How to Prepare Artwork for Screen Printing: The Complete Guide

Published by GiftSuppliers.ae | Knowledge Hub | Artwork & File Preparation Reading time: approximately 13 minutes

Screen printing is the dominant decoration method for high-volume fabric branding in the UAE and GCC corporate market — the technique behind the polo shirts at every major conference, the tote bags at every trade show, the t-shirts at every corporate team day. At production volumes of 100 pieces and above, screen printing delivers Pantone-accurate colour, exceptional wash durability, and a per-unit cost that no digital method can match at equivalent volume.

But screen printing has a specific and non-negotiable set of artwork requirements that are different from every other print and branding method. It is not a digital printing process that interprets artwork directly from a CMYK file. It is a physical, multi-screen process where each colour in the design occupies a separate physical screen, and where the artwork must be prepared as a clean, separated, print-ready set of single-colour layers before any production can begin.

Marketing coordinators and brand managers who submit screen printing artwork prepared for digital printing — a full-colour CMYK PDF, a multi-layer JPEG, or an RGB PNG — consistently encounter the same prepress rejection: the file is not screen printing ready. The screens cannot be produced from an unseparated file, and attempting to do so produces either incorrect colour or a technically impossible specification.

Understanding what screen printing artwork actually requires — and why — eliminates this rejection and its associated timeline cost. It also equips buyers to make better design decisions: understanding from the outset of a design brief that screen printing is the production method, and designing within its constraints, produces more effective and more cost-efficient results than designing freely and then attempting to adapt an incompatible design for screen production.

This guide provides the complete artwork preparation knowledge for screen printing — applicable to all fabric screen printing applications in the UAE and GCC corporate promotional products market.

CTA — Screen printing artwork assessment and production? GiftSuppliers.ae’s screen printing prepress team assesses colour separation, minimum feature compliance, and screen count for every submitted brief — advising on preparation requirements before production begins. Submit your screen printing brief

What Is Screen Printing and Why Does It Need Separated Artwork?

Screen printing deposits ink through a mesh screen onto the fabric surface. Each screen carries one colour — one Pantone-matched ink — and applies that colour in the areas where the mesh is open (not blocked by the photosensitive emulsion that defines the design). Where the emulsion blocks the mesh, no ink passes through.

The one-screen-per-colour architecture:

In a multi-colour screen printing setup, each colour requires:

• A separate screen (mesh frame coated with photosensitive emulsion)
• A separate film positive (a black-and-white transparency showing only the areas that receive that specific colour)
• A separate ink (mixed to the Pantone specification for that colour)
• A separate print pass (the garment is printed through one screen, then moved to the next, then the next — one pass per colour)

This architecture is why colour separation is a fundamental requirement for screen printing artwork. The production team must know, for each colour in the design, exactly which areas of the fabric receive that colour — and this information must be presented as a series of separate, single-colour files (one file per colour), each showing only the areas that receive its colour in solid black.

A full-colour CMYK PDF, by contrast, presents all colours blended and mixed in a single image — it does not separate the colours into individual channels. The screen printing prepress team cannot produce individual film positives from an unseparated CMYK file without significant additional work — and the result of attempting to do so (printing CMYK separations from a design not prepared for CMYK screen printing) is typically a misaligned, colour-inaccurate result.

How Screen Printing Artwork Preparation Works: Step by Step

Step 1 — Design the artwork in vector, using spot colours

Every colour in a screen printing design must be a defined, named spot colour — a specific Pantone Coated reference that the ink kitchen will mix to produce the correct physical ink. In Adobe Illustrator, each brand colour is defined as a named Pantone spot colour swatch (not a CMYK process colour), and the design is built from flat, solid-colour shapes using these spot colour swatches.

Each shape in the design is filled with exactly one spot colour — there are no colour blends, no gradients, and no transparency effects in standard spot colour screen printing. Every element in the design has a single, defined ink colour.

Step 2 — Separate the artwork by colour

Colour separation is the process of isolating each colour layer for individual screen production. In Adobe Illustrator, this is achieved by working with a layer structure where each layer contains only the elements of a single colour — or by using the Separations Preview function to verify that each Pantone spot colour appears on its own separation.

