For t-shirt printing and other promotional garments and merchandise, screen printing is often employed using one of three different methods. The method most commonly used and best suited for a large variety of graphics is called ‘Spot Colour’ printing. Spot color printing is the appropriate procedure for graphic prints that aren’t photographic.

A graphic designer usually chooses the ink colours used to reproduce the graphic images, and they are all Pantone specified. Pantone coated or noncoated color types are selected to clarify the ink hues of the pattern. The Pantone system is a global standard for colour matching where every colour is assigned a unique designation.

When colour identity and uniformity is an issue, for example in branded promotional garments or a large selection of products, this method of spot color printing works very well.

4 Color Process is an additional technique for t-shirt screen printing. This printing process is utilised primarily with photographic designs and sketches comprised of a broad variety of hues, shades and gradations. Hard covers, paperbacks and periodicals all use the same four-colour process.

The transparent inks blend with one another on a plain white backdrop to recreate each of the colours and shades present in the original. This is certainly a much harder procedure to do on material than it is to do on paper. However, the actual method used is mostly the same.  This particular sort of t-shirt printing will, obviously, only be effective on white cloth. It won’t work on coloured garments. When garment screen printers reproduce such full colour images onto coloured fabrics a method called ‘Simulated Process’ is used. The print set-up costs are higher than that of simple spot colour designs and as such only suitable for larger print runs of 100+ Using method similar to spot colour printing to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image the artwork is separated into various colours and shades

This method is used by every printer and is very popular for reproducing heavy metal and fantasy images taken from CD artwork and reproduced on black t-shirts for band merchandising. This is the most expensive form of printing and as such used only on larger print runs due to the higher set up costs involving the colour separations and larger number of colours used to print the images.