If your funny t-shirts look funny, the problem may be your text. No matter how amazing 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 custom amateur t-shirts into perfect, polished t-shirt artwork.
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. And if you’re designing a t-shirt for a serious, professional law firm, you probably don’t want to use that kitty 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 may have laying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious from 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 the font text is typed in a computer program, the spaces between the letters and the words are a bit uneven and often too wide. This extra, uneven spacing not only makes the text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, it also makes it a bit harder to read because the words don’t hold 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 uneasiness.
Fortunately for the novice t-shirt designer, this problem can be addressed by a combination of tracking and kerning, which are simply two methods of adjusting the spacing between letters.
Tracing it has to do with adjusting the average spacing of letters 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 “tighter”), or increase the average spacing (“open” the text), depending on whatever is necessary. Since unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you’ll need to decide which one is needed for your particular t-shirt design. But a good trick professional t-shirt designers use is to start by adjusting the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increase the tracking until the words look just right.
kerned is very similar to tracking, 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 for a greater degree of control than tracing, and allows a t-shirt artist to fine-tune the spacing between pairs of individual letters that still don’t look quite right, even after the text has been traced.
In general, the best practice is to use tracing so that the entire range of letters in a t-shirt slogan looks pretty good, and then use kerning to adjust the spacing between pairs of letters until the t-shirt text lines up. look 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 exactly the same way as kerning and it’s really just adjusting the spaces between words rather than letters, but the rule of thumb for proper word spacing is a bit different, for what the space between words is a whole 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 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 Question. Creating the right amount of space between words will support the effects of your tracking and kerning, helping your words stay together as separate visual units and improve readability.
T-shirt Design Secret #4: Leadership AKA “Line Spacing”
Another place new t-shirt designers often get it wrong is in the header or “text line spacing.” Lead, pronounced like the metal “lead” rather than a “leader” that leads people somewhere, dates back to the days of the printing press, when a person actually used small, thin pieces of lead to create vertical space. between the type lines. These days, of course, computers handle leadership for us. Unfortunately, when it comes to t-shirt text, it’s often mishandled.
When a T-shirt slogan is typed into a computer program, it often begins with too much space between the lines. This helps the text look very “typographical” rather than natural, as well as making the t-shirt design (and the designer) look very amateurish. However, with just a small change to the header, you can make the same text on your t-shirt look very tight and professional.
With line spacing, the goal is to create enough space between the lines of text so that they fit together nicely and don’t interfere with each other, without creating so much space that they look artificial or become difficult 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 line spacing (adjusting the space between 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 “breaking lines”
Phrasing has to do with where a t-shirt designer chooses to break lines of text, and it’s another often overlooked aspect of good t-shirt design. Many new designers just write their text in the size they want, and don’t pay attention to what 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 t-shirt that reads terribly and feels like a buff.
For example, a slogan on a badly ripped t-shirt might look like this:
I’m not an
doctor but game
one indeed
life
As you can see, this slogan is a bit difficult to read because the semi-random breakdown 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 choppy. However, with a little more thought and effort to break the lines at natural points in the text, we end up with this:
I am not a doctor
goal I play one
in real life
Suddenly, the slogan on the t-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 text, and the reader can easily process the t-shirt’s message without having to fight through bad phrases to understand it.
T-shirt Design Secret #6: A Bonus Tip (Because I Like You)
Once you’ve applied these 5 secrets from t-shirt design pros, you’ll find that your t-shirt text already looks much better and more professional than when you started. Unfortunately, you’ll also likely find that you’ve been looking 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 that will 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 seem jagged or inconsistent, fix them.
- See your design reflected in a mirror. If you see gaps that seem jagged 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. The words become abstract shapes for your brain, and you, the t-shirt artist, are free to correctly 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 way that is visually balanced and well-spaced. By correctly applying these t-shirt design tips, your t-shirt text will be much nicer to look at, easier to read, and will be miles ahead of all the amateur t-shirt designs hitting the market. And, most importantly, your funny t-shirt designs will finally be fun in a good way.