When the design is correctly structured in Illustrator with named Pantone spot colours, the PDF/X export automatically produces a separations-ready file — the press operator or the RIP (Raster Image Processor) that drives the film output device separates the file into individual channel outputs, one per Pantone spot colour.

Step 3 — Output film positives

The separated file is output to a film positive — a black-and-white transparency (or a direct-to-screen digital output in modern facilities) showing the areas of the design that receive one specific colour. For a five-colour design, five film positives are produced — one for each Pantone colour. Each film positive shows only the areas that receive its colour as solid black; all other areas are transparent/white.

Step 4 — Expose and prepare screens

Each film positive is used to expose a screen — a mesh frame coated with photosensitive emulsion. The film positive is placed over the emulsion-coated screen and exposed to UV light. The UV light hardens the emulsion where it is exposed (the transparent/white areas of the film) and leaves the emulsion soft and soluble where it is blocked (the black areas of the film — the design areas). The soft emulsion is washed away, leaving open mesh in the design areas through which ink will pass.

Step 5 — Print the design

The garment is loaded onto a platen on the screen printing carousel. Each screen is brought down over the garment in sequence, the appropriate Pantone-matched ink is applied, and a squeegee draws the ink across the screen — pushing ink through the open mesh onto the garment surface. After each colour pass, the garment moves to the next screen station.

Step 6 — Cure the ink

After all colour passes are complete, the garment passes through a conveyor dryer at approximately 160°C — curing the plastisol or water-based inks to their permanent, wash-durable bond with the fabric.

Materials Compatible with Screen Printing

Screen printing is primarily a fabric decoration method — it is the standard process for branding cotton, polyester-cotton blend, and canvas promotional products. The following covers the most relevant materials for UAE and GCC corporate screen printing applications.

Cotton and cotton-blend fabrics: Cotton is the primary substrate for promotional screen printing. 100% cotton, 65/35 polyester-cotton blends, and 50/50 blends are all well-suited to screen printing with plastisol inks — the standard ink system for cotton garment printing. Plastisol inks produce vibrant, opaque colour on cotton substrates with excellent wash durability (50–100+ wash cycles).

Polyester fabrics: 100% polyester requires specialist ink systems for screen printing — standard plastisol inks do not bond reliably to polyester fibres without additives, and low-bleed inks are required to prevent the polyester dye from migrating into the printed ink layer (a problem called dye migration, where the polyester’s reactive dyes bleed through the white ink layer, tinting the printed colour). For polyester screen printing in the UAE market, confirm with your supplier that low-bleed ink systems are in use.

Canvas and woven bags: Canvas tote bags, cotton canvas promotional bags, and non-woven polypropylene (NWPP) bags are standard screen printing substrates in the UAE events and promotional products market. Canvas prints with the same plastisol system as cotton garments. NWPP requires a different ink system compatible with its polypropylene surface.

Flat hard goods (boards, wood panels, paper): Screen printing on flat hard goods substrates — wooden gift boxes, card panels, flat board surfaces — is used for specific promotional product applications. These applications use solvent or UV-curable screen printing inks rather than plastisol, and require flat-bed screen printing equipment rather than garment carousel presses. For most UAE corporate hard goods branding, UV printing or pad printing are more common alternatives to hard goods screen printing.

Advantages of Correctly Prepared Screen Printing Artwork

Accurate Pantone colour reproduction: When artwork is correctly prepared with named Pantone spot colours, the ink kitchen mixes each ink exactly to the Pantone specification. The result is the closest available colour match to the brand standard of any fabric decoration method — more accurate than embroidery thread approximations, more accurate than DTF CMYK simulation, and more accurate than dye sublimation’s sRGB-calibrated output. For organisations with strict brand colour standards, correctly specified screen printing produces the most reliable fabric colour accuracy.

No prepress revision cycles: Correctly separated, correctly specified screen printing artwork proceeds directly from submission to screen production without a prepress return for revision. This eliminates the 24–72 hour revision cycle that incorrect artwork submissions introduce — significant for time-sensitive UAE event programmes.

Accurate cost estimation: Screen printing cost is driven primarily by colour count (number of screens) and quantity. Correctly prepared artwork with a defined, counted set of Pantone spot colours enables the production team to provide an accurate cost quotation immediately. Artwork with undefined or vague colour specifications requires additional back-and-forth to establish the actual screen count before pricing can be confirmed.

