Whatever your reason for designing custom T-shirts, it always pays to invest enough time and good money in them. Low-quality shirts will either leave you with zero sales or unsatisfied clients. Hence, you mustn’t make half-baked designs in the process.
Customizing T-shirts seems simple, but making great, long-lasting designs takes effort. If you have to create a new batch of shirts for a special occasion, read this article for some handy tips to get you started:
Make Mock-Ups
One of the best parts about creating your T-shirts is imagining the design and what it would look like once applied to the fabric. Most artworks begin with a draft, and a T-shirt design is no exception. So before finalizing the product, run it through a mock-up first.
You can easily make T-shirt mock-ups on most photo-editing apps on mobile or desktop. These graphic design programs allow you to tweak your image as you wish or resize the shirt model to ensure a balanced output. However, you can also ask professional shirt printing services for assistance so they can use their software for creating drafts, like an online T-shirt design tool from teejunction.com.au.
If you’re in a slight rush, you could always print out your design on a large enough sheet of paper and stick it to a plain T-shirt to see how the image would look. But if you have the time and an extra, unused tee lying around, print the graphics onto the shirt to get a better idea of how it would appear on the actual cloth.
Choose Comfortable Fabrics
Clothing fabric is a make-or-break deal for most people. There’s usually no point in wearing a piece of clothing with a fantastic design if the fabric it’s made of is unbearably uncomfortable. Thus, choosing the right type of T-shirt fabric is a must, especially if you’re making shirts in bulk.
When in doubt, pick cotton. Cotton’s natural fibers make clothing breathable and absorb moisture faster than other types. It’s also affordable and appropriate for casual wear. Other fabrics commonly used for T-shirts include:
- Rayon
- Linen
- Polyester
- Poly/cotton blends
- Tri-blends
These fabrics are pretty popular choices, and you can see many customized T-shirts using one of them. Despite that, cotton remains anyone’s best bet. It’s generally accepted that synthetic fabrics, like the ones on the list, aren’t as comfortable or breathable as cotton. But ultimately, the final choice is in your hands.
Pick A T-Shirt Style
T-shirts come in various styles, including crew neck and V-neck. The style depends on the design you want to print on it since some images don’t always look great on shirts with a particular type of collar shape.
You can pick a style during the mock-up phase and test your design on all available types to see which ones work best. It’s also important to note the occasion or purpose of the T-shirt. Henley shirts might not look appropriate when worn at a business event. Meanwhile, a polo shirt may appear too formal for a casual family reunion.
Keep It Simple
Highly-detailed designs often get the most attention. But intricate details on a custom shirt seem a bit too much. You may learn from graphic design lessons that simpler images can also be eye-catching in a good way. So, limiting the embellishments printed or embroidered onto T-shirts is often better.
In the same vein, stick to a limited color palette. Too many colors can overpower an image, while a color scheme of two to three complementary hues creates a sense of unity. You may also implement color psychology when choosing a palette, like using shades of red for action and energy or blue for intelligence and authority.
Don’t forget to test your design on shirts of different colors to check if it works well, even when not put on a white or black tee.
Use Appropriate Fonts
You’ve probably encountered a shirt where you just can’t read what’s written on it. Typography is a big deal in graphic design, so it’s a must that your shirt design has readable words if it has any. Having legible fonts on T-shirts used for marketing and branding is crucial, or you could leave potential clients confused when they pass by.
Script, Serif, Sans Serif, and Display are standard fonts used on T-shirt designs since they’re easily readable from a considerable distance. Stick to two to three different yet complementary fonts with the words appropriately positioned to make your design look more dynamic and exciting.
Know Your Target Market
The last thing you should take note of is your target market. Are you designing T-shirts for a corporate event, a casual get-together, or personalized gifts? Understanding your clientele helps you create a shirt they’ll frequently wear without embarrassment. You’d want people to continue wearing the T-shirts you made and make others ask who designed them, after all.
Conclusion
Designing a T-shirt isn’t simply choosing an image and printing it on the cloth. There’s an art and a science to creating the best shirt graphics that’ll make one fun to wear and show off to people. So, take your time and keep testing your designs on different shirt fabrics, styles, and colors until you decide which one is closest to perfect.
