How to Place an Order for Screen Printing Embellishment?

By lucas | Published: September 8, 2011

In a continuing effort to simplify our various processes for our valued customers, this blog will address the steps that follow preparing a purchase order for screen printing contract embellishment services provided by Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing. (The purchase order itself was covered in our last blog and the intricacies of artwork submittal were covered in the previous 6 blog posts.)

Once the purchase order and the artwork are prepared for screen printing and ready for submittal, two additional documents are necessary in order to complete the order placement process – the credit card authorization form and the shipping request form. (If your company is a Florida corporation, you will also need to submit your Florida corporations tax certificate, which will eliminate the necessity for you to pay sales tax on your order.)

The credit card authorization form requests the company or person’s name, the type of credit card, (American Express, MasterCard, Visa or Discover), the card number, and the code. It also requests the card holder’s name, statement mailing address, telephone number and email address as well as the name, company name, address, telephone number and email address to be used for the shipment.

The shipping request form is a detailed sheet that gives Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing all the information we will need when we ship your order of embellished items. Your shipping request form enumerates your shipping address, and the form of shipping that will employed – UPS or Federal Express and the exact shipping services that you request. Remember, the faster the shipping you request, the more costly it will be. This is a very good reason to place your contract embellishment order early. We take 7-10 business days to complete screen printing orders.

Note that these two are PDF documents, which means they may be filled out online, but they cannot be saved on your computer.

Once you have all these documents filled out, you may either email or fax them with your PO (or Embellishment form) to screen@atlasembroidery.com or faxed to 954-922-1212. Artwork must also be received by overnight or snail mail, but the first is obviously preferred since we cannot schedule your job until we have everything in hand.

Do you have questions? Or, do you wish to place an order? Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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What Constitutes a Purchase Order for Embroidery Embellishment? Part 2

By lucas | Published: September 2, 2011

Continuing our online help desk to make things simpler for our valued customers, this blog will reiterate that the first step in doing business with Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing is the purchase order (PO) or Embellishment Form. This PO may be conveniently filled out online and must be filled out completely for each job. This also applies to repeats of previous jobs. If you are ordering the exact same embellishment, you don’t need a different PO for each item, for example, a sweatshirt and a t-shirt could go on the same PO.

Important: The PO is a .pdf document that allows you to fill it out and print it once, but you cannot save it to your computer. If you need copies, you can print it out once and make them with your copying machine. You may fax the Embellishment Form/PO to us at the number indicated on the form. But, most customers just attach the filled out form to an email to the appropriate department along with the other necessary documents, which will be discussed in future blogs.

At the top right of the form, you will see boxes for screen and embroidery. Here, you check the screen printing box for the type of job and supply a distinct PO number. Please note whether the mailing address is a residential or a commercial one. At the bottom of the form, we will also need to know if we are shipping the order (details will be requested on the shipping form).

The drawings of garments may be utilized to indicate where on the particular garment the screen printing should go. This must be indicated by hand so, in this case, you will need to fax the form to us. The “Numbers” indicator is for team numbers on t-shirts. Please separate these numbers with commas.

The Garment Type and Sizes box indicates the breakdown by size of garments (usually t-shirts) When you total these up, that represents the total items for that job. On the left of that box, the Y before the sizes means “youth” sizes.

Please use the Special Instruction lines for any important information that isn’t called for on the PO form. If your item isn’t pictured on the PO, simply indicate what the item is. Just remember that the PO must contain all important information about the job: Embellishment method, item/style, quantity and size breakdown. Other specifics are covered on other forms, which we will address in upcoming blogs.

Questions? Want to place an order? Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

 

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What Constitutes a Purchase Order for Embroidery Embellishment?

By lucas | Published: August 26, 2011

Because we want to make things simple for our customers, we have instituted this online help desk. The first step in doing business with Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing is the purchase order (PO) or Embellishment Form, which may be filled out conveniently online. The PO must be filled out completely for each job, including repeats of any previous jobs. If you are ordering embellishment on more than one type of item – like hats and shirts – each item must have its own purchase order because it is a separate job.

Important: The PO is a .pdf document that allows you to fill it out and print it once, but you cannot save it to your computer. If you need copies, you can print it out once and make them with your copying machine. You may fax the Embellishment Form/PO to us at the number indicated on the form. But, most customers just attach the filled out form to an email to the appropriate department along with the other necessary documents, which will be discussed in future blogs.

At the top right of the form, you will see boxes for screen and embroidery. Here, you check the embroidery box for the type of job and supply a distinct PO number. Please note whether the mailing address is a residential or a commercial one. At the bottom of the form, we will also need to know if we are shipping or dropping off the order.

The drawings of garments may be utilized to indicate where on the particular garment the embroidery should go. This must be indicated by hand so, in this case, you will need to fax the form to us. The “Numbers” indicator is for team numbers on t-shirts. Please separate these numbers with commas.

