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How To Design A T-Shirt Online? : Must-Follow Tips & Tricks

by Henny Kel Tweet - in Tshirt Design

Design A T-Shirt Online

Last updated on December 14th, 2022

T-shirts are amongst the most effective and in-demand marketing strategies with a massive reach amongst the targeted audience. But only a well-thought-of t-shirt design can yield the desired marketing goals. You must pay heed to some professional ways to design a t-shirt. In this post, we’ve shared the effective tips and tricks to design a tshirt online.

When it comes to reaching out to thousands of people by making a one-time investment, t-shirt marketing is the most desirable business strategy. Each person who wears a t-shirt with a brand message becomes a walking advertisement. This means that thousands of people see that t-shirt when someone wears it. Thousands of people, thus, see your design and brand message daily.

Due to the increasing demand for t-shirt designs, many individuals and companies are competing to create these designs to drive attention. Now, an ordinary design created casually is not going to work for promoting a brand or driving people’s attention. Your business must base your t-shirt designs on unique ideas.

The use of a custom-designed t-shirt is growing in popularity and volume. This is because companies have found t-shirts as an effective modern branding strategy to promote products or services or discounts. Startups are particularly fond of t-shirt marketing due to their low budgets. According to the new stats, the global custom t-shirt printing market size is increasing rapidly. It was worth USD 3.4 billion in 2019 and was expected to grow by a CAGR of 9,6 percent.

While the demand for a well-designed t-shirt is increasing with each passing day, you can generate robust demand for your t-shirt business. But first, you must ensure that you design a t-shirt online with an approach of a professional designer. Only such a design can attract people’s otherwise wavering attention.

Here Are Some Tips To Design A T-Shirt Online

01. Know Why You Need A T-Shirt

The first thing you should be clear about is the purpose of the t-shirt. Is the t-shirt is purely for promotional purposes and branding is your sole goal? Or, is it for fashion and personal purposes? You may want to create the shirt design for commemorating an event.

To know your purpose of the shirt, you should write out a list of things. Write about the styles, themes, and personality traits that your brand needs to convey. For instance, your brand could be conservative, playful, serious, luxurious, or affordable. When you create a t-shirt design, it should be answering such concerns and questions.

02. Set A Budget

Before you start creating your t-shirt design online, you should know your budget and quantity. The amount of money you can spend will also determine the choice of design elements and printing. For example, you can decide on the number of colors you should be using. More colors will result in more spending on printing.

Also, the budget will be a factor in choosing the right printing method. While some methods are ideal when printing in bulk, the other methods are best suited for small orders. You can also know how many t-shirt prints you are going to do. Therefore, you should plan your budget and quantities of prints.

03. Gather Inspiration

An inspiring idea is a key to designing a t-shirt online. But, where to get the inspiration from. One of the best ways is to find out which trendy designs are currently selling more. If you are in the business of selling a t-shirt, you should first find out which themes and styles of designs are trending.

You can search the trending designs on sites such as PrintShop by Designhill, Teespring and Spreadshirt, which are mainly meant for this purpose. Just type some keywords and you can have a select list of the design trends that are popular at present.

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04. Understand The Printing Options

When exploring your printing options, know that you have access to many of them depending on your budget, material, appearance, and production time.

Here Are The Options

i. Screen Printing

Screen Printing is considered a gold standard of printing. In this method, your printer makes an original screen for each of the colors you use. This allows for bulk printing. But it is an expensive option if the design has multiple colors. This is because each of the colors needs yet another new screen.

ii. Vinyl Graphic

Vinyl graphic is a heat transfer printing method, using more durable vinyl and not just the ink. It is a durable method but expensive as additional colors need more budget.

iii. Direct-to-Garment Alternative Printing

Direct-to-garment alternative printing is also known as print-on-demand, which is a comparatively newer option. It allows for the printing of the design directly on fabric. A great advantage of this type of printing is that you can print design with maximum details and multiple colors.

05. Pinpoint Your Design Concept

Invest some time and effort in arriving at the t-shirt design. Gather your design team and brainstorm over different design ideas. Let you and your design team randomly discuss those ideas. When brainstorming, you should think of the types of t-shirts, style, and imagery, your brand message.

You should come up with some quick sketches of how the design is going to look. But make sure that these t-shirt design ideas are suitable for the realistic size of the shirt. Consider how the design will look at larger and smaller sizes of t-shirts.

06. Style and Imagery

Decide on what style and imagery you would like to have to design a funny t-shirt online. To do that, you must have a clear picture of what your brand is all about. You must precisely know about your target market. This will help in picking the right style and imagery for your design.

