If you’re designing a custom tee for your company or organization, you want a design that effectively conveys your culture, your brand messaging, or the goal of an event you’re hosting. The custom gear you create should be easy to read, but it should also have a dynamic, engaging design. This will make it memorable and appealing to wear while improving the overall quality of your custom screen-printed T-shirts.
How to Get the Best Quality Custom T-Shirts
If you want to make sure you get the best quality out of your next batch of custom screen-printed T-shirts make sure you follow these tips:
Tip 1: Use High-Quality Assets and Content
Using assets and content you already have, like existing logos and mascot images, can make your T-shirt design easier to create. They also contain images your audience may already recognize. But make sure you use logo images in high resolutions; if you use low-resolution logos or images, you may find the end result ends up blurry or unclear.
Once you have high-quality logos and images, you can create a design that uses a familiar image in a new way, or you can use familiar text to anchor a new logo design. Additionally, if you’re designing a T-shirt for a specific charitable event, you should research what kinds of T-shirt images and phrases are associated with the subject you’re raising money or awareness for.
Using existing content for your design gives you images and phrases you can play with and build on as you create your new shirt without having to reinvent the wheel.
If you’re printing T-shirts for a client-facing event, a well-designed T-shirt can leave a positive impression on clients, prospects, and customers that may encourage them to do or keep doing business with you.
Tip 2: Decide on Effective Color Choices
As you’re exploring the creative possibilities, you should try to select no more than three colors for your design. Limiting your color choices prevents your design from becoming too busy and hard to read. It also makes your design more cost-effective, since T-shirt screen printing charges for every color used.
Make sure the colors you choose have enough contrast that the ink stands out on the shirt’s background color. You can gravitate toward tried-and-true color combinations like red and white, or blue and yellow. Or you can do further research on contrasting and complementary colors to make more unique color combinations. Either way, choose a color palette that is complimentary but won’t make it difficult to distinguish between different design elements, text, and imagery.
Tip 3: Choose Dynamic, Readable Font Pairings
Along with color choice, font pairings are an important part of creating high-quality custom T-shirt designs. Fonts and typefaces are their own animal, and there’s plenty you can learn about them. However, some quick rules of thumb are:
- Use one to three fonts. Any more will make your design cluttered and busy. Two or three are often preferable because switching between fonts can make your design more dynamic, especially if it’s a text-only design.
- You can always pair one serif font with a sans serif font, though you should determine whether they work well together before you use them in your design. A serif font has small lines on ends of letters like T, R, and M, while sans serif fonts do not have these lines.
- If you use a decorative font, you should pair it with a straightforward serif or sans serif font to make the design readable.
Bonus Tip: You can find font pairing websites and pages on the internet, and those can help you pick the proper fonts for your design.
Custom T-Shirt Embroidery and Screen Printing for All Your Design Needs
At Marathon Sportswear, we have the equipment, experience, and technology to supply screen-printed apparel for your Chicago area company’s or organization’s needs. Our screen-printing services include heat transfer and silk screening, and we work with you to make your custom design a reality. If you’re interested in our custom screen-printing services, contact us today.