The Garment Type and Sizes box indicates the breakdown by size of garments (usually t-shirts) When you total these up, that represents the total items for that job. On the left of that box, the Y before the sizes means “youth” sizes.

Please use the Special Instruction lines for any important information that isn’t called for on the PO form. If your item isn’t pictured on the PO, simply indicate what the item is.

Questions? Want to place an order? Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Provides More Resolution Information for Online Customer Help Desk

By lucas | Published: August 12, 2011

Specific Requirements for Art Submittal: Resolution – Part 6

This is our final blog of our series addressing the submittal of art for the embroidery and screen printing services provided by Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing. We greatly value our customer base of promotional distributors, advertising and public relations agencies. This blog reviews the requirements of resolution, using the measurement of DPI, or dots per inch, for our printing applications.

Scanned Images:

  • All scanned images should be no less than 300dpi RGB color space. For grayscale and monochrome black & white line art, ideal resolution is 600dpi.
  • Scans that do not meet resolution specifications are not guaranteed to output well and submitting agency assumes responsibility.
  • If you require scanning, please provide color or black and white photographs not less than 5×7 inches displaying good focus and properly composed.

 Art from the Web:

  • Art and photos downloaded from the Web must meet the above requirements for optimum output. Photos downloaded from Web pages that have been saved at low resolution (72 – 100dpi) cannot be used as they may not print clearly.

 Lines Per Inch:

  • Pre-press output for screen printing is widely divergent from traditional angles and screens used for offset printing and lithography. Our standard line screen output ranges from 30 lpi – 70 lpi which yields an average tonal range between 15% – 75% density.

 Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Provides Resolution Information for Online Customer Help Desk

By lucas | Published: August 5, 2011

Specific Requirements for Art Submittal – Part 5

This is our fifth in a series of blogs to address submittal of art for the embroidery and screen printing services provided by Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing. We greatly value our customer base of promotional distributors, advertising and public relations agencies.

We also understand that our requirements may seem complicated and difficult to understand at times. We hope this series is helpful. As we have tried to accomplish in this series, in future blogs, we will try to address all of the technical aspects of our business so that our customers may have a better understanding of these complexities.

Atlas’s Art Requirements (Do’s and Don’ts):

 1 -All files should be built at 100% output size and sent ready to open with regard to raster artwork. Vector files do not need to be sized as they are easily re-sized without quality degradation.

2- Avoid file compressions, such as LZW and JPEG routines, which cause damage to the original production file.

3- Do not include halftone images such as those used in magazines and newspapers. (Halftone images simulate imagery through the use of dots that vary in size, shape, or spacing that actually trick the human eye.)

 

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

 

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Provides Software Information for Customer Help Desk

By lucas | Published: July 28, 2011

Specific Requirements for Art Submittal – Part 4

In an effort to provide detailed information for our customer base, specifically the promotional distributor, advertising and PR agency, we have devised a Help Desk as part of our weekly blog to demystify the processes involved in ordering embroidery and screen printing applications. Recent blogs covered accepted software, vector graphics and raster graphics. The following list includes more specific requirements of Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing::

  1. Please specify the authoring platform (PC or Mac) when submitting art to ensure accuracy. Conversion of files not meeting these software requirements are subject to additional charges for production.
  2. We request that all Corel Draw files either be exported as .ai or eps for maximum compatibility but please submit the native CDR file with those exported formats to insure correct re-production. Files from these software applications should have all fonts converted to curves (paths, outlines).
  3. Raster Graphics from the following applications: Photoshop PSD, JPEG and TIFF files can be acceptable only if sent in high resolution. 300 dpi files for these formats must be submitted and color separation art charges will most likely be applied to these types of formats.
  4. Submitted artwork that requires reworking for production will incur an art charge (most jobs require some amount of work by the Graphics Dept. to setup for production), unless Vector files are supplied.
  5. We typically cannot accept artwork created in the following software: Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Word, Adobe PageMaker, Quark XPress and FreeHand.

 

Our next Help Desk blog will address resolution issues.

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Distributor Help Desk Continues to Explain Graphics Submittal Process

By lucas | Published: July 21, 2011

Raster Artwork – Part 3

Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing’s last blog discussed Vector Graphics. As promised, this blog discusses the other type of core graphics used in our industry – Raster. While these two formats are quite different from each other, they complement each other for the different graphics requirements of our industry.

Raster Graphics Simplified

A Raster image is a collection of dots, or tiny colored squares called pixels. This grid of pixels is called a bitmap. Each pixel is assigned a color and when viewed together, they form an image. Images are scanned and converted to pixels to create a raster image.

The most common form of raster images are scanned graphics and Web graphics. Most of the images you see online are Raster graphics. Your computer monitor displays Raster graphics and your digital camera produces Raster graphics. Photographs usually look more accurate as raster images. This is the main benefit of Raster graphics. The gradients are smoother and Raster maintains the subtle details within the photograph.

