Halftone for Screen Printing and T-Shirts

Screen printing can't print grey. It lays down flat ink, so any shading or gradient has to be faked with dots. That's exactly what halftone does, which is why getting the dots right is the difference between a clean print and a muddy mess on the shirt.

Dot size is everything

On a press, dots that are too small fill in and turn to a solid blob, especially on textured fabric. Dots that are too big look crude. The sweet spot depends on your mesh count and the printer, so the safest move is to talk to whoever's printing and ask what dot size and screen they can hold. Then set your grid to match.

Why you want SVG, not PNG

Export SVG. It saves every dot as a real vector shape, so it scales to any shirt size without going blurry, and your printer can work with clean, editable artwork for making the screens. A PNG locks you to one resolution and can soften the dot edges, which is the last thing you want when those edges become physical ink.

Keep it simple

• High contrast so the design reads from across a room.
• Limit colours — each colour is another screen and another pass.
• A coarser dot grid holds better on fabric than a fine one.
• Test print on the actual fabric before committing to a full run.

One-colour designs are your friend

A single-colour halftone — black ink on a light shirt, or white on dark — is cheap to print and almost always looks sharp. If you're new to this, start there. Multi-colour halftone work is doable but every extra colour adds cost and a chance for misregistration.