ASPA
  • Home
  • Online Classes
  • Join ASPA
  • Get Certified
  • Videos
  • Store
  • Equipment & Supplies
Picture

How to Avoid Spelling Mistakes on Custom Printed T-Shirts

1/14/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
I recently read an article of a professional sports team that had a glaring misspelling on their team t-shirts. It was an error of just one letter in the team's city name, but it was an embarrassing mistake for everyone involved—the team, the printer, and the fans who bought the shirts before they were pulled from the store and had to be reprinted.

We’ve all, at some point or another, seen someone with a shirt that has something misspelled on it. Most of the time these misspellings are usually from bad translations from overseas companies, like the “Engrish” seen on clothing throughout Asia.


But even printers that natively speak the language they’re printing on shirts can end up with mistakes, and this can be incredibly embarrassing for all involved; from the customer who didn’t notice at the time of purchase, to the shop that printed the shirt, and to the artist that designed it.

If you’re in the screen printing or t-shirt printing business and you get an order for shirts that involves text, follow these simple steps to ensure you catch any errors before losing time and money printing bad shirts.

1. SHOW THE TEXT TO MULTIPLE PEOPLE
Perhaps the simplest way to catch a mistake is to show a few people the design and get them to read it. While it’d be nice to believe that we could spot any problems ourselves, the truth is our brains are very, very good at reading what should be there instead of what is there. That’s partly how simple problems — a single letter missing, or out of place, for example — can go through multiple stages of a design process and not be noticed. By getting multiple sets of eyes onto a problem you increase the chance of someone noticing.

2. USE A “SPELLCHECKER”
If you don’t have multiple people to show, or can’t for whatever reason — or simply don’t trust those around you to be attentive enough! — write the text exactly as it appears into a word processor and run it through the spell checker on your computer. Assuming it’s not a fictional word, say from pop culture (“quidditch” from the Harry Potter books, for example), your spellchecker should pick it up.

3. GOOGLE SEARCH
Fictional words, people’s names, and some location names will show up as incorrect on a spellchecker even if they’re right. For this reason it’s a good idea to use a Google search of the word in question. For example, “quidich” is completely unrecognised by a spellchecker and could be either an awful misspelling or exactly right. When you enter it into Google, you get two options — either Quidich, a company that sells aerial technologies in India, or Quidditch, the popular sport in the Harry Potter universe. It should be fairly obvious by the design of the shirt which word is actually meant.

4. HIRE SOMEONE TO DOUBLE CHECK
Ideally this would be for text that’s not in your native language. There are a variety of affordable online services that allow you to connect to native-speakers of just about any language to check the spelling of words you’re completely unfamiliar with. These can run as low as $5 a service, which you might even be able to spread across a few designs — a cost that’s nothing compared to the revenue you’ll make selling the shirts, and a lot more affordable than having to recall and replace clothes with errors.

5. THE BOTTOM LINE
In an ideal world, a shirt design would be a hundred percent error free by the time it arrived for printing, but unfortunately that’s not always the case. It might be annoying to check yourself before you go to print, but the slight cost to your time is nothing compared to the frustration, embarrassment and cost you’ll face if you let an unfortunate mistake get printed and delivered to your customer.


0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Author

    ASPA Staff and others

    Archives

    January 2020

    Categories

    All
    Andy Warhol
    Andy Warhol Screened Art
    Avoiding Spelling Errors
    Certified Graphic Artist
    Checking Spelling
    Cleaning Up A Bitmap Image
    Coreldraw Bitmap To Vector Conversion
    Drawing Tips For Beginners
    Ed Big Daddy Roth
    Exposing A Photo Silkscreen
    Film Positive For Screen Printing
    Get Better At Drawing
    Getting A Job As A Graphic Artist
    Graphic Artist
    Graphic Artist Certification
    Grayscale Photo Screen Prints
    How To Draw A Picture
    How To Draw A Tshirt Design
    Improve Drawing Skills
    Improve Freehand Drawing Skills
    Inkjet Film For Screen Printing
    Inverting Artwork
    Pop Art
    Rat Fink
    Rat Fink Designs
    Screen Printer
    Trademark Design
    Tshirt Artist
    Tshirt Design Trademark
    Tshirt Graphic Artist
    Vector To Bitmap Conversion
    Vellum Paper For Screen Printing
    Warhol Silk Screens
    White Ink On Black Shirt
    World Changer

    RSS Feed

Advice Notice & Disclaimers | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Sitemap | Contact Us | About ASPA | Advertise with Us | ASPA Members

Copyright © 2004-2021 American Screen Printing Association Inc. (ASPA) | The #1 Ranked Screen Printing Association on the Web | All Rights Reserved.
  • Home
  • Online Classes
  • Join ASPA
  • Get Certified
  • Videos
  • Store
  • Equipment & Supplies