Consistent results across the production run: A correctly structured stitch file (embroidery equivalent: a correctly structured screen printing separation) is the definitive production reference for the entire run. Every piece in a 2,000-piece run prints from the same screens, in the same ink sequence, with the same Pantone-matched inks — producing a consistent result from the first piece to the last.

Artwork Limitations in Screen Printing

No continuous-tone gradients in standard spot colour printing: Standard spot colour screen printing cannot reproduce smooth colour gradients. Each screen deposits a single, flat colour — there is no mechanism for a smooth transition from one colour to another across a single screen pass. Gradients require either: (a) halftone simulation — where the gradient is reproduced as a pattern of dots of varying density, simulating the appearance of a tonal transition — or (b) a stepped colour approach — replacing the gradient with two or three distinct flat colours arranged in distinct zones.

Halftone screen printing can reproduce gradients with acceptable quality but requires higher screen resolution and more careful ink density management. For most UAE corporate promotional products applications, a flat spot colour approach without gradients is simpler, more cost-effective, and more production-reliable.

Colour count limitations and cost implications: Each additional colour adds one screen (AED 30–80 per screen in the UAE market), one ink mix, and one print pass — all of which add cost. At small quantities (under 100 pieces), the screen setup cost per piece is significant. At large quantities (500+ pieces), the per-unit screen cost amortises to a small fraction of the per-unit cost. For budget-constrained programmes, reducing the colour count by one or two colours (without compromising brand recognisability) produces meaningful cost savings — particularly at short-run quantities.

Registration tolerance for fine detail: Screen printing registration — the precision of colour-to-colour alignment across multiple print passes — has a tolerance of approximately ±0.5–1.5mm depending on the equipment, the garment type, and the skill of the press operator. Fine details that depend on precise colour-to-colour registration (thin borders between two colour areas, fine text on a coloured background, very small elements with multiple colours) are at risk of misalignment at this tolerance level. Design considerations for screen printing should ensure that any design element relying on colour registration is appropriately sized for the registration tolerance of the production equipment.

Minimum feature sizes: Screen printing’s minimum reproducible feature size is approximately 0.5mm for fine lines on a stable, smooth substrate at close range. For production screen printing on fabric at typical garment viewing distances, 1mm is a more practical minimum line weight. Text below 6–8pt at the print size may lose legibility — confirm minimum text size with your supplier for the specific fabric and ink system.

Colour Separation in Detail: Spot Colour vs CMYK Screen Printing

Spot colour screen printing (the standard for corporate branding):

Spot colour screen printing uses one screen per Pantone-matched ink colour, with each screen depositing a flat, solid colour area. This is the standard for corporate logo and branding applications:

• One to six defined Pantone colours, each on a separate screen
• Each colour is a solid, flat ink deposit — no dot pattern, no halftone
• Maximum colour accuracy — Pantone inks are mixed to specification
• Clean, crisp edges and solid, opaque colour areas
• Artwork must be vector, with each colour on a separate layer

CMYK screen printing (for photographic and illustrative content):

CMYK (four-colour process) screen printing uses four screens — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black — each printing a halftone dot pattern. The combination of all four halftone dot layers simulates the appearance of a full-colour image. This is the approach for photographic imagery or illustrations requiring a full-colour appearance in screen printing:

• Exactly four screens: C, M, Y, K
• Each screen prints a halftone dot pattern at a specific angle and frequency
• The overlapping dot patterns create the visual illusion of full colour
• Registration between four screens must be very precise — more demanding than spot colour
• Colour accuracy is lower than spot colour — CMYK simulation cannot reproduce all Pantone colours accurately

For the majority of UAE corporate promotional products applications — logo branding, wordmarks, brand marks, simple graphic designs — spot colour screen printing is the correct and preferred method. CMYK screen printing is reserved for applications requiring photographic reproduction or complex illustrative artwork on fabric at volume.

Hybrid spot + halftone:

Some designs combine spot colour elements (logo, wordmark) with a CMYK photographic element (a campaign photograph, a product image). In hybrid printing, the spot colour screens are used for the brand identity elements (clean, Pantone-matched) and a CMYK halftone is used for the photographic element — producing a result that combines the brand colour accuracy of spot colour with the photographic richness of CMYK.

