If the phrase “time is money” weighs heavily on everything we do in business then it makes sense to put every task we do under the microscope, evaluate it, and then proceed to find ways of speeding up or cutting out those tasks. Saving time on repetitive tasks is the key, and for me the greatest time saving came when I re-engineered our humble job sheet.

When I was employed as a pre press graphics artist at my local screen printing shop I was in charge of not just creating the artwork to go on the garment but also breaking down the artwork into individual colours to produce films called “positives”. These films were then sent to the screen technician to produce the screens that the printers would then use to create the images we see on most printable garments. It was my job to explain to the screen printers exactly how the artwork should be printed. Sounds easy, but there’s a lot of specific information requested by customers or clothing companies that I need to interpret and then ensure it gets carried out so we don’t end up with thousands of misspelt garments. Anyway…to cut a long story short, I developed a quicker way to produce the screen printer’s jobsheets by setting them up in Adobe Illustrator, creating symbols of the ink types and static information in a way that I could just click and drag it to the job sheet. After using the jobsheet for a couple of days I found it greatly sped the whole process up, but still needed refining. Over the next few weeks I kept tweaking and refining the design till I came up with what you now see below.

The job sheet contains all necessary information:

• Client details
• Screen printing inks and printing process to be used
• Screen mesh to use
• Print order for each positive (very important on some jobs)
• An area for extra information from the client
• Job due date as well as an easy way for our screen printers to visually see the urgency of the job.
• Print placement (example: front chest, back hem, left sleeve or collar etc)
• Type of garment, color, and fabric type
• Most importantly the job number so we can save all the films and job information in a bag for later use if the customer needs more prints.

 

All in all, it’s a lot of work for one job and when considering our print shop had multiple automatic and hand printing machines keeping up with the workload was tough.

If you own a screen printing facility, or are in fact the ‘art guy’ at your print shop I feel your pain, that’s why I’m giving this jobsheet away for free. My hope is that it saves a lot of time for you too. Most importantly this jobsheet gives the printers all the crucial information they need to print the job right the first time.

Enjoy!

 

This free resource contains:

• 100% Editable AI and EPS files (For use with Adobe Illustrator)

 

Download – Free Screen Printing Job Sheet  ( .Ai + .Eps )

 

P.s. I thought I’d mention that the job sheet works flawlessly with any of our Vector garment template packs. Jobsheet + Vector templates = Even more time saving. Just add the templates to the Adobe Illustrator symbols library then you’re ready to click and drag the garment templates straight into the job sheet. Here’s a quick video on how to add our templates to the symbols library.