to create your image at 72 dpi and then convert or resize it to 150dpi – we can tell when you do this and it does not produce the best result).  The minimum dpi that we can accept will be 150dpi.

Here are some things that can be done to minimize the color shifting between on-screen and printed images.  Some of these techniques are for more advanced designers, but don’t worry – you will still get great prints using the procedures above.  Some other image creation tips are:

  • Order a swatch - when color matching is a high-priority we recommend ordering a swatch of your fabric design prior to placing an order for yardage.
  • Color mode: If possible you should try to create your image in the LAB color mode.  LAB, or CIE Lab is a color space that gives the most consistent representation of color regardless of the device used to create it.  This will decrease the  color shifting in your printed images to only colors that are out of our printers gamut.
  • Users can install our color swatch files: We have created a swatch of colors in Photoshop that you can install and use to create your images.  This swatch represents colors that can be reproduced with our printers with no shifting of colors.  Click here to download our custom swatch file.  Save the *.aco file in: Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop X\Presets\Color Swatches  X is the version number for your install of Photoshop. To load: go to the Swatches palette, then click the small arrow in the top right corner and choose printswatch.aco from the swatch collections and click load.
  • Advanced users can install our ICC Profile: An ICC Profile is a file that describes how a device (i.e. a printer, monitor, scanner, etc.) reproduces color.  We can provide you with an ICC Profile of our printer.  With an accurately calibrated monitor, this profile can be used to generate a ’soft proof’ of your image in Photoshop versions 6.0 and later, which will show you what your printed image will look like.    Click here to download the ICC Profile.  After downloading, right-click on the file and select install profile.  Then in Photoshop, open your image, go to View>Proof Setup>Custom and you can select the Eye Candey ICC Profile.  This will show you what your image file will look like printed on our printers.  Your original image won’t be changed in any way.

Edited: May 12th, 2009