Artwork Requirements for Screen Printing

Required format: Vector artwork (Adobe Illustrator .ai or EPS) is the definitive format for spot colour screen printing. The vector format enables clean colour separation, precise layer management, and accurate film positive output. All design elements — logos, text, graphic shapes — must be vector paths in the submitted file.

Colour specification: Every colour in the design must be defined as a named Pantone Coated spot colour in the Illustrator swatches panel. The swatch name must match the exact Pantone reference — “PANTONE 286 C”, not “brand blue” or “navy”. The swatch type must be set to “Spot Color” (not “Process Color”) in the Swatch Options dialog. If CMYK process colours are mixed with Pantone spot colours in the same file, the screen printing prepress team will need to redefine the CMYK colours as spot colours before film output — a correction that adds prepress time and introduces interpretation risk.

Layer structure: Organise the artwork in layers — one layer per colour. Name each layer with the Pantone reference it contains: “PANTONE 286 C”, “PANTONE 871 C”, “White”. This layer structure allows the prepress team to verify colour separation visually and to generate film positives from each layer independently if needed.

Text: All text must be outlined (Type → Create Outlines in Illustrator). Live text dependent on font files cannot be reliably separated for screen production. After outlining, confirm that the text shapes are clean closed paths without any stray anchor points or open path segments.

Minimum line weight: Lines, borders, and fine elements below 0.5pt (0.18mm) at the print size may not reproduce cleanly on the screen mesh at standard commercial screen mesh counts (86T, 120T). For most UAE commercial screen printing, a minimum line weight of 1pt (0.35mm) at the print size is the practical minimum for reliable production. Fine detail text should be confirmed with the specific supplier for their mesh and emulsion specification.

Overprinting and trapping: Where two colour areas meet at a boundary, one of two approaches applies:

• Knockout: One colour has a “hole” cut in it at the boundary, and the second colour prints within this hole — the colours do not overlap. Standard for most design elements.

• Overprint: One colour prints directly over another — creating a third colour where they overlap (e.g., printing yellow over blue produces green in the overlap area). Overprinting is used intentionally to create additional colours from a limited screen count.

Trapping — a slight overlap between adjacent colour areas (typically 0.2–0.5mm) — prevents white gaps appearing at colour boundaries where registration tolerance causes a slight misalignment between screen passes. Trapping must be applied to all adjacent colour boundaries in correctly prepared screen printing artwork.

White ink underbase for dark fabric:

One of the most frequently misunderstood requirements in screen printing artwork preparation is the white underbase. When printing on dark fabric (navy, black, red, bottle green — any fabric darker than the ink colours being printed), a layer of white ink must be printed first to provide an opaque foundation for the colour inks above it.

Without a white underbase, colour inks printed on dark fabric show the fabric colour through the ink — a navy ink on black fabric appears near-invisible, a yellow ink on black fabric appears greenish and muted. The white underbase blocks the dark fabric colour, providing a neutral reflective surface on which the subsequent colour inks appear at their full, intended vibrancy.

The white underbase adds one screen — increasing the screen count by one and adding one print pass to the press sequence. It must be specified explicitly in the artwork brief for dark fabric applications. The white underbase layer is typically slightly larger than the colour layers above it (flashed underbase) to account for the slight shrinkage of the white ink when cured between passes.

White ink underbase artwork preparation: In the Illustrator file, the white underbase layer should be defined as a separate spot colour named “White” or “Underbase White”. The white underbase layer covers all areas of the design that receive colour inks on the dark fabric. The colour layers are positioned above the white underbase layer in the layer stack. The prepress team will size the underbase slightly larger than the colour coverage areas as part of their prepress workflow.

Artwork size specification: Always specify the intended print size in millimetres — width and height of the complete design at the final print size on the garment. Standard print position references for UAE corporate garment screen printing:

• Left chest print (logo): 100–130mm wide x 80–100mm tall
• Centre chest print (logo): 130–200mm wide x 80–120mm tall
• Full back print (graphic design): 250–320mm wide x 200–280mm tall
• Sleeve print: 60–80mm wide x 60–80mm tall

Production Considerations

Screen mesh count and design resolution: Screen printing mesh counts range from 25T (very coarse, for thick discharge inks) to 195T (very fine, for halftone printing). The mesh count determines the maximum detail resolution achievable — a 120T mesh can reproduce finer detail than a 86T mesh. For most corporate logo and brand mark screen printing on cotton fabric, 86T–120T mesh is standard. For halftone printing and fine detail, 120T–160T is used.

