When you need rally towels for your team or business, whether as a fan giveaway or a promotional item, there are a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your towel comes out exactly the way you want it to look. At RallyTowels we work with exceptional lint-free cotton towels, custom-manufactured inks to match your Pantone color specifications, and state of the art screen printing materials. Despite all this, your custom rally towel will only end up looking as good as the design that you send. Here are some tips to ensure that your design is a success and that it translates well to a rally towel format.
- Your Color Scheme
One of the great thing about working with sports teams is that they usually already have two or three team colors that they know they’ll be working with. These colors are often time-tested, having been in use for years, if not decades, depending on the organization. The same is true with some businesses. You can hardly think of, Coca-Cola, for example, without picturing their white script on a red field. But sometimes, whether you’re designing a towel for a sports team or a business, a specific event will mean that the default colors of a logo, uniform, or mascot, aren’t necessarily the correct ones to use for your custom rally towel. If this is the case, you’ll need to put some extra thought into the colors that you choose for your towel.
Contrast is key to having a good looking visual and text when printed on the towel, especially if you want it to be visible at a distance of more than a couple of feet. Most colors will show up well against a plain white towel, if that’s what you choose, but some lighter colors should probably be avoided. Most yellows and any color tint that could be described as a pastel would show up better against a darker background. We offer twelve towel colors besides white to choose from, so you definitely have options when it comes to background colors for creating contrast.
Single color designs are the least expensive, but we can print towels with as many colors as you want or need. Keep in mind, though, that each color will need to contrast well with the background and with other colors in the design in order for things to come out looking their nicest.
- Your Design
When designing your custom rally towel, one thing to keep in mind is the principle of negative space. Don’t just think about where you are going to put your artwork or your text, or how you are going to fill the printable area of the towel, but also what areas you are going to deliberately going to leave open and blank. More negative space around text, for example, will help to make it easier to read. A clean design against more open space can be more impactful than a busy one, and allows the color contrast that you thought about in the previous step to really pop.
In color printing, there are generally two different methods used to achieve the millions of colors that exist in the world. The most common one is called process color printing, and if you have a color printer in your home or office, you’ve seen this in action. This type of color printing hundreds of dots per inch in only uses four basic colors. These dots of ink or toner are too small to be noticed individually, but taken as a whole, they and their neighbors approximate the desired color.
How Screen Printing Is Different
Screen printing, however, almost always uses a method called spot color printing to achieve color results. With spot color printing, the color of the ink is mixed to perfection beforehand, then applied evenly across the entire print. If there is more than one color in the design, the colors are applied one at a time.
What this means for your design is that you cannot include any shading or color gradients in your artwork. The screen printing process cannot smoothly transition from one color to another. If this effect is desired it has to be drawn into the design itself using techniques like stippling or cross-hatching.
Finally, screen printing doesn’t allow for the same fine lines that can be achieved on paper or on a computer screen. For the best results, when designing a custom rally towel, your thinnest lines should be at least two points wide, with at least two points of space between them. A large, bold design will often work better than a finely detailed one, when printing onto cloth. 
- Your File Type
In order to print your design, we require vector files at RallyTowels.com. This means .eps or .ai. Adobe Illustrator is among the most common professional software meant for editing these kinds of image files. Vector images can change sizes without changing quality, unlike raster images like .bmp, .jpg, .png, or .tiff, which cannot scale without pixelating. Please do not send us raster images.
We hope you enjoy designing your custom rally towels, and that you find these tips helpful. If you need any further assistance, please contact us for more information.
