Impressions Magazine posted their latest gallery of inspirational decorated apparel today, and in this latest MULTIMEDIA and Digitizing Artistry gallery, Black Duck was prominently featured through our one-of-a-kind apron for local favorite, Dion’s Pizza! Created from a design once used for company reward jackets, this beatiful, but work-sturdy apron features a detailed rendition of the famous Dion’s logo, complete with all of the wood-cut inspired lines you would expect from this classic piece of logo artistry.
Thanks to the good people of Impressions, and thanks to Dion’s for all the awesome pizza, subs, and salads over the years! (we paid for them all, don’t feel bad, folks! ) We’re happy we’ve been able to help you promote your great products and outfitting your employees with identifiable and professional uniforms and apparel has been a pleasure!
This lacy-backed dress made an excellent canvas for Erich's metalwork-inspired designs.
As we hinted in a previous post, the work of Black Duck’s embroidery digitizer, Erich Campbell, has been featured in Stitches Magazine’s latest fashion shoot, “Bring on the Glam” with his medieval, Anglo-Saxon inspired ethnic embroidery styling. Erich also posted about it on his blog for Stitches magazine, describing the artistic process he went through in creating this fashion-ready piece. Reading through his process gives you a window into how Black Duck operates, building great finished garments, with attention to detail from the fabric, to the design, to the embroidery setup, to the decoration materials, and right through to the execution- we approach each piece as a whole, making every step count.
We know that not many of our customers are looking to create something meant for models and mansions, but when you want your corporate logo, team mascot, or even home furnishings done well, why not look to people who can do so much more than the average left-chest logo? Black Duck features experienced artists and designers in-house for free consultation. Whether you need a baseball hat or a ball gown, Black Duck can find a way to make your visions come to life, just like Erich’s did!
Though it looks better in person, you can see the deep level of detail in this initial test print.
Have you ever wanted to place something truly artistic on a T-shirt? If your art is more than the average logo, or if you are promoting truly fine works, there’s no reason why screen printing can’t suit your needs. Black Duck’s staff is skilled in the recreation of fine art pieces, and though we don’t always have such masterworks to contend with, we recently had just such an order that really shows the versatility of the seemingly humble Tee.
Not long ago, the sales staff was surprised to see a customer enter the shop with a rather large piece of art. Measuring feet to a side rather than the normal inches of most source material we see, this panoramic canvas from our turned out to be an amazing Native American painting by skilled New Mexico artist Yellowman; a vibrant, rich, and detailed piece with more than just its size to make it impressive. No sooner than it was in the door did we hear what we knew would make this job a challenge, this needs to go on a T-shirt.
Immediately we set to work, suggesting how we might crop and arrange it to end up with a selection from the original that would not only capture the spirit of the art, but create T-shirt that people would want to wear; a shirt with a design that provided good coverage and was visible from a distance, all without compromising the original piece. One of our skilled artists, Barry Townsend, created the new layout, and tuned the color separations that would become the screens from which the designs would be printed.
In cooperation with our skilled screen-printing supervisor, Mike Adams, the first test prints were created, and under the watchful eye of Yellowman, who was present for proofing of the initial prints, Barry and Mike tweaked and adjusted the print- achieving a final piece that had great fidelity to the vibrant colors of the original art. When they were done, not only was our customer happy with the outcome, we were all more than impressed with what the fine detail and depth of color they had achieved. If the test prints weren’t impressive enough, on every one of the various colors the customer had ordered, the prints looked fantastic, and maintained the overall soft hand that our work is known for.
We’re proud to say that though we love to print your company logos, team-sports names, and all of the simple pieces that are fairly common in our industry, we can achieve that fine-art look that pleases even the most discerning customer, even the painter of the original of a piece himself! If you find yourself curious about promoting your creation through a truly finely printed T-shirt, don’t hesitate to give Black Duck a chance to make your genius into wearable art.
The fine folks at Stitches Magazine have decided to feature us and a photo of our owners, Doug and Dana Bird before one of the walls in our famously crimson conference room in their latest issue. We were selected due to our bold use of color in the decoration of our fully-stocked showroom and conference room spaces as Stitches discussed the psychological uses of color in business spaces.