For instance, if you are designing for kids’ t-shirts, then the style will be cartoony and cute. But whichever style you choose, ensure that it is simple and not involving many color ingredients and too much linework.

07. Pick The Right Typography

The typefaces you incorporate in your t shirt design is going to make an impact on the viewers. It will also determine the success of your design. Typography helps to give a personality to the design. So, you should choose serif or non-serif fonts, script fonts, comic fonts, etc. as per your brand personality.

Remember that the typefaces you pick will also help convey your brand message to your audience. Therefore, after deciding on your brand message, look for the right typefaces that can convey the message at a glance.

08. Choose The Right Colors

Make sure that your choice of colors is perfect to design a t-shirt online. A characteristic of color is that it evokes an intended emotion from the viewer. When seeing a color, there is an emotional response to the design from the target audience. For example, red is generally considered by the designers to evoke aggressiveness, love, passion, and energy. Similarly, yellow is a sunshine color that gives the feeling of hope.

Note that each color hue, shade, and the tint is capable of evoking emotion and even a set of emotions. A clever designer knows how to use colors to get an emotional response from target viewers or customers. So, incorporate colors keeping your audience in mind.

Another thing to note is that the use of multiple colors in the design will enhance your printing costs. So, if your budget is smaller, consider using only one or two colors. But make sure that they complement each other. It would be wise to use fabric color as the background and then pick a contrasting color for the design.

09. Do It Yourself

If you can design your t-shirt on your own, then its cost will come down to your budget. So, if you are on a tight budget, prefer designing all by yourself. All you need to do is to use design software, which works on a drag-and-drop basis. Choose the colors, fonts, etc. elements and drop them in the design frame and complete the design.

Amongst the leading design software, you can think of choosing are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, InkSpace, CorelDraw, and GraffixProStudio.

10. Hire A Pro

In case you have enough budget to design a t-shirt online, then it is better to hire a professional graphic designer. The designer understands how to create a customized t-shirt design as per your brief.

An advantage of hiring a designer is that you can work on a one-to-one basis. You will get many revisions of the design, which means you have many design ideas to choose from. Also, you can ask the designer to improve on some ideas.

11. Crowdsource The Design

Another effective option you can explore is to crowdsource the design to a marketplace. Think of outsourcing it to a leading creative marketplace Designhill. This marketplace has hundreds of professionals as well as amateur designs. They will try their best to win your t-shirt design contest and an attractive prize.

As a consequence of it, you have quick access to dozens of new t-shirt design ideas from as many talented designers. They come to your contest from across the globe with different cultural and design backgrounds. In this way, you can choose one design that you think is best suited for your target audience and market. So, you have the services of many talented designers by launching your design contest.

12. Choose A Printing Company

Once you have finished designing a t-shirt online, it is now the time to print it on t-shirts. For this, you need to choose the right printing platform if you want it done online. For physical printing, you can visit a nearby printing shop and get the job done. But that may consume more of your time and money as well. Therefore, an online printing site is the best option for many businesses that want to sell t-shirts.

You can pick PrintShop by Designhill as your printing platform. This is an ideal print on demand site where all you need to do is to order the site to print a particular design on custom tshirts with your design and print specification. Then, the site will print the design on the t-shirt fabric of your choice. Not only that, the site can get the printed t-shirts delivered directly to your customers. In this way, you save time and money on going through the entire process.

13. Get The Right Files

Since you are designing online, make sure that your designer sends you the design in the right file. If you need your t-shirt design in vector format, then it should be in a file such as Adobe Illustrator, PDF, or EPS file. But if your printer can accommodate custom colors, then you must have Pantone or CMYK color codes so that you get the colors as you want.

These are the major steps you should take to design a t-shirt online. Make sure that you take each step with utmost caution and information. The design process should be completed professionally from start to finish.

Are You Looking for a New Graphic Designer?If Yes, Call Us on +1-855-699-2851 [times for calling 9am to 6pm EST (US)] or Register for a Free Design Consultation

Wrapping Up

T-shirts are useful marketing tools that ensure you a wider reach amongst your target audience. But, you should design a t-shirt online to cut down your design costs if your budget is smaller. You need to follow some professional processes and steps to create a design that suits your theme, target market and customers, and brand image.

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I am a graphic, web designer and blogger with over 6 years experience. I am very passionate about anything related to design and spends copious amounts of time hidden behind a book or a screen and reading about design. Twitter

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