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Ali (Buttonhead)

Want to create and submit your own designs? Check out this video tutorial to learn how to take your ideas from concept to print. This technique can be applied to any of the button products made with the Tecre brand button equipment (including button pins, magnets, pocket mirrors, etc).

You will need to download my templates and have a copy of Photoshop to work with the files. When your design(s) are ready, you may place an order in my web shop and upload your printer-ready artwork. Please note: Creation or setup of 1 design is included with every (non-tattoo) order, so you are not required to do this. If you would like to use more than 1 design for no extra charge — or if you simply prefer to create your own designs — your artwork must be submitted using my templates in full page print-ready layout for the entire order. This video will demonstrate exactly how.

Here also are a few additional resources to help you ensure the best possible results:

Download Button Templates

Image Resolution, Print Size, and Print Quality (Article)

Digital Print Color Management (Article)

How To Zip Your Files (Article)

Buttonhead custom sticker labels are available now on Etsy!

Please keep in mind: Color management is a vast topic, and this article is not intended to be a thorough examination. I aim only to help you understand enough to make basic decisions about your design and print processes. For an in-depth study, additional research will be required.

RGB and CMYK
Even though computers and printers work together, individually they are two very different machines. For instance, they interpret and output color in two entirely different ways. After all, your computer is representing color digitally, and your printer is using ink. Those are two completely different mediums. Your computer uses a color system called RGB, meaning it creates color with various combinations within a Red, Green, Blue spectrum. By the way, if you are a photographer, your digital camera also uses RGB color (and so does your scanner).  Your home printer, on the other hand, uses a color system called CMYK, meaning it creates color with various combinations of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Unfortunately for us, the range of colors within the RGB and CMYK spectrum are not the same. That neon green color looks amazing on your computer screen, but it doesn’t even exist in print.

Digital Print vs. Offset Print
In the world of printing, there are two main types of printing processes. The first and most common is digital print. Digital printing includes home inkjet printers, your office laserjet, and even those large Kinkos production printers. These printers still use CMYK ink processes, but they rely on the computer’s digital component. Digital content is rendered through a software program, such as Photoshop, and then printed onto paper via an electrical charge. Offset printing, on the other hand, uses a process similar to screenprinting. Ink is rolled onto screens, and pressed against paper to recreate the original image. Colors are professionally mixed, much like house paint, by a company called Pantone. The colors are static and can be selected from swatches within the Pantone Matching System (PMS).

What is the difference between digital printing and offset printing? The two most obvious differences are price and color accuracy. Offset printing is a much more involved and precise process. With the Pantone Matching System, you are more likely to get consistent color. Consequently, it is more expensive. Digital printing is more widely available and significantly cheaper. However, digital printing, as we will discuss next, has many hard-to-control factors that can affect the outcome of your print color.

Buttonhead is a digital printer, and the remainder of this article will explore digital printing management.

Know Your Monitor
Not only are there differences in color from RGB to CMKY and from digital print to offset print, but there are also differences from computer monitor to computer monitor. Guess what? The color you see on your computer screen is not necessarily the same color I see on mine. Ugh. Can you believe that?! You may set up your digital image to look exactly how you want it and then send it to me for print, only to receive the print from me, and it’s not what you expected. Grrr! The best way to combat this is to calibrate your monitor on a regular basis.

But wait! Here is some more bad news: Even if your monitor is calibrated, there can still be inconsistencies from screen to print. Here’s an exercise: Try looking at an image on your monitor when your eyes are even with the screen. Now, tip the monitor back, and then tip it forward. Watch how the color changes. Now, adjust the brightness of your monitor, and watch how the color changes from dark to bright. Although we will be discussing all of the best ways to control certain variables, in the realm of digital images, nothing is 100% fool proof.

Color Is Relative
Let’s just take a brief moment to discuss relative color. Take a look at the image below. The two squares in the center look like two different shades of blue, right? It’s actually the exact same blue being affected by the color surrounding it. When designing graphics, it’s important to keep in mind that colors interact with each other. Where a certain color appears in your design may affect how that color is perceived.

Similarly, color is affected by light. Here is another exercise: Print an image and look at it under a lamp in your home and observe the color. Then, step out into the daylight and see how that color changes. Your house lamp most likely has a warm light, while daylight tends to cast blue. The color cast of light will change how your print colors are perceived.