Confirm with your supplier which mesh count is appropriate for your specific design — very fine details and halftone gradients require higher mesh counts, which may affect production cost.

Flash curing between colour passes: When printing on dark fabric with a white underbase, the underbase must be partially cured (flashed) before the subsequent colour layers are applied — otherwise the wet underbase ink mixes with the next colour, producing muddy, indistinct results. Flash curing requires a brief infrared heat treatment between the underbase pass and the first colour pass.

Flash curing adds to the production cycle time per piece — a consideration for large production runs where throughput is time-critical. Account for flash curing in the production timeline when specifying dark fabric programmes.

Ink systems for UAE climate: Plastisol inks are the industry standard for UAE garment screen printing — they are heat-cured thermoplastic inks with excellent wash durability and colour retention under standard laundering conditions. For corporate apparel that will be laundered repeatedly (hospitality uniforms, healthcare workwear), plastisol provides the required durability. For environmentally positioned programmes, water-based inks offer a lower-impact alternative with acceptable durability on cotton substrates.

Discharge printing — a technique that chemically removes the fabric dye and replaces it with a pigment during the screen printing process — produces a very soft hand-feel print on cotton that is part of the fabric rather than sitting on the surface. Discharge printing is appropriate for premium event apparel and lifestyle brands where the soft hand-feel of the printed area is part of the quality proposition.

Colour matching on fabric vs paper: Pantone inks on cotton fabric produce a different visual result from the same Pantone inks on paper. The fabric texture absorbs and diffuses the ink slightly, and the woven structure of the fabric creates a micro-texture that affects how light reflects from the printed surface. A Pantone 286 C ink print on cotton may appear very slightly different in saturation and brightness from the same Pantone reference on a Pantone coated paper swatch. For production colour approval, always evaluate a printed fabric strike-off (a short test print on the actual production fabric) against the Pantone fan guide, rather than against a paper print.

UAE National Day programme timing: The UAE National Day screen printing peak — predominantly red and green t-shirts, polo shirts, and tote bags for corporate distribution in late November and early December — is the highest-volume period in the UAE garment screen printing calendar. During this peak, screen production capacity is constrained across the UAE market, and lead times extend. Plan UAE National Day screen printing programmes with artwork submission no later than six weeks before the event, and confirm production capacity with your supplier before artwork finalisation.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Submitting a full-colour CMYK or RGB design file and expecting spot colour separation: A full-colour CMYK file — a design created in Photoshop with all colours mixed together in a single raster layer — cannot be automatically separated into individual spot colour channels for screen printing without significant prepress intervention. The supplier’s prepress team can perform colour separation from a raster file, but the results will not be as clean or as colour-accurate as a properly separated vector spot colour file. Always prepare screen printing artwork as vector, with individual Pantone spot colour layers.

Not specifying the white underbase for dark fabric: A design brief for polo shirts that says “full-colour logo on navy polo shirts” without specifying a white underbase will either produce an incorrect cost quotation (without the underbase screen) or produce a quoted cost that omits the underbase and then requires revision when the prepress team flags the omission. Always specify “white underbase required” explicitly for any design on a fabric darker than the lightest ink colour in the design.

Using CMYK colour mode instead of Pantone spot colours: Illustrator files prepared in CMYK colour mode — where each colour is defined as a CMYK percentage breakdown rather than a Pantone spot colour — are not correctly prepared for screen printing. CMYK colours separate into four process channels (C, M, Y, K) rather than into individual Pantone spot colour channels. The prepress team must re-identify and re-specify each colour as a Pantone spot colour before production — a correction that adds prepress time and risk. Define all colours as Pantone spot colours in the Swatches panel from the outset of the design.

