Coming up with a good t-shirt design can be daunting, but entirely possible. A good t-shirt custom design has several features. It should be easy to read and understand while being creative and unique at the same time. No matter what type of T-shirt you’re designing, there are some mistakes you can avoid. Here are some of them:
1. Too large of a design
To ensure that your design fits on to the front of back of a T-shirt, you’ll want to find out the ideal height and width your design needs to adhere to. It terms of width, it shouldn’t go above 16 cm, while its height should be no more than 25cm. Anything larger than this might affect the visibility and composition of the design as a whole.
2. Unequal composition
A design should revolve around a central point, and good composition is where each picture and word is spaced out equally between one another. You want to avoid bunching up elements in one corner of the design. Also, you should pay attention to the positioning of words so that it can be read in the correct order.
3. Blurred image
Any image that’s designed or printing on T-shirts should have a resolution of 200 dpi and above. Ideally, it should reach 300 dpi. Anything below this will cause the image to be blurred, which can lead to your design not being translated properly onto the fabric. Additionally, blurred images can contain artifacts, little dots or slashes that can interfere with the look of the design once it’s enlarged onto a t-shirt.
4. Hard to read fonts
This is probably one of the most common mistakes to make, whereby the design employs typography that is difficult to read, or may be read wrongly. Even if you have to use a stylistically distinct typography, make sure that you run it past a few colleagues, friends or associates to ensure that your message comes across and can be read clearly.
5. Making it too complicated
When it comes to T-shirt designs, less is more. Some designers feel that including many colors, fonts and graphic elements will make the design more attractive. However, the opposite is actually true. Therefore, when designing for T-shirt custom prints, you should keep it at 1- 3 colors, and use no more than 2 or 3 types of fonts for the wordings. You want a design that grabs the viewer’s attention without confusing them too much.
6. Designs without contrast
When choosing the colors for your design, you should take into consideration the color of the T-shirt you’re printing on. Your design has to contrast with its background so that it can be viewed easily. To know which colors contrast with each other, you can consult a color wheel. Colors which are opposite each other in the wheel contrast well, such as red and green, black and white, yellow and dark blue and more.
Colours that don’t contrast with each other are found beside each other on the wheel, such as red and orange, white and light blue, and blue with green.
To ensure that your design is suitable, you can speak to any Custom Prints and Apparels consultant and they will be able to guide you with suitable tips so that your design translates better and you achieve the look you want.