Controlling Color Through Color Space
Now that we’ve discussed all of the many x factors that can affect digital print color, let’s start talking about the ways we can best manage the situation. The first and most important is to become familiar with color space. In the simplest of terms, color space is a map of colors that can possibly be represented by a device. For instance, a CMYK color space is a map that represents all possible CMYK colors. An RGB color space is a map that represents all possible RGB colors. When creating a new graphic or manipulating a current graphic in a software program, such as Photoshop, Corel, or Illustrator, you have the option of working in a particular color space to contain and represent the types of colors used. The most common color spaces for designers are: CMYK (SWOP) or RGB (sRGB or Adobe RGB). The color space you choose to create/edit your graphic in will yield two different results when printed digitally.

What Color Space Should I Use?
An image designed and printed in a CMYK color space may look drastically different than that same image designed and printed in an sRGB color space. So, what color space should you use? The answer will depend on the final output of your project. Here is a very basic idea that will help you determine which to use.

RGB: Digital Printing and Web Use
CMYK: Offset printing

Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, of course! However, if you are a novice designer, just looking to learn the basics, this is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Color Space Conversion and Consistency
Wait a minute. Even though my home printer uses CMYK ink, I should still edit my photo in an RGB color space? Yes! The reason is this: Whether you create the image in RGB or CMYK, your monitor will always show you RGB colors. Remember, a digital printer relies on your computer’s digital component. Your printer is designed to translate those colors to the CMYK color space. Design and edit your images in RGB, and let your Photoshop software and printer work together to convert the colors for you. The more converting you do, the more possible color loss you may experience. You can manually convert the color space within your image editing program, but you should do so with care. Photoshop can perform an operation to convert an image from CMYK, automatically matching it as closely as possible to colors in the RGB spectrum.

Whichever color space you choose, it’s important to remain consistent from creation to print. When you convert a color space from one to another, the color information from the original file becomes lost. If you are designing an image for offset print, use CMYK from start to finish. If you are designing an image for digital print, choose an RGB color space, stick with it, and ensure that your printer uses that color space as well. Converting color space is helpful at times, but remember that color can easily become lost in translation.

Soft Proofing
The best way to avoid the headache of color matching is to use a process called soft proofing. Soft proofing is a built-in process within your editing software that shows how your image will look when printed. It’s like printing without printing! In Photoshop, for instance, you can select View > Proof Colors, and you will see a working preview of how your colors will translate to CMYK print. Depending on the type of editing software you use, I strongly recommend discovering your soft proofing tools. It will not only save you the headache, but it will save you ink as well.

Keep Coloring!
I hope this article has helped give you a top line understanding of digital color management. Print color is a incredibly deep topic that goes beyond my space here and my expertise. Any of these individual topics can be further researched to unveil a huge amount of additional information. I recommend just focusing on the basics at first, then do more research as issue arise, questions form, or curiosity leads. Just keep designing, printing, and learning!

Please keep in mind: Image resolution is a vast topic, and this article is not intended to be a thorough examination. I aim only to help you understand enough to make basic decisions about your design and print processes. For an in-depth study, additional research will be required.

What is Image Resolution?
First, let’s talk about digital images. Digital images are any graphics you find on the web, photos from your camera, or logos for your business. Most digital images are made up of pixels. A pixel is a tiny dot that contains information about that image. Any given image may be made up of hundreds, even thousands of these tiny pixels that together form a picture. Simply put, image resolution refers to the number of pixels per inch of the image. The unit of measurement used to describe image resolution is: pixels per inch (ppi). You may also see this same term expressed as dots per inch (dpi). The ppi refers to how dense the pixels are per inch of an image. The more pixels per inch an image has, the more detail it has, and the better quality the image will be.

And Then There’s Math: Raster vs. Vector
When an image is made of pixels, as we’ve discussed, it is considered a raster image. Raster files include (but are not limited to) all .jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif, .tiff, .cpt, and .psd files. However, there is a type of image that is not made of pixels. Vector graphics are created using a mathematical equation, instead of pixels. Vector images can be scaled up or down without losing their quality (unlike raster images, which we will discuss later). Software programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw are used to design vector graphics. So, why would an image be created in pixels rather than a mathematical equation? For now, it’s mostly important for you to understand that that there is more than one type of image to demonstrate that there are exceptions to these rules. There are pros and cons to both vector and raster artwork. Each type has a place and a purpose.

