How To Print Individual Names – Part 1

Printing Names For Teams

Today, we will be talking about how to print individual names on shirts.  This is mostly used for team shirts where the customer asks for a team name and/or logo on the front of the shirt, then each players individual number and name on the back of the shirts.  Last week we talked about printing the numbers.  Aligning the name with the number is a topic for another post.  Today we will focus on producing the name.

The problem with individual names is, as we all should know by now, everything you want to print on a shirt will require a screen.  So, lets say the team has 16 players, each of which need their own individual name on the back of their shirt.  Are we going to burn 16 screens?  No!  Talk about a waste of money and time!  Today we will talk about how my shop approaches this issue.

Artwork

• Font Selection

Most individual names are used for team shirts.  In most of these cases, a nice easy to read athletic style or block font in all caps is preferred.  I like all caps for names for a couple of reasons.  It looks nice having all the letters the same height, and when you get into the names with upper/lower requirements, like McDonald where the “c” is lower case and the “M” and “D” are upper case, you are less likely to mess up if it were all upper case MCDONALD.  Of course, there are always exceptions to this, and it will depend on the customer.

• Spelling

Names are the biggest culprit for typos.  If I sit down and type out 20 names, I can almost guarantee that I will misspell at least 5 of them!  The best way I have found to deal with this is to have your customer email you a list of the names.  Then you can just copy and paste the name into your graphic file.  This insures that you spell them correctly, and if there is a name misspelled when the customer receives the shirts, you have an email showing the list you were sent.  Save ALL the information the customer gives you LONG after the customer receives the shirts.  I always staple anything the customer gives me to the work order, then everything is filed away with the invoice.  I still have the lists of names given to me for orders years ago.

If you cant get the customer to type out the list of names for you, then you have no choice but to type them in for yourself.  If this is the case, GET A PROOF READER!!!  It doesn’t matter who it is, as long as it is another set of eyes other than your own.  Trust me, I have learned this lesson the hard way.  Always proof read names.

• Font Size

Font size is not always as simple as just choosing a point size for the font then typing all the names in that size.  Some names are a lot longer than others.  For instance, Russellinskyston is a LOT longer than Ty.  If they were both the same font size, they would look funny.  Please note, there are ALWAYS exceptions to rules, so make sure you understand your customer’s needs before printing.

What we like to do is start with a maximum length for width.  Ours is normally about 10.5 inches since we use Tabloid size vellum to print our positives.  We take the longest name and increase the font size until it is the maximum size, then note the point size.  Then we take one of the medium to smaller sized names (don’t pick the smallest sized name for this) and do the same.  This will give you two font sizes, one large and one smaller.  Go thru your name list and assign each name either the large font or smaller font.  This gives you some pretty uniformly sized names that look better.

• Page Set Up

I set my names up on Tabloid sized pages (portrait).  Depending on how many names I have, I will set up multiple pages in my graphic software in one file.  Set your names up on these pages with 8 to 12 names per page depending on the size of each name and the font size you used.  If you only had 16 players on the team, you would most likely use 2 pages.  Make sure your names are spaced out far enough that the one name is not too close to the one under it.  We like to keep our names sized and spaced where we can cover one name with one strip of packing tape later on during the printing process.

• Print To Film

Print all your pages on film or vellum, which ever your shop used to burn screens.

Thursday we will post Part 2 of this tutorial.  Do you have any questions or comments so far?  We would love to hear them.