Our red showroom was meant to get our customers revved up! Just ask Doug if you see him stepping out of his awesome red Corvette, or even when he drives the classic Ford truck, complete with Black Duck tailgate, that graces illustrations on our main website- red gets your pulse going! Admittedly, red is supposed to increase sales, and while you might feel like we’re trying to brainwash you, we’re not all that bad. We haven’t started using subliminal messages or tried to hypnotize anyone, we just want to give you the energy to be as fired up as we are about your customized apparel and accessories!
If you’d like to get a snapshot view about color theory and how it affects sales, we recommend checking out this interesting and attractive infographic from the folks at KISSMetrics. It breaks down both the importance of image and the effects various colors could have on your customers, and is well worth a look. There’s a great deal of information out there, but this simple chart should whet your interest to take up a further search if you’re so inclined.
If, after you’ve checked out our mention in Stitches or read up on color with the folks at KISSMetrics, you feel the need to retool your color scheme, Black Duck is here to help you with your apparel, accessories, signage and more. After all, if we paid this much attention to the color and art on our walls, imagine what we’ll do with your gear!
A mock-up of how our visual style guide might look.
Simply put, a visual style guide is a document that contains the details you need to give anyone who will be decorating anything with your logo/brand in order to create a consistent rendition of your art. It lays out the look of your logo, the fonts that you’ve selected, and the colors you use in a way that’s easy for printers and art departments to understand so that no matter what you are having made, your logo looks the way you want it to look, every time. They can be as simple a single page containing only an image of your logo with some approved color numbers from a standard system like Pantoneand a list of the font names used. If you are producing more complicated items, you may want a more detailed style guide, with several color examples made to show the proper way to render your logo when it appears on different backgrounds, multiple versions of your logo for larger and smaller areas to be decorated, or for horizontal and vertical decoration areas, even spacing to be used when adding other logos and text to your logo, font choices for documents on which your logo appears, and sample layouts of documents, apparel, or promotional products.
Why do I need one?
The easy answer is that it allows you to be in control of the way your logo is presented, but there are more benefits than the obvious control over your image. Having a prepared style guide saves you time and money on art preparation. One of the most time-consuming processes undertaken by most artists is the search for fonts used in a logotype. A style guide not only eliminates this search, it can provide a host of answers about proper color usage and sizing that would otherwise cost you more preparation time and might require an artist or decorator to contact you repeatedly. Having a style guide means never having to repeat yourself when describing the look you want to achieve. Moreover, you will likely find that your entire production time is reduced, seeing that many printers and apparel decorators will favor by necessity a job with complete information over one that requires several rounds of interaction with a customer to set up. The decorator has to keep machines moving to insure profitability, and if you have your designs in order, you may end up with your design approved and slotted into an empty production line while an artist waits for details from a less prepared customer.
How do I create a style guide?
Generally, you would have this created by the artist that designed your logo. If you designed the logo yourself, you may find that your printer or apparel decorator’s art department can help you not only to redraw clean, vector-based art that you will be able to use for all your printing and decorating needs, but to create a professional-looking and information-packed style guide. Most decorators will have access to professional color-matching systems and can help you to pick out the proper color codes to include in the guide. Moreover, if they have already done the work of searching out your fonts and redrawing your logo, they’ll be armed with all of the font names and measurements they need to produce the sample images and font lists. Common simple logo style guide sheets include at a minimum the full color version of a logo with color numbers, a single-color version of the logo for simple promotional products and paper goods, versions for dark and light backgrounds and/or backgrounds that share a color with the logo, and a list of fonts used. All you’ll have to do is sit down with your decorator’s art department to establish any other information or logo versions you’d like to include. Make sure to get yourself a PDF file, the Adobe document standard for which nearly all computers have a pre-installed viewer, and you’ll be set to send it to anyone who will be reproducing your logo.
What if I don’t think I need a style guide or can’t afford to create one?
