If your school camp is coming up, you may want to order a T-shirt with custom printing or hoodie to commemorate the occasion. T-shirts can help foster a sense of unity between the camp, and also serves as nice take-home gifts. However, printing a custom T-shirt or hoodiemeans someone must first come up with a design. More often than not, schools will not have the budget to hire a designer, so you may have to design the T-shirt yourself. Here are three tips to help you cruise this shirt design journey.
Start with a symbol or brand
Imagine that an event participant brings home your T-shirt. Ideally, you want them to reminisce about the good time they had during the event. This means that you should incorporate something memorable that they encountered during the event so that it will jolt their memories. This insignia, symbol or brand could be your camp logo and slogan, a key activity during the event, or the key catchphrase of the camp cheer.
Begin with that symbol or brand, and design your T-shirt around it. If you already have a logo, that can be the centrepiece of the design, and you can complement it with a caption or slogan to help make the T-shirt uniquely yours.
Choose your colours wisely
Custom t-shirt printing services charge differently for different colours in the T-shirt design, so the colours you use is a big consideration. If your school has a tight budget, opt for a mono-colour T-shirt – this means either a white design printed on a black T-shirt (more popular) or a black design printed on a white T-shirt. This is probably the most cost-effective design as there is only one colour printed.
If you do want to make your T-shirt a bit more fanciful, you could consider having a different base colour for your T-shirt but keeping the design to a single colour. This ensures that you would not have to pay extra for the different types of ink on the T-shirt. A different base colour is also good to help identify different groups of people within the camp.
Pick complementary fonts
If there is text on your T-shirt, you have to consider the fonts to use. Typically, only one font is used in a T-shirt design, as it is less distracting than having multiple fonts, which could clutter up the design. The recommended number of fonts to use is two, and the maximum number should be three unless there is a strong aesthetic reason to choose even more fonts.
Graphic designers typically use fonts that look different but can combine together to look beautiful. For instance, designers advice against picking two serif fonts in a design, and would usually opt for one sans serif font and one serif font. Some designers recommend opting for non-conventional fonts, dropping common work-related fonts like Arial and Times New Roman for more interesting fonts like Montserrat or Bebas.
