PrettyThin

I definitely never thought this site would get this big, nor that it would ever have people asking for shirts, but here it is. 

A few of you asked, more of you voted, and the results are in. Nearly 70% of you said "yes" to t-shirts and other PrettyThin products.

For many fo you, it's something that you can look at when out and about to remind you of who you are, and knowing that no matter where you are, this community is here for you. Knowing that you are beautiful, knowing that it's your journey but that you're not alone.

So I am developing a store with shirts, stickers, cups, and more. This is not about me; this is about you, so I need your help. Ideas, thoughts, designs, and just about anything you can think of is welcome.

You can send just about anything. This is for you, about you, and mostly, from you. 

If you're submitting designs, some guidelines are below to make sure the resolution is right and the design can be used. But you don't have to send just designs.

Do you have a line or quote or poem which you think would be great on a shirt? Send that along!
Have an idea for a design? Send that along.
Have an idea for something other than a shirt? Send that along.

You might find more than just shirts in the upcoming store. Stickers, underwear, cups, mousepads...who knows :-)

Email me your designs and ideas to pretty.thin@yahoo.com

Please help me organize things by adding the subject line "T-Shirt Designed for PT"

Resolution and Sizing
Resolution is what determines if your pictures look "chunky" when you print them. All computer pictures are made up of small dots. Resolution is how many dots in an inch, often referred to as DPI or "Dots Per Inch". Your computer monitor generally displays less than 100 DPI while a printer usually prints at 300 to over 1000 DPI. What looks good on your screen will not necessarily look good printed. Luckily, apparel is not exactly photo-paper, and the naturally un-smooth nature of cloth hides some resolution issues. But not all! When you create a picture you will want to follow the guidelines presented in the Image Resolution Guidelines (see chart below), specific to each product. For the most part, pictures should be between 100 and 300 DPI to print well on the products you sell. Below is an example of how a graphic gets more "chunky" as you size it larger, resulting in a smaller DPI.

When creating images, start your image at 200-300 DPI. You can always decrease your image and maintain a clean, crisp image. However, you cannot increase the resolution and image size of your image without compromising the image quality. Making your image larger will cause the image to look "dirty". See the example below of how a "dirty" image looks when increasing the DPI.
 

What are Resolution and DPI?
Resolution and DPI are often used interchangeably, but they are quite different.

Any digital image is composed of pixels. The pixels are the small colored square dots that can sometimes be seen when images are enlarged too much, or if you look at your screen close enough. Resolution is the number of pixels in the horizontal direction by the number of pixels in the vertical direction. For example, a picture with 1200 pixels at the horizontal direction and 2100 pixels at the vertical direction would have a resolution of 1200 x 2100 pixels (pronounced 1200 by 2100 pixels).

As you've probably noticed, nowhere in the above definition it is said what size the pixels are. This is where the DPI comes in. DPI is simply Dots Per Inch. A picture with 100 x 100 resolution would be 1 x 1 inch when printed at 100 DPI, and 100 x 100 inch when printed at 1 DPI!

There's a tradeoff. The bigger the resolution, the bigger the image is. It will take more disk space, occupy more memory when loaded, and will take longer to be transferred through the Web. On the other hand, the bigger the resolution, the better the image looks when printed. We feel it is better to wait a bit more for your photo to upload than to have a bad print at the end.

Formats and Compression
PNG - Portable Network Graphics format is a completely loss-less compression. Gradients come out much smoother and do not have the distortions that may appear in a JPG. PNG is the recommendation for image uploads.

PSD - PhotoShop Document supports millions of colors. This file format also has exceptional image quality, but it does not compress your file so file sizes will be large and uploading times will be long.

Maximum file sizes for each format
(before receiving timeout errors while uploading)

If you are receiving a timeout error, check to see how large your file is. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, files over 7 MB can timeout.

JPG - 7 MB
PNG - 4 MB

Whatever you send may be turned into a shirt, or a cup, or who-knows-what. So this is a disclaimer which you must agree to when sending anything for the store.

Anything that you send becomes the property of PrettyThin and myself. It feels odd saying it, and a part of me doesn't like the idea, but I think it's the only way to protect myself from getting sued by some random person who decides they didn't want what they sent me on a shirt or product.

So, whatever you send becomes the property of myself, and this website.