Silkscreening is a process where a transfer screen is created to allow many copies to be made in a single color of an image on to a number of mediums, such as shot glasses or mixing glasses. The screens are produced through a process similar to darkroom photography. We use the highest mesh screens available, thus allowing a high degree of detail in the images. While most anything can be silkscreened, the best images for silkscreening will be line art, text, clip art and simple shapes.

Single-color printing process and why we only print in one color

The silkscreening process, while powerful and relatively inexpensive, has one inherent limitation. We can only screen one color. Because of the limitations of the process, a single color is placed into the screening machine and a single pass screen transfer is created. The image transfers fully and correctly, but is limited to this one color.

Photographs and why gradients won’t work

Photographs, like all raster images, have gradients, shades, hues and dithering that won’t be transferred in the silkscreening process. Any time more than one color is used, the screen treats every open area as a solid image. Thus, there’s no way to properly re-produce a photograph using this method. While there are silkscreening methods used by other companies in other industries (such as t-shirt printing) that allow 4 spot colors, these transfers would not be applicable to the shotglass printing that we do.

What is the difference between a raster and vector image?
A raster (or bitmap) image is composed of pixels with each pixel having a specific value. Each pixel in a raster/bitmap has a defined color value and most photographs contain thousands or millions of pixels which comprise the picture. Adobe Photoshop is a raster based software program that allows you to edit raster files such as photographs.

A vector image is a math-based image that uses paths with a start and end point and does not use pixels. With a vector program such as Adobe Illustrator you can add or remove points or nodes to the path that will allow you to bend, twist, stretch, straighten the path into any object. That is why a vector image can be scaled to any size and (whether it will be printed on a business card or on a billboard) will still retain its sharpness, whereas a raster image has a set resolution and if it is enlarged will become blurry.

Here is a visual comparison of the difference:

	This image looks the same whether opened in Adobe Photoshop or in Adobe Illustrator…
	However, if you zoom in or scale the vector, you can see that the image has no pixels and the image quality has not decreased.
	Alternatively, when you zoom in or resize a raster/bitmap image, the pixels are plainly visible, the image is blurry, and there is a tremendous loss of quality.

For more information on vector images, Wikipedia has plenty of information. Click here!

Font Selection and Size

It is important that you use the largest and clearest font possible when designing glassware. Unlike a solid surface, glass has a translucent property which diffuses what your eye can see against it. Some colors, such as silver, share much of the color spectrum with the light in the room that is reflected within the glass. This makes these colors more difficult to see on glass. By choosing a font that is larger, more bold and spaced appropriately, this will allow the imprint to have maximum impact.

Proper Spacing

Proper font spacing and artwork spacing is also very important. Items that sit on top of or near each other may appear to bleed together. Very thin lines and lines that make impact with fonts or images may disappear into the large images in it’s proximity. When designing a shot glass, be sure to leave a sufficient space between elements so the recipients of your shot glass can easily read the imprint.