Designing with overlapping elements without considering overprint or knockout: In a screen printing design where two colour areas overlap or meet at a boundary, the designer must decide whether the front colour knocks out (removes) the back colour at the boundary, or whether the front colour overprints the back colour (printing on top of it, potentially creating a third mixed colour). Leaving this decision undefined — submitting artwork with overlapping colour areas without specifying knockout or overprint — forces the prepress team to make a judgement call that may not match the designer’s intent. Define all overprint and knockout relationships explicitly in the artwork.

Not accounting for design size at the time of design: Designing a screen printing layout without knowing the intended print size leads to a design that either has features below the minimum feature size at the intended scale (discovered at prepress) or has text and elements that are too large for the specified garment print area. Always confirm the print size specification — print width and height in millimetres for each placement on the garment — before beginning artwork development, and design within those confirmed dimensions.

Regional Insights — UAE, GCC and Africa

UAE: Screen printing is the backbone of the UAE promotional products garment decoration market — the method behind the enormous volume of branded apparel produced for GITEX, Arab Health, The Big 5, UAE National Day programmes, and the constant flow of corporate conference and event merchandise that the UAE’s events industry generates year-round.

The most common screen printing artwork issues in the UAE corporate market are:

• Full-colour designs submitted without colour separation for a spot colour specification — typically a design created for digital media, repurposed for event merchandise without adaptation
• Arabic text and Arabic calligraphy submitted as live text (requiring font) or at font sizes below screen printing minimum legibility
• National Day programmes submitting the UAE official National Day visual assets (downloaded as PNG) rather than vector artwork, requiring prepress redrawing

UAE screen printing facilities vary significantly in their prepress capabilities — from sophisticated pre-separated digital workflow facilities capable of processing complex multi-colour jobs with CMYK and spot colour combinations, to smaller operations that require simple, clean spot colour vector files and have limited in-house prepress correction capability. Brief accordingly: know your supplier’s capability before submitting artwork.

Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia’s event and promotional merchandise market mirrors the UAE in its screen printing volume and artwork requirements. The Kingdom’s largest screen printing demand periods are Saudi National Day (23 September) and Founding Day (22 February) — both generating very large volume programmes for government entities, corporations, and community organisations. Lead times for Saudi National Day screen printing programmes are comparable to UAE National Day — plan six weeks minimum from artwork to delivery for large programmes.

Africa: Screen printing is deeply embedded in African promotional products and branded apparel production across the continent. South Africa has a mature, well-equipped screen printing industry serving corporate, events, and retail markets at international quality standards. In other African markets, screen printing quality is more variable — for pan-African programmes requiring consistent quality, centralised production at a UAE or South African facility with quality-controlled distribution is more reliable than distributed local production.

CTA — Screen Printing Artwork Assessment and Production GiftSuppliers.ae’s screen printing prepress team reviews colour separation, spot colour specification, and minimum feature compliance for every UAE and GCC corporate screen printing brief — advising on preparation requirements before production begins. Submit your screen printing brief

Case Study: Artwork Revision Cascade — GITEX Exhibition Polo Shirts

Organisation: The regional marketing team of a global enterprise software company, Dubai 

Brief: 1,800 polo shirts for a GITEX Technology Week exhibition — branded polo shirts for exhibition staff across six company divisions, each division requiring a different colour combination of the company logo on a common navy polo shirt base 

Artwork submitted: Six separate design files — one per division — each in PNG format extracted from the company’s internal brand portal

The prepress cascade:

All six files were rejected at prepress on the same day. The prepress checklist identified multiple issues across all six files:

Issue 1 — Format: PNG raster files, not vector. Screen printing requires vector artwork with separated spot colour layers. The PNG files contained the company logo in full CMYK colour as a merged raster image.

Issue 2 — Colour specification: No Pantone references supplied. Each division’s colour combination had been noted in the brief only as colour names (“Divisional blue”, “Accent red”) without Pantone references. The production team could not identify the correct ink mix from colour names.

Issue 3 — White underbase: No white underbase specified. All six designs were intended for navy polo shirts — an underbase was required for all of them. The original cost quotation had not included the underbase screen, producing a cost discrepancy.

Issue 4 — Print size: No print size specified in the brief. The prepress team could not confirm minimum feature compliance or production suitability without the intended print dimensions.

