Designing Mistakes That Should be Avoid

Some of the greatest designs are simple. But even simplest designs need to do some things right and avoid the most common mistakes to achieve that greatness.

How to Avoid the 10 Most Common Mistakes When Designing a T-shirt:

In this post, I’m going to outline the top ten things you should be thinking about as you design your printed masterpiece. Some of these might seem obvious, others could be news to you. Read on to find out.

1.  Sizing

There may be things in life where size does not matter. In T-shirt design, it matters a lot. And yet, most people tend to go with standard sizing most of the time.

Here’s the thing: size should be decided based on the nature of the design, and the properties of the garment to be printed. There should be some thoughts put into it.

2. Placement

Your design could be so amazing that it turns heads– but get the placement wrong, and heads will be turning for the wrong reason. A common mistake is the belly print, which is never flattering. In an upcoming post, I will discuss this unfortunate placement in detail.

3. Typography & Fonts

Typography, in its most basic form, is the visual component of the written word. It’s not the text itself– but anytime text is printed or displayed, it involves some degree of typography.

When it comes to design, typography is the art of typesetting or arranging type in a way that makes sense, along with choosing typefaces (fonts), making sure the letter spacing and line spacing is correct, and the way it interacts with the graphic elements is aesthetically pleasing.

4. Composition

Composition is something you may remember from your high school art class. Every design has elements that are arranged in relation to each other, and this relation is what makes up the overall composition.

5. Image Quality

This is one of the most common problems with our customer-submitted art files. Images are all too often “low resolution”. In other words, they don’t have enough pixel information to give us the quality and details that make for good print quality.

6. Colors

Color choices are some of the most important decisions; not only for design reasons, but if you want screen printing, making sure the job fits your budget. More colors = more cost per item. Of course, you could always buy more shirts to decrease your cost per item. Spend more to save more. Sales logic.

7. Contrast

Contrast is a part of color choice, but it’s a very specific and important part to consider. What exactly is contrast? It’s the degree of visual difference between the darker and lighter parts of an image, or the way shades of colors correspond to each other.

8. Inversion

Inversion is something fairly common that needs to be done, usually when printing white ink on black garments. Unless you’re some kind of Goth art band, you probably don’t want your photo looking like an x-ray.

9. Complexity

The human eye can only process a certain amount of information at once, graphics or otherwise, and with a T-shirt design you not only have limited viewing time, but you’re usually a moving target. So keep it simple!

10. Borders, Masks & Edges

Many designs that we print feature one or more photographs. A photo just sitting on a shirt with plain edges can look boring or even cheap and unprofessional. An easy solution to this is to “put a border on it”!