Table: Shirts are loaded onto a flat surface that moves around the press stopping at each color station for printing. The pallet we pull the shirt over is often referred to as a table.

Tack (Spray Tack): A light adhesive is sprayed on the press pallet to stabilize the t-shirt and keep it from lifting up in the printing process. This adhesive is often referred to as tack or spray tack. Although a residue may be left in the shirt, the tack is water soluble and comes out easily when washed.

Underbase (White Underbase): When printing on dark colored garments, a layer of white ink must be printed first, so the actual logo or design print colors are visible. The under base is also commonly referred to as underlay, white underlay, flash white, or simply base white.

Water-Based Ink: Water-based inks are defined as those that utilize water as the main solvent. That does not mean, however that water is the only solvent. It is significant to note that many water base inks contain “co-solvents” which may even be petroleum based solvents. The reason these co-solvents are used varies, but one of the key reasons is to decrease the time and heat necessary to cure the ink film on the fabric. Water-based has a different aesthetic than standard plastisol inks. Be sure to discuss limitations of water-based printing with a screen print artist or custom service representative.

Wet-On-Wet: Wet-on-wet is the screen print technique eliminating a flash cure on press. Wet-On-Wet printing technique is used for color blending of simulated process prints. For simpler design and spot color designs, the under base is flashed to cure inline on press. 

Art Requirements: Guidelines that specify what types of art can be used for decoration and how to format digital files for use for screen printing.

Butt-To-Butt Registration: When colors in a design line up exactly next to each other with no space in between and no overlap.

Color Separation: The process of breaking down a digital art file, image or photo into 14 or fewer colors that can be used to screen printing.

Digitizing: Process for converting digital images or logos into a map of stitches. The digitized file is uploaded to the embroidery machine to provide instructions for location of stitches and thread color.

Film Positive: Used to burn a stencil onto a screen for printing, the film positive is created by printing black ink on a clear plastic surface. Each design has one film positive per color.

Gradient: When screen printers talk about gradients, we are referring to a series of halftones created when a digital graphic transitions from a darker to lighter shade. These gradients can be layered to create printed blends when transitioning from one color to another.

Halftone: Halftones are dots or ellipses used to create lighter shades of a print color without changing the actual ink color to something lighter. Smaller dots spaced farther apart, create a lighter shade. Larger dots spaced closer create a darker shade. 

Line Count: Line count refers to the number of vertical lines of halftone spots per inch or lines per inch. Line counts are measured in lpi (lines per inch) and/or dpi (dots per inch). Most shops will use anywhere from 45 lpi to 85 lpi depending on the desired affect. Higher line counts can hold more detail, but tend to print with less saturation than lower line counts.

Loose Registration: When colors in a logo or design to not have to line up next to each other. Any of the colors can overlap or fall in the vicinity of a designated area without having to be exact.

Raster Art: Digital art composed of pixels (as opposed to paths) is a raster file. Raster files for screen print are best created in Adobe Photoshop at a minimum resolution of 150 dpi at print size.

Resolution: Resolution refers to the quality and clarity of raster art files. The higher the resolution, the cleaner and more clearly a print can be produced. Resolution is measured in dpi (dots per inch), ppi (pixels per inch), or lpi (lines per inch).

Up-Sampling: Up-sampling is taking a piece of low resolution digital art and merely re-assigning the dpi value to a higher resolution. This does not actually increase the size or quality of the image. Low resolution art files must be completely redrawn or created in an acceptable file type for use in screen printing.

Vector Art: Vector, in the screen print industry, refers to a type of digital file that is acceptable for use. The images are created using paths instead of pixels. Pixels are used in raster files.