The revision process:

The marketing team contacted the company’s global brand team to request: vector source files for the logo in all six division colour variants, Pantone references for all divisional colours. The global brand team provided the vector source files within 48 hours.

The marketing coordinator then worked with the production team’s prepress technician to: convert each design to vector spot colour specification, add the white underbase layer to each file, confirm print size (100mm x 80mm left chest for all six variants), and specify Pantone references from the received brand files.

Total delay caused: 4 working days — representing a significant portion of the 10-day production timeline available before GITEX delivery.

Outcome: All 1,800 polo shirts produced and delivered the day before GITEX — with zero buffer. The production ran without further issues once correctly prepared artwork was submitted.

What a correctly prepared artwork brief should have included:

• Six Adobe Illustrator vector files, one per division, with Pantone spot colours named precisely
• A written colour specification: Pantone reference for each colour in each variant
• White underbase specification: “White underbase required — all variants on navy fabric”
• Print size specification: “Print size 100mm wide x 80mm tall, left chest placement”
• A garment mockup showing the placement position on the polo shirt

Key lesson: For multi-variant screen printing programmes with different colour combinations of the same base design, prepare each variant as a separate correctly separated vector file — not as colour variations of a raster master. The vector separation is the production file; the raster PNG is a reference image. The two serve completely different purposes, and substituting one for the other is the most common cause of screen printing prepress rejection in UAE corporate programmes.

Frequently Asked Questions About Artwork For Screen Printing Setup

Q: What file format do I need for screen printing? 

Vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator (.ai) or EPS format, with all colours defined as named Pantone spot colour swatches. Each colour should ideally be on a separate, clearly named layer. All text must be outlined (converted to paths). The file should be set at the intended print size in millimetres. Do not submit PNG, JPEG, or general-purpose PDF files — these are not separated for screen production and will require prepress correction that delays production.

Q: How many colours can I have in a screen printing design? 

Technically, there is no absolute maximum — but practically, most UAE screen printing facilities work comfortably up to six or eight colours, and costs increase with each additional screen. Each colour adds one screen (AED 30–80 in the UAE market) and one print pass. For corporate logo applications, most designs use two to four spot colours. On dark fabric, add one additional screen for the white underbase. Evaluate whether all colours in the design are essential — reducing from four to three colours saves one screen cost per production run, across all future production runs.

Q: What is a white underbase and when do I need it? 

A white underbase is a layer of white ink printed first on the fabric before the colour inks, providing an opaque foundation on dark fabric. Without it, colour inks on dark fabric are affected by the fabric colour — a yellow ink on black fabric appears greenish and muted. You need a white underbase any time the fabric is darker than the lightest colour ink in your design. On navy, black, dark red, or dark green fabric, a white underbase is required for any colour print that must appear at full vibrancy.

Q: Can screen printing reproduce my company’s gradient logo?

Standard spot colour screen printing cannot reproduce smooth gradients — it deposits flat, solid colours. Gradients require halftone simulation (where a dot pattern simulates tonal variation) or replacement with flat stepped colours. For a corporate logo where the gradient is essential to brand recognition, discuss with your supplier whether halftone simulation or a flat colour simplification best serves the specific application. For most corporate apparel applications, a flat colour simplification produces cleaner, more durable results than halftone simulation.

Q: What is colour registration in screen printing and why does it matter for my artwork? 

Registration is the precision of alignment between multiple colour layers — each colour is printed by a separate screen pass, and the alignment between passes has a tolerance of ±0.5–1.5mm. Where two colour areas are intended to meet precisely at a boundary, misregistration within this tolerance produces either a white gap (if the colours don’t quite meet) or an overlap (if they go slightly past the boundary). Artwork with very thin colour-to-colour boundaries and fine details depending on precise registration requires trapping — a slight planned overlap between adjacent colour areas — to prevent white gaps at the boundaries.

Q: How do I specify artwork for different colourways of the same design?

For designs with multiple colourways — the same graphic in navy-and-white for one division, in red-and-gold for another — prepare a separate, correctly separated vector file for each colourway. Each colourway file contains the same design structure but with different Pantone spot colour swatches assigned to the design elements. Clearly label each file with its colourway specification: “Design_DivisionA_Pantone286C_871C.ai”. Do not submit a single file with colour notes — each colourway requires its own separated production file.