No matter if you have a style guide or not, be aware of the basic needs of any printer or decorator, and you’ll still come out ahead. Know your fonts, have a good idea about the colors you want to use, and be prepared to answer questions about what you want. Check out my previous post on saving art and setup costs, and you’ll be prepared.
So, there you have it. Visual style guides are useful tools for keeping your logo’s look consistent and your printing and decorating worry-free. If you need a style guide, the art department at Black Duck is ready to help- either as an additional service on your next decorated apparel or promotional products order, or any time you want to create this logo life-saver, we’ve got the staff to help you tell the world how to handle your brand.
Niamh, representing our favorite stock design site, Urban Threads, has honored us by singling out the work of our embroidery digitizer, Erich Campbell, in her latest post on their fun and funky blog, Stitchpunk. Check it out here:
You may be familiar with our work from Stitches Magazine but you probably haven’t seen all the awesome placements, spectacular color palettes, and yes, embroidered skulls, that Niamh serves up in this post about all the modern fashion and fun there is to be had with machine embroidery.
In case you thought we were falling off, this is a great time to announce that Erich is working with the fine folks at Stitches Magazine for an upcoming fashion shoot in the next couple of months, so we’ll have more of his extravagant embroidery stylings to share with you in the very near future.
Thanks again to Niamh for thinking of our work, and to Stitches Magazine for trusting Erich to design and execute something special! Remember, if you want cool embroidery like the samples you’ve seen at StitchPunk, Black Duck is here with our needles threaded and our design staff ready to rock!
Sometimes we have to charge for the creation or revision of your source material to get the clean art we need in order to create the most eye-catching printed and embroidered garments. Though art preparation services are part of what we offer as a complete decoration and design service, the truth is that though we love creating art and making your own art look its best, there are a few labor-intensive tasks that we would love to do less often, and the omission of which, with a little effort on your part, may lead to reduced fees and a quicker turn-around for your job.
This is what we see when we zoom in- It's a lot harder to redraw that Raster file!
1. Get the best source material you can! Though the best art is in a vector format (think Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Draw) we want the best, highest resolution graphics you can get. If you’ve had paper printing or a sign created for you, your paper printing company may already a vector file prepared! Don’t despair if you haven’t had anything digital produced, or if your art is only on paper. Simply bring us the best, clearest, largest (within reason) version you can find. What many customers don’t know is that images from company websites are almost always far too low in resolution for us to use, and even if we must use them, that the lower the quality of the image we have to work with, the longer and more expensive the drawing process will be.
2. Know your fonts! Even if you don’t have the most wonderful source material in the world, make sure that if you want a specific style of type that you know at least the name of your font. You would scarcely believe the number of hours our art department spends in a week tracking down beloved fonts for our customers. Even if you have gotten us your vector art, often the fonts aren’t embedded in the document. If you’ve created the document yourself, or you are asking your print artist to send us a vector file, having them convert the text to outlines/curves will save us tons of time and effort, helping your bottom line. If you don’t know your vector from your raster and have typed something up in Microsoft Word, don’t worry, just make sure you tell us any font names you can.
The logo looks great on paper, but which shirt do you want?
3. Design for your garment! If you’re designing from scratch, make sure you take into account the color and size of the garment on which we are going to print or embroider your image. Check that your design looks good on the garment color you’ve chosen, or that you know what sort of color changes/alterations you want to make if you can’t make them yourself. Likewise, you should avoid making the details of your design too small to reproduce cleanly on your smallest garment. We can adapt the art if we need to, but changes take time, and time is money. Seeing your art on the right background and in the correct size ahead of time can save you a lot of headaches. As I discussed in our last post, 3 Tips for Headwear Design Domination, garments like caps and likewise promotional products like pens and mugs have some real size constraints that could make your art ineffective at getting out your message unless you design for the area available.