Color and Image Resolution: RGB to CMYK
Even though computers and printers work together, individually they are two very different machines. For instance, they interpret and output color in two entirely different ways. After all, your computer is representing color digitally, and your printer is using ink. Those are two completely different mediums. Your computer uses a color system called RGB, meaning it creates color with various combinations on a Red, Green, Blue spectrum. Your home printer, on the other hand, uses a color system called CMYK, meaning it creates color with various combinations of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. When converting an RGB computer image to a CMYK printer, some pixel information is lost (approximately half). This is one reason why a raster image can appear 6 inches tall on your computer screen and only 3 inches tall in print.

Resizing Images and Blue Jeans
When a raster image is created, it is given a certain number of pixels. When you resize an image and make it smaller, you are throwing some pixels away. After you click File > Save, the image can never gain those pixels back again. Here’s a good analogy: Imagine your favorite pair of jeans. You can wash them, then throw them into the dryer and shrink them, but you can never make them bigger again. The same is true for a raster image. You can always downsize a raster image, but you can never upsize (upsample) it again without losing quality. Let’s say you found an internet image that you’d really like to print, but it’s super small. Ideally, you could just open it up in an image editing program like Photoshop, click Image > Resize, and make it as big as you need it to be. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. When you try to upsize that low resolution image, the remaining pixels in the image become stretched thin to fill the full space of the document size you are requesting. The result is a blurry, sad looking graphic.

.JPG Isn’t Always Best: Lossy Data Compression
On a related note, let’s just take a moment to discuss lossy and lossless file types. File types such as .jpg are designed to be small, compact, and easy to store. When you save a file as a .jpg, the data used to create your image is compressed. Similar to when we downsize an image, as discussed above, data is thrown away that cannot be recovered. While .jpg is great for many purposes, when preparing an image for print, it is best to work in a lossless file type, such as .png, .gif, .tiff or .psd. The files are larger, but they retain all of the essential data without compressing or throwing anything away.

So, What Image Resolution Do I Need?
Ok! Let’s get down to the dirty details. What you really want to know is: What image resolution do I need? I could try impress you with a lot of mathematical formulas right now, but for the purposes of this article, I’m just going to boil it down short and sweet:

Not So Great Print Quality: 150 ppi
Great Print Quality: 300 ppi
Best Print Quality: 600 ppi

Anything below 150 ppi will result in a terrible quality print. For most purposes, anything above 600 ppi will make no detectable difference.

Don’t Forget About Document Size!!!
Now that we understand print resolution, it’s time to place the final puzzle piece. It’s not enough to adjust your image resolution. Remember, image resolution denotes the density of pixels per inch. To get the right size for your image, you must adjust your document size, and that is the easy part. Your document size should be the size you would like your image to print. For instance, if I want to print a great quality graphic that is 5”x5” on a standard piece of printer paper, the image properties should be 5”x5” in 300 ppi.

Up, On, and Away!
I hope this article has helped give you a top line understanding of image resolution and print size. Image resolution is a complex animal. Any of these topics can be further researched to unveil a huge amount of additional information and explanation. I recommend just focusing on the basics at first, then do more research as issue arise, questions form, or curiosity leads. Just keep designing, printing, and learning!

Each of these designs was lovingly illustrated and colored by me. I spent each and every evening for an entire month creating this set, and I would love for you to see the finished work. Feel feel free to browse the full collection of customizable temporary tattoo art, and then leave a comment to send me your feedback, suggestions, or design ideas. As always, I look forward to hearing from you!

Customizable pre-made designs include: Classic heart, winged heart, double heart, skull, pirate skull, day of the dead sugar skull, roses, butterfly, dolphins, swallow, sun moon and stars, moustache (mustache), cupcake, robot wedding, guitar, bicycle, guns and roses, double cherry, flaming dice, four leaf clover, anchor, cross, and more!

My handmade custom temporary tattoos have recently become a very popular item for weddings! It’s a unique favor that adds a personal touch to the big event. Temporary tattoos are easy to apply, fun to wear, and leave guests with a lasting memory that you don’t need laser surgery to remove.

I’ve been making wedding temporary tattoo favors for years, and I’ve got the process down to an art. Recently, I stopped to take a photo of a batch in the process of being made. These are the packaging tags that are affixed to the top of the favor and the scoring tool I use to fold each card.

Check out my custom temporary tattoo selection on Etsy, if you are interested. I make them for birthdays, bachelorette parties, gag gifts, or just because! Trust me, they’re even better than the real thing.

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