The larger the image, the more disk space the image file will take up. To deal with this, image compression algorithms help to reduce the file sizes – JPEG and GIF are the most common compressed image formats. Others include BMP and TIF.

The resolution of a Raster image is expressed in dots per inch or dpi. When a raster image is enlarged, the pixels produce a jagged appearance. This means that Raster images are not scalable, as Vector images are. The way each format handles resolution is the key to when they are used. For this reason, when producing logos, which typically are presented in different sizes, Vector graphics software is typically used instead of Raster because resolution doesn’t suffer when Vector is scaled up or down.

 

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Distributor Help Desk Demystifies Graphics Submittal Process

By lucas | Published: July 15, 2011

Vector Artwork – Part 2

In a concerted effort to demystify the technicalities involved in submitting artwork for both embroidery and screen printing applications, Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing offers the second in a series of Help Desk subjects. This one will discuss Vector graphics. Next week, we will address Raster graphics.

Vector Graphics

Vector Graphics are based on fairly complex mathematical formulas that, according to a fairly technical article in Wikipedia, consist of “geometrical “primitives” such as points, lines, curves and shapes that represent images in computer graphics.” (By comparison, Raster uses pixels.)

With the exception of Flash (a vector graphics program), most browsers (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox) do not support vector graphics on the Web. This means you don’t normally see Vector graphics on the Internet, unless you are looking at a Flash produced series of images.

The advantages of Vector

  1. It is resolution independent, because it can be scaled to different sizes while remaining sharp.
  2. It provides smooth curves, instead of jagged ones.
  3. It supports small file sizes for computer drawn artwork (vector art and type, or font), instead of larger sized files, which are impractical because they aren’t as scalable, or able to change size and remain sharp.

Common uses for Vector image formats

  1. Spot color printing, which is most commonly used in screen printing, as well as most other applications, including embroidery, brochures, magazines, and so on.
  2. Logos, which are generally a few solid colors and need to be reproduced in a variety of sizes.
  3. Text, because most letters are made of curves, which is conducive to Vector graphics format. Postscript and TrueType are examples.

 

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing Inaugurates Distributor Help Desk to Facilitate Ordering Process

By lucas | Published: July 8, 2011

 

Software Programs for Art Submittal – Part 1

The last blog we posted talked about how we plan to provide educational information to enable our valued wholesale distributor customers to place orders that maximize dollar value while avoiding the pitfalls that can arise when they don’t understand screen printing industry procedures. This week, we will begin to address the complexities of art submittal. What software programs should our customers use to send us the art for a screen print job?

First, let’s clarify that while many art departments work only in a Mac (graphics) environment, the Graphics Department at Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing processes artwork on both Windows- and Mac-based PCs. This allows us to accept art created in either PC or MAC formats, which allows cross-platform conversion. (We ask that our customers specify the authoring platform (PC or MAC) when submitting art to ensure accuracy.

We adhere to the standard industry definition of reproducible art and reserve the right to accept or reject art depending upon the job. We require native file formats, which are the default file format used by a specific software application. The software applications that we accept for images for any type of printing (whether it is spot printing, 4-color or process printing, or simulated process printing) include the following:

Adobe Illustrator, including all versions up to Adobe CS 5

Corel Draw, including all versions up to Corel Draw X5

Other programs, such as Adobe Acrobat PDF and Adobe EPS must be reviewed to insure compatibility.

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com.

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Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing educates its customers, the promotional products wholesaler

By lucas | Published: July 1, 2011

An East coast discount men’s clothing store called Syms uses the slogan, “an educated consumer is our best customer.” We, at Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing, have our own twist on that slogan, “an educated promotional products wholesaler is our best customer.”

We feel strongly that it’s our job to educate our valued customers to minimize the headaches that they would probably experience with another supplier of embroidery and screen printing services, other than Atlas. Why is this especially important for wholesale distributors?

We believe that it’s particularly important since, very often, they represent a licensee, a distributor, or an advertising or public relations agency, party planners, event companies, or other such entities whose valuable business it would be a disaster to lose. With our help and assistance, the successfully educated promotional products wholesaler wouldn’t make the kind of expensive mistakes that could potentially make their customers go away.

Because of our painstaking guidance, our promotional products wholesalers will understand everything from the ordering process, to design issues, and complexities with regard to garment procurement and much more. The steps involved in a wholesale contract with Atlas Embroidery sound simple: 1. Purchase Order, 2. Art, 3. Payment and 4. Shipping. There are many ways throughout the process where costs and potential problems can be minimized for the customer.

All of these processes and issues will be discussed in greater detail in future blogs during the next few weeks. We hope our wholesale promotional dealer customers will be looking out for them in order to improve their profits and dispel any potential concerns with their next order for embroidery or screen printing services.

Call us today at 954.922.2242 or visit www.atlasembroidery.com

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