If your funny t-shirts look funny, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool t-shirt designs are when you imagine them, if your text is poorly designed, your t-shirts will always look unprofessional. But fear not! With these 5 tricks from professional graphic designers, you can quickly turn those amateur custom t-shirts into perfect, polished works of t-shirt art.
T-shirt Design Secret #1: Choosing the Right Font
When choosing a font for your t-shirt text, be sure to choose one that supports your message. For example, if you’re designing a fun t-shirt, choose a font that has a fun twist. If you’re designing a sexy t-shirt, choose a font that has a sexy edge to it. And if you’re designing a t-shirt for a serious, professional law firm, you probably don’t want to use that kitten-shaped font.
While this may seem like common sense, many new t-shirt designers and would-be t-shirt entrepreneurs skip this step and just go with whatever standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious in your results; what could have been a fun t-shirt design ends up being boring and amateurish looking. However, if you are careful to choose a font that represents the content of your words, you can avoid this fate and your t-shirts will always be one step ahead of your competition.
T-shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
Most of the time, when font text is typed in a computer program, the spaces between letters and words are a bit irregular and often too wide. This extra, irregular spacing not only makes the text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, but it also makes it a bit harder to read because the words don’t stick together visually as units. Even if the viewer doesn’t notice it, the eye and brain have to work a little harder and that extra difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.
Fortunately for the novice T-shirt designer, this problem can be addressed through a combination of tracking and kerning, which are simply two methods of adjusting the spacing between letters.
Follow-up it has to do with adjusting the average letter spacing in entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the T-shirt artist can decrease the average spacing between all letters in the selected range (making the spacing “narrower”), or increase the average spacing (“open” the text), depending on whatever is necessary. Since raw spacing varies from font to font, you’ll need to decide which one is needed for your particular t-shirt design. But a neat trick professional t-shirt designers use is to start by fitting the font too tight (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increase the tracking until the words look just right.
interspersed It’s very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: Instead of adjusting the average spacing across an entire range of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at a time. This allows for a greater degree of control than tracking, and allows a t-shirt artist to fine-tune the spacing between individual letter pairs that still don’t look quite right, even after the text has been tracked.
In general, best practice is to use tracking so that the full range of letters in a t-shirt slogan looks pretty good, and then use kerning to adjust the spacing between the letter pairs until the text on the t-shirt matches. see perfect.
T-shirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing
Once the letters of a t-shirt slogan have been correctly traced and spaced, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between the words. Adjusting word spacing is very similar to tracking and kerning; in fact it’s done in exactly the same way as kerning and really just a matter of adjusting spaces between words rather than letters, but the general rule of thumb for proper word spacing is a bit different, e.g. making the space between words is a complete step in itself.
In general, the best practice when setting word spacing is to display the width of a lowercase “L” in the font being used, and then make the space between each word that wide. This means that the width of the spaces between words will be different from font to font (because the size of the lowercase “L” is different from font to font), but it also means that the spacing will be custom designed for the font in ask. Creating the right amount of space between words will support your tracking and kerning effects, helping your words stick together as separate visual units and improving readability.
T-shirt Design Secret #4: Leadership aka “Spacing Between the Lines”
Another place new t-shirt designers often go wrong is in the header or “space between lines of text.” Lead, which is pronounced like the metal “lead” rather than a “leader” that takes people somewhere, dates back to the days of the printing press, when a person would actually wear small, thin pieces of lead. to create a vertical space. between the lines of type. These days, of course, computers handle the leadership for us. Unfortunately, when it comes to t-shirt text, they often mishandle it.
When a T-shirt slogan is typed into a computer program, it often starts with too much space between the lines. This helps make the text look very “typographic” rather than natural, as well as making the design of the shirt (and the designer) look very amateurish. However, with just a small change to the header, the same text on the T-shirt can be made to look very tight and professional.
With line spacing, the goal is to create enough space between lines of text so that they fit well and don’t interfere with each other, without creating so much space that they look artificial or become hard to read. The eye should be able to easily jump visually from one line to the next without losing its place and without any effort. While there is no real rule of thumb for the proper amount of line spacing, a T-shirt designer beginning to fit the front will quickly learn to “feel” when it is correct. In general, the best way to start is to decrease the amount of leading (by adjusting the space between the lines) and then keep adjusting it up or down until it feels visually balanced. When it looks natural and reads smoothly, your t-shirt slogan is one step closer to the big time.
T-shirt Design Secret #5: Phrasing aka “Line Breaking”
Phrasing has to do with where a t-shirt designer chooses to break lines of text, and is another aspect of good t-shirt design that is often overlooked. Many new designers simply write their text at the size they want, and don’t pay attention to the words the lines end on and how those line breaks affect the readability of the t-shirt. More often than not, this results in a jersey that reads terribly and feels amateurish.
For example, a badly torn T-shirt slogan might look like this:
I’m not an
doctor but i play
one in truth
life
As you can see, this tagline is a little hard to read because the semi-random breaking of logical sentences and groups of ideas makes both the eye and the brain work harder to make sense of it all, and the result is the t-shirt. the catchphrase ends up feeling breathy. However, with a little more thought and effort to break the lines at natural points in the text, we end up with this:
I’m not a doctor
goal I play one
in real life
Suddenly, the slogan on the shirt flows naturally and is much easier to read. By visually keeping logical phrases together, you can create a much more natural visual rhythm for your T-shirt copy, and the reader can easily process the message on the T-shirt without having to fight bad writing to understand it.
T-shirt Design Secret #6: A Bonus Tip (Because I Like You)
Once you’ve applied these 5 secrets from the t-shirt design pros, you’ll find that your text on your t-shirt already looks much better and more professional than when you started. Unfortunately, you’ll also likely find that you’ve been staring at the text for so long that it becomes difficult to correctly judge its improvement. Such is the life of a t-shirt artist! But don’t panic! Professional graphic designers have a few more tricks up their sleeves to help you overcome this career hazard.
To check the text spacing on your t-shirt and make sure it’s really perfect, you can:
- Look at your design upside down. If you see gaps that seem uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
- Look at your design reflected in a mirror. If you see gaps that seem uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
- Print your design on a sheet of paper, hold it up to a light source, and then look at the text from the back of the page. If you see gaps that look uneven or inconsistent, you guessed it, fix them.
By doing any or all of these three weird things, you force your eyes and brain to pay attention to the empty spaces between letters instead of trying to read the words themselves. Words become abstract shapes for your brain, and you, the T-shirt artist, are free to correctly judge the empty spaces between words.
And that is!
As you can see, professional t-shirt text design is really just a matter of creating text that not only supports your message, but also presents it in a way that is visually balanced and well-spaced. By applying these t-shirt design tips correctly, your t-shirt text will be much nicer to look at, easier to read, and you’ll be way ahead of all those fan t-shirt designs hitting the market. And, most importantly, your fun t-shirt designs will finally be fun in a good way.