One-off t-shirt prints in the UK, dark fabric – advice?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I could do with some new t-shirts, and I figured I may as well design my own this time around. I'm aiming for dark fabric with non-rectangular images with lots of colours.

Having some fun here – I've had a look at thetshirtman.co.uk's site, and the SVG loader doesn't understand Inkscape images, and the GIF loader does the same with my 300 DPI 1 bpp GIF: invisible image, does nothing if you try adding it to the shirt. Their software is horribly broken even by my bug discovery standards.

Two prominent names with a UK presence are Zazzle and Spreadshirt. Spreadshirt play down their digital direct service and make it sound rubbish, but that's what I'd have to use; Zazzle's documentation don't inspire me with confidence either, and neither company could give me an intelligent response to my queries about handling image transparency when I found their documentation lacking. Zazzle have clarified theirs since, but Spreadshirt don't say anything about PNG alpha or GIF transparency.

Anyone had any experience with these services' UK offerings for print-on-demand? How many bad print jobs am I likely to go through due to bad colour balance (I only work in RGB with no profiling), wrong print size (the designer only understands 'M' and apparently doesn't scale to shirt size) and other gotchas? If anyone has a black Firefox t-shirt, that's what I have in mind: non-rectangular half-toned image.

I might be able to pull off vector, but Spreadsheet don't have vector support in their editor, and the site I just tried doesn't understand Inkscape files!

[fossala]

My sister has a t-shirt buisness. If you want I will pm you her email address.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

She does reliable print on demand on dark colours with PNG transparency? I'd like to see the website first and test out their designer. My concern arises over things like how well they deal with RGB, whether GIF and PNG transparency is correctly handled (just because Adobe Flash Player will draw uploaded 32-bit PNGs doesn't mean that their t-shirt printer can do 32-bit digital direct printing!) and whether the colours are decent, something Spreadshirt play down (they claim a "vintage look" ... uh oh)

I was thinking about leaving the designs up on the printer's store, not to make money, but in case anyone else is as hopelessly sad as I am.

[fossala]

The way I get T-shirts made by her is just send her the image. I am about to head out to work, but when I get back I will ring her up and ask her you questions. The quality of her t-shirts are very high, it's mainly all I wear.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Thanks, will be interesting to know what she says.