If your funny t-shirts are getting fun, the problem may be your text. No matter how cool your 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 hacks from professional graphic designers, you can quickly turn those custom hobbyist t-shirts into perfect, polished works of t-shirt art.
The secret of t-shirt design n. # 1: choose the right font
When choosing a font for your t-shirt text, be sure to choose one that is compatible with your message. For example, if you are designing a fun t-shirt, choose a font that has a fun twist. If you are designing a sexy t-shirt, choose a font that has a sexy touch. And if you’re designing a t-shirt for a serious, professional law firm, you probably don’t want to use that kitten-shaped letter font.
While this may sound like common sense, many new t-shirt designers and aspiring t-shirt entrepreneurs skip this step and just choose whatever standard font they may have laying around. Unfortunately, it is obvious from your results; what could have been a fun t-shirt design ends up being boring and amateur looking. However, if you are careful to choose a font that represents the content of your words, you can avoid this destination 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 typing text is written in a computer program, the spaces between letters and words are a little uneven and often too wide. This extra, uneven space not only makes your text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, it also makes it a bit more difficult to read because the words are not visually held together as units. Even if the viewer doesn’t notice it, the eye and brain have to work a little harder, and that added difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious sense of discomfort.
Fortunately for the novice t-shirt designer, this problem can be solved by a combination of tracking and kerning, which are simply two methods of adjusting letter spacing.
Tracing it has to do with adjusting the average letter spacing in whole words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the T-shirt artist can decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing “tighter”) or increase the average spacing (“opening” the text), depending on than necessary. Since raw unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you’ll have to decide which one is needed for your particular t-shirt design. But a good trick used by professional t-shirt designers is to start by adjusting the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increasing the tracking until the words look good.
Interleading is very similar to tracing, but with one important difference: instead of adjusting the average spacing over an entire range of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at a time. This allows 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, the best practice is to use tracing so that the entire range of letters in a t-shirt tagline looks pretty good, and then use kerning to adjust the spacing between pairs of letters until the text on the t-shirt shows up. perfect.
T-Shirt Design Secret # 3: Word Spacing
Once the slogan letters on a T-shirt have been traced and adjusted correctly, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between the words. Adjusting word spacing is very similar to tracing and kerning; in fact it is done exactly the same way as kerning and it is actually just interspersing the spaces between words rather than letters, but the general rule of thumb for proper word spacing is a bit different, so the spacing between words is a step in itself.
In general, the best practice when adjusting word spacing is to display the width of a lowercase “L” in the font being used and then make the space between each word this 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 question. Creating the right amount of space between words will support the effects of your tracking and kerning, helping your words better stick together as separate visual units and improving readability.
Secret n t-shirt design. 4: Leader, also known as “Leading”
Another place new t-shirt designers often go wrong is at the start or “line spacing.” Leading, which is pronounced as the “lead” of metal rather than a “leader” that leads people somewhere, dates back to the days of the printing press, when a person used small, thin pieces of lead to create a vertical space between type lines. These days, of course, computers handle the leadership for us. Unfortunately, when it comes to text on t-shirts, they often mishandle it.
When a T-shirt slogan is written in a computer program, it often begins with too much space between the lines. This helps the text look very “fonty” rather than natural, as well as making the t-shirt design (and the designer) look very amateurish. However, with just a slight change to the header, the very text on the shirt can be made to look very tight and professional.
With leading, the goal is to create enough space between lines of text so that they fit well and do not interfere with each other, without creating so much space that they appear artificial or become difficult to read. The eye must be able to visually jump from one line to the next without losing its place and without any effort. While there is no general rule of thumb for the proper amount of line spacing, a T-shirt designer who begins to adjust for interference 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 you feel visually balanced. When it looks natural and reads smoothly, your jersey tagline is one step closer to the big moment.
Secret n t-shirt design. 5: phrasing, also known as “line break”
Copywriting has to do with where a t-shirt designer chooses to break lines of text, and it is another aspect of good t-shirt design that is often overlooked. Many new designers just type their text in whatever size they want and don’t pay attention to the words the lines end in and how those line breaks affect the legibility of the shirt. Most of the time, this results in a shirt that reads terribly and feels like a hobbyist.
For example, a slogan for a T-shirt with a poor line might look like this:
I’m not an
doctor but i play
one in real
life
As you can see, this slogan is a bit difficult to read because the semi-random breaking of logical phrases and clusters of ideas makes both the eye and the brain work harder to make sense of it all, and the result is the t-shirt. slogan ends up feeling choppy. However, with a little more thought and effort to break the lines at the natural points of the text, we are done with this:
I am not a doctor
but i play one
in real life
Suddenly, the slogan on the shirt flows naturally and is much easier to read. By keeping the logical phrases together visually, you can create a much more natural visual rhythm to your t-shirt text, and the reader can easily process the t-shirt message without having to fight poor wording to understand it.
T Shirt Design Secret # 6: An Extra Tip (Because I Like You)
Once you’ve applied these 5 secrets of t-shirt design professionals, you will find that your t-shirt text already looks much better and more professional than when it started. Unfortunately, you will probably also find that you have been looking at your text for so long that it becomes difficult to correctly judge its improvement. This is the life of a t-shirt artist! But do not spread panic! Professional graphic designers have a few more tricks up their sleeves to help you overcome this professional danger.
To check your t-shirt text spacing and make sure it’s really perfect, you can:
- Look at your design upside down. If you see gaps that look uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
- Look at your design reflected in a mirror. If you see gaps that look uneven or inconsistent, fix them.
- Print your design on a sheet of paper, hold it up to a light source, and then look at your 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 rather than trying to read the words themselves. The words become abstract shapes for your brain, and you, the artist on the t-shirt, are free to properly judge the empty spaces between the 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 visually balanced and well-spaced way. If you apply these t-shirt design tips correctly, your t-shirt text will be much more pleasant to see, easier to read, and far more advanced than all the fan t-shirt designs hitting the market. And, most importantly, your fun t-shirt designs will finally be fun in a good way.
