Make Your Custom Designs Pop with Puff Ink
Elevate your designs literally with puff ink.
Consider puff ink for your next project if you’re looking for a way to make your designs stand out. Puff is becoming increasingly popular because of the depth and dimension it provides. The technique is perfect for those looking to add a little more oomph to their designs.
If the word ‘puff’ pulls you into a flashback fever dream from the eighties, where you had the urge to DIY everything in your closet with puff paint, let us pull you back to 2022 and show you what modern puff can do. Keep reading to learn all about the basics of puff and how best to utilize the techniques in your designs.
The process of using puff ink starts the same as most standard screen printing projects. The ink is printed flat on the garment, but once it goes down on the dryer, the magic happens. Puff combines a foaming agent with the ink that expands and puffs upward when exposed to heat.
If you want to use puff, our best advice is to go big or go home. Puff ink works best when used for large design elements such as bold text, heavy lines, and shapes. In this case, bigger is definitely better.
Smaller parts of a design are easily warped and provide less of an impact if printed using puff ink. You can strategically keep smaller elements, outlines, and shadows in the design flat to create more dimension and really make the puff elements stand out.
Color-matching puff can be tricky. The foaming agent used to make the ink puff up alters the color of the ink. This makes it a little difficult to get an exact Pantone match but it’s still very close.
Want puff but prefer the look of embroidery? We can do that. You can achieve the same three-dimensional look as puff ink with embroidery thread and foam. First, the foam layer is cut into the desired shape. Then, the thread is sewn around the foam, covering it entirely creating an eye-catching 3d effect.
Just like its ink counterpart, puff embroidery turns out best when used on bold text and larger designs. Due to the added layer of material, puff embroidery works best on heavier materials such as sweatshirts and hats.
Make sure your puff stays perfect by following these care tips:
Contact one of our Daymakers to get started on a puff project today or keep reading and check out our last post, “What are the Most Comfortable Custom T-shirts?“.