So there you have it- 3 top tips to save yourself time and money, and to give our art department more time to do the important work of making your design look its best. As much as we’d love to have great source art come in with every job, there’s no need to feel bad if you have the old ‘sketch on a cocktail napkin’ or even just a good idea when you walk in our doors. The secret fourth tip is this: have us design the art for you entirely! Rather than pay for round after round of beating a piece of art that you aren’t happy with into shape, you can have our veteran art staff create you something brand new, or to update your original concept. It might not be as inexpensive as coming in our door with a nearly finished vector file, but in the end you’ll have clean, professional art that you can be sure is ready for your garment and for anything else you can imagine embellishing, and the value of that is far more than our very reasonable pricing might lead you to believe.
It might seem counter-intuitive that a company might offer to help you save money on their own services, but that’s a big part of what we do for our customers; we educate. One of the best reasons to choose Black Duck centers on our experience and willingness to try new things, and nothing says more about our knowledge than how free we are to share it with you. Ultimately, even if you know nothing about your art and you’d just like to hand off your job to a professional, we’ve got the staff that can make things as easy as picking out garments, sharing your goal, and picking up the finished product.
Do you find yourself squinting at your headwear, wondering how the awesome logo you dropped off with your decorator became this awful, cramped and tiny blob? Are you wishing for a retail look like your favorite promotional hat, or that cap you bought to support your favorite team? Do you wish that your headwear had the awesome visual impact of the stuff you see in the stores? We’re here to help.
At Black Duck, we embroider and screen print garments of all descriptions, yet the most popular garments, despite the incredible pace of innovation and all the new offerings in the space, are t-shirts, polo shirts, and, of course, baseball caps. Over the years, we have refined our techniques to create incredible results on all of these garments, but no matter what we do technically to decorate any apparel, the best outcomes are from designs that are most suited to the application. We’re going to give you the tips to make your headwear, and thus your logo, stand out in the crowd.
1. Design Size and Aspect – Go wide!
This hat from Red Cliff has a 6" wide design and really makes an impact with it's fuzzy felt appliqué!
You want to make your logo visible, but once it’s on the cap it just looks so small! Though you may have seen huge designs on retail gear that crawl all over a cap, those pieces were embroidered before the cap was put together. When you are embroidering finished caps, there are limitations as to the embroiderable area. Caps have a vertical area that’s limited to roughly 2 1/4 inches in height, but can have embroideries all around the crown, and designs up to 6″ in width are easy to execute. If you have a tall, narrow design you are going to end up losing a lot of detail when the design is resized to fit that all important vertical measurement. More than that, you are missing out on a lot of valuable real-estate that could be used to place your business name or other important info and images!
Fixes: Shrink your design to the finished height and check for tiny details- see what can be eliminated or altered. Move text inside the design area out to the sides and size it up so it can be read from the handshake distance. Stretch the design widthwise if it doesn’t damage the recognizability- you can even tilt the design or turn it sideways and place it off-center for an edgy, retail-inspired look!
2. Legibility – Remove, Replace, and Reorient your Text!
You really want people to be able to find you, get in touch with you, and use your business, right? So you decided to put it all on the cap- address, phone number, website, store hours, services you can render, and you even (sort of) fit a logo up there! The problem is, now everything is so cluttered and small that nobody can read a word. Well, in order to sew cleanly in the first place, text must be at least 1/5 of an inch in height, but even that is really to small to see at any distance. It may be time to reconsider both what you need to communicate and how you can make that work on your caps.
Fixes:Remove or move some text. Too simple, right? You might think that all your text is too important. Well, think about how someone will see your cap, are they going to stop your workers or the customer you gave the cap so that they can write down your address? Consider what information can you add to the cap and still make sure that your logo has enough space to really make a bold appearance; remember that you’ll have to catch someone’s eye before they’ll look at that all-important information. Also, can you move the information to the side or back of the cap? It might be slightly more expensive, but having a name and website on the cap back might be more valuable than adding it to the front design area- after all, how often are you looking someone right in the eye compared to the amount of time you spend in line stuck looking at the back of someone’s head?
This cap from M80 is off-center, features three-dimensional foam and has a total retail look, made right in-house by Black Duck!
