SHIRT AND PRINT - ANSWERS

How do you print your shirts?

At Bountee we use a fairly new (well, state-of-the-art) printing process called Direct To Garment (DTG) printing.   This allows us to be able to offer every design that our members upload for sale - something that Screen Printing couldn't let us manage!

It's worth noting that this is not Vinyl or transfer printing like some other, larger websites use - we think the quality of our printing is directly comparable to Screen Printing.

Can you print more than four colors?

Absolutely YES! - a DTG printer can produce over 16 million colors. We hope that's enough for you?

What is the highest resolution image that you can print?

We can print with graphics up to 2880 dpi. And because we use vector artwork all throughout our process you can be sure of the finest quality print!

Can you handle gradients in a graphic?

Yes. We can definitely handle lovely, smooth gradients, halftones, etc.

Can you only print on white or light-colored shirts?

We can print on any color garment. Unlike older DTG technology, we can also print white on dark garments. We like to call this 'The Future'!

What types of shirts do you print on?

All of our shirts are high-quality, branded blanks. We chose AAA, AlStyle™ shirts for the adults, because we liked their fit and the quality of their material.
For the Children's shirts we went for Hanes Beefy - 'cause being parents ourselves we know just how durable these things need to be!

How is the washability on a DTG print?

Garments printed using DTG technology have excellent washability because the ink actually penetrates into the fabric. Unlike silk screen and heat transfers, your image will not crack or peel off after a few washes.

In fact, as I write this, I'm wearing a shirt sample that was printed nearly a year ago - when we started building Bountee - and it looks pretty much as good now as it did then (and I wash this one at least once a week!)

DESIGN AND PAYMENT ANSWERS

What in the world is an SVG file?

SVG's are great! The best way to describe them is as an "open and scalable" vector graphics format.
We at Bountee love SVG's because the allow you as a designer the ability to export your artwork straight from programs like Adobe® Illustrator® and use it on Bountee within seconds - all you need to do is 'export' or 'save as' within your application and your done.
We also love SVG's because one of our favourite (and free) applications uses it. We thoroughly recommend trying out Inkscape.
They can actually do a load of other cool things as well but the best place to learn about the real nuts and bolts to them is on Wikipedia.

What do I need in order to design a shirt?

Other than talent, imagination and other such billpaying skills? Well, you need to be able to create an SVG file. You can export these straight from Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or our current favourite application - inkscape!

In fact, if you are a designer or illustrator already you will probably find that you already have something that can export your artwork as an SVG.

Can I convert a PSD to an SVG? What about JPEGS etc?

We're glad you asked. To be honest we don't really dig the whole 'line trace' thing within illustrator, but if you do have some great artwork in Photoshop that's just crying out for the T-Shirt treatment then you could do far worse than trying out this application called 'Delineate'.

How do I get paid?

Ahh, the money question. It's quite simple actually. To start with you will need a PayPal account into which we can pay you. Visit PayPal.com to do this.

All done? Great. Now let's talk about the commission.

Bountee.com has a baseline price that we sell our shirts for; this covers garment costs, printing, packaging & posting and a little something for us to keep our respective families and children in shoes and clothes. This is the price that you'll see when you first create a shirt.

After that, all you need to do is to decide how much percentage of commisison on top of that price that you feel people will pay for your design. We do this as a percentage rather than a straight cash figure because it allows us to sell your design at a decent market rate in other currencies/territories - a truly global marketplace :)

When should I see my payments?

We make a scheduled payment with PayPal within the first week of the month - every month. If you have made any sales (which you can view within your account/profile pages) you'll see this money hit your account during that week. You'll also be notifed by email and asked to accept the transaction.

My upload isn't working! It just hangs for ever! What gives?

Ah yes - there does appear to be a few issues that we've encountered with certain files. We are working tirelessly on fixes and improvements within our Create Tool for this but for now we have found that doing the following fixes 90% of the issues:

• Outline all fonts, strokes etc in your illustration programme.
• Make sure that there are no linked or embedded bitmaps etc.
• Cut and paste your entire design into a new document - some certain types of print/file margins seem to freak everything out.

Why aren't my shirts showing up on the site?

Well, quite simply you need to put them 'On Sale'.
To put a shirt on or off from sale all you need to do is log-in and visit your CREATE page.

• Click the 'Off/On Sale' button at the foot of your design'
• Archiving a design removes it completely from your page and places it within an 'archive' folder