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Advice on good T-shirt design for creating your own customised T-shirts

 

When designing a custom T-shirt using online design software, the challenge becomes coming up with a great design, rather than mastering technical skills. When using online T-shirt design websites such as Shirtlab, it’s a good idea to plan before starting the design to get the best results, focusing on two components: The purpose of the T-shirt and basic principles of good T-shirt design.

Here are a few questions that you should answer before starting your T-shirt design.

What is the T-shirt for?

People create customised T-shirts for a wide variety of events, and bearing the final purpose for the T-shirt in mind can help you at the start of the design process.

The purpose for the customised T-shirt will dictate the information that you need to put on it before you even think about pictures, colours and fonts. For example, if you are you’re creating sport team T-shirts, you might need to have a person’s team position and number printed prominently on the back. If your T-shirt design will be worn by employees working at a particular event, you may need to include your company name very prominently, along with your company website address, or perhaps a simple “Here to help” on the back. Once you know how much critical information needs to go on, you can begin the design without worrying about leaving something important out.

Will the T-shirt be uniform, a give-away gift or for sale?

If you are creating T-shirts for your staff at a trade show, having a prominent logo is a good idea for brand visibility. However, if you want to create T-shirts for give-away gifts, you might want to consider coming up with a funny message or industry in-joke which will be the most prominent design feature, with your logo and website more subtle in the design.

Whilst this may seem counter-intuitive from a branding perspective, think about the people who will be taking the freebie T-shirt. If the T-shirt just has your company logo on it, they are unlikely to wear it out and about – only the huge global brands can expect T-shirt wearers to do that for them. Those kinds of customised T-shirts end up being worn for gardening or DIY, decreasing the potential exposure for your business. However, if your T-shirt design is funny, and the logo present but smaller, it’s likely to be worn in more places, thereby increasing your brand exposure as people will ask where they got it from.

Creating T-shirts for sale also favours this approach, and will be even harder to design and sell – unless there is a good incentive such as a charity fundraising element. Again, think about the person wearing it before your own company branding; a T-shirt that shouts “I’m raising money for XYZ” with your logo as a badge will be much more popular for example.

The custom designed T-shirt’s purpose may also influence the visual design

A good example of this are T-shirts designed for conventions (fan events) and rock concerts. Both tend to have attendees that prefer black T-shirts – proven by increased sales in that colour. If you know that your T-shirt design is likely to be printed onto a particular colour, make sure your design works well with that colour as a background.

The principles of good T-shirt design

Once you have a clear idea of your T-shirt’s final use, there are a few things to bear in mind to help make your customised T-shirt design a success.

Advice regarding colours used in your T-shirt design

The best way to place a design onto most cotton garments is by screen printing. Screen printed clothing washes well, lasts longer than heat transfer prints and looks more professional in quality. Each colour in a T-shirt design requires a screen, so if four colours are used, four screens are required. If you are creating customised T-shirts on a budget, keep the number of colours to a minimum to keep the costs down.

Take care to choose complimentary colours

If you are producing promotional T-shirts for corporate use, your design will probably be guided by your logo, but if you are adding other elements, or designing something from scratch, take care to choose colours that compliment each other.

Minimal colours often look good on T-shirts

When you look at the most popular T-shirt designs over recent years, they often only contain 3 colours or less – or go to the other extreme and make having many different colours the centre of the design. Only the very best designers pull the latter off well; the simpler you keep your design, the better the final result. Simple T-shirt designs have an impact either close up or when seen from a distance.

Know the limitations of T-shirt screen printing

Whilst you can use different colours to create your T-shirt design, remember that it’s almost impossible to get a photo-realistic image onto a T-shirt using cost-effective screen printing because elements such as half tones and shading don’t reproduce well. Solid line art is a safe bet, with the lines used no smaller than 1mm in thickness to ensure that they print well.

Be careful with images that you use

There are many T-shirts on the market that adapt corporate logos to make a pop culture comment or joke, but if you intend to use an image that you haven’t created (or own the rights to already) ensure that you get permission to avoid any legal problems.

 

 

About the Author

About the author

Steve Beynon has over twenty years of experience in the garment printing and embroidery industry, creating Shirtlab after extensive research into customised clothing and apparel websites currently available in the UK. Shirtlab provides a state of the art online promotional garment design service, providing easy to use design tools that create outstanding personalised T-shirt designs with minimal effort.

 

 

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