3. Impact – Consider Special Designs and Techniques just for Caps!
Let’s just put it bluntly, your cap is boring. It looks just like your business cards and you are happy it’s recognizable, but it’s not like the crazy designs you see at the skate-shop in the mall or your friend got at that car show. Yours is a logo and some text front and center on a plain cap, and though it looks good, you want it to look cool. Did you know that your local embroiderer can likely do a lot of the same processes you see on those caps in the store, or that they have more styles, colors, and finishes of caps than you can imagine? What if you added something to your logo- left it recognizable, but tweaked it just enough to give it that wow factor? It might be time to talk to the designer at your apparel decoration shop!
Fixes: Get creative with an expert! For a fairly paltry sum you can bring in a trendy retail cap you like, a sketch, or just an idea, add your plain, old logo and have someone at your local shop work up something great. Most of us in the industry have a great deal of experience designing for apparel and likely have some concepts to show you! Consider off-center design placements or special techniques that don’t work anywhere but caps. Add three-dimensional foam embroidery to make your design stand out! So long as you have big, bold lines, you can have that logo puffed out for incredible impact! Use textured or printed appliqué, rhinestones for ladies’ designs, or specialty threads! Don’t settle for a carbon copy of your letterhead, do something awesome! It won’t necessarily change your setup costs, and despite the possibility of a little extra cost per cap, the power of having a hat that your employees and customers want to wear is invaluable! After all, how will a cap promote your business, team, or club if no one sees it?
There you have it- the keys to awesome cap designs- Go wide, make your text count, and get creative! Caps may have limitations, but when you think about what is possible and plan ahead, you can make your caps really work for you. Your decorator can handle it, and your employees and customers will thank you by wearing your awesome cap (and promoting you) the next time they venture out into a crowd.
This multimedia print and rough-cut appliqué was a hit for Sandia Prep
Though there are many trends we’ve seen rise and fall in the garment decoration industry, some of the processes, applications, and types of decoration that came through our doors this year seem destined either to dovetail into the next fashion-forward craze on the horizon or to stubbornly buck the popular wave due to the large number of fans that have stayed true to their favorite gear. The first trend that seems to cut across the new movement toward minimalism in Spring 2011 fashion is Distressed Applique. Though it is rough, high-contrast, and everything that the current movement towards smooth, neutral fashion, this technique has become a major part of decoration for schools, teams, and resortwear and doesn’t show any sign of dropping off just yet. The next style of embroidery that we saw become more and more popular this was Tonal Embroidery. Though we’ve seen tone-on-tone embroidery (think a black or dark gray logo on a black shirt) in high-end corporate decoration before, this year it seemed to be the choice of many designers and even businesses who wanted to achieve a retail, designer look. It was most popular in our shop as a treatment for caps, and often came with 3D Puff Foam to create a tail, relief version of the tone on tone logos to increase the contrast and visual impact. This style falls right in line with th latest trend toward understated decoration.
This Laser Etched Blanket photo is courtesy of mhaithaca - Beam us up one of those!
The last and most surprising decoration technique that really picked up speed in our shop was Laser-Etched Polar Fleece. Also a tone-on-tone treatment, laser etching cuts off the fibers of the high nap (think fuzz) on polar fleece jackets, blankets, and the like. Due to the ability to create impressively large and yet tonally-understated images, it became a favorite treatment for companies that wanted to give logo-emblazoned accessories that didn’t scream ‘giveaway‘.
Santa Duck hopes someone brought Black Duck gear to go under your tree!
To all of our customers, past present and future, we here at Black Duck Embroidery and Screen Printing want to wish you a happy holiday season. Whether you choose to use our services to buy your employees great logowear, to print up t-shirts for your band, to make the jerseys for your kid’s soccer team, to make a tablecloth or banner for your charity event, or even to embroider the name on your new grandchild’s first stocking, we are honored to make the garments and accessories that you use to show your pride. your joy, and even your love for the important people and places in your life.
We’re thankful for your continued interest in our work, and for your support. We can’t thank you enough.
So, for everyone here at Black Duck, happy holidays to you and your important people!
) We’re happy we’ve been able to help you promote your great products and outfitting your employees with identifiable and professional uniforms and apparel has been a pleasure!
Niamh, representing our favorite stock design site, 
