ImagesMagUK_Digital-Edition_Dec17

www.images-magazine.com DECEMBER 2017 images 55 TIPS & TECHNIQUES Erich Campbell is an award-winning digitiser, embroidery columnist and educator, with 18 years’ experience both in production and the management of e-commerce properties. He is the partner relationship manager for DecoNetwork in the USA. www.erichcampbell.com Accessorise Rather than decorate the printed item, you could use an accessory or a coordinating piece of apparel that can work with the printed piece while offering a better canvas for your design. This would mean a price increase for your client, so it won’t be the preferred solution for every order, but it can’t hurt to prepare a coordinating garment as part of your pitch. No matter which strategy you adopt, make sure to clear all alterations of a design with your client before the needles meet the garment. Although these solutions do mean more active consultation with your client, the delight they feel when the end result is easy to read and more integrated Recolour your logo to align with the palette of the print and intentionally go for a lower-contrast tonal look ...My friend asked if I could run his design on some customer-supplied shirts. As soon as I said yes, he sent me a fuzzy picture of this fabric swatch. You can see howwith black, white and dark red areas, it would be hard to choose contrasting thread colours for this piece That same highly contrasted paisley shown in the DKD example can demonstrate how going with the flow might be a worthwhile option for some logotypes. The origami duck logo from my previous company, Black Duck Embroidery and Screen Printing, is recognisable enough that even when stitched in one of the four primary colour families seen in the background print, it maintains a fair amount of recognition. Moreover, the tonal look exudes a little dressier feeling than the outlined look shown in the previous example, and fits better with the style of garment one usually sees with this sort of print with their printed product will help to cast you as a favourite branding partner rather than a commodity. Noticing that the ‘ninja head’ portion of the logo looked good, we tried several text colours to no avail. No colour stayed true to the brand and maintained a nice contrast. My friend asked me to come up with a new treatment of the logo specific for apparel that could be used on any background without alteration. I created a new patch-style logo based on the smaller ‘ninja head’ element, which provided a solid colour cover-up to eliminate the pattern behind the logo, while adding an outline to the outer edge to set the logo off from the dark colours in the print In order to show my friend how the background would affect his logo if he didn’t change colours, I recoloured a similar vector pattern and brought it into my digitising software behind his original logos. Often customers need a visual example to really understand the conflicts in colour and line