Top T-Shirt Design Tips - 5 Secrets For Perfect T Shirt Text (Plus One Bonus!)

If your funny t-shirts are turning out funny-looking, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool tee shirt designs are when you imagine them, if your text is poorly designed, your shirts will always look unprofessional. But don't fear! With one of these 5 tricks of professional graphic designers, you can quickly turn those amateur custom t shirts into perfect and polished works of t shirt art.

T-Shirt Design Secret #1: Selecting the right Font
When choosing a font for your t shirt text, ensure that you pick one that supports your message. For instance, if you are designing a funny t shirt, choose a font which has a funny feel to it. If you are designing a sexy t shirt, choose a font which has a sexy feel to it. And if you're designing a t shirt for a serious, professional law firm, you probably don't want to use that font with letters shaped like kittens.

While this may appear to be common sense, many new tee shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this task and just pick any standard font they could have lying around. Unfortunately, it's obvious in their results; what could have been a fun tee shirt design eventually ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you are careful to select a font that represents the content of your words, however, you can avoid this fate and your shirts will be one step ahead of your competition.

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
More often than not, when font text is typed right into a computer program, the spaces between your letters and words are a little uneven, and often a little too wide. This extra and uneven space not only makes your text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, it also makes it slightly more difficult to read as the words don't visually hold together as units. Even if the viewer doesn't see it, the eye and the mind have to work a little harder and that extra bit of difficulty provides viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

Fortunately for the novice tee 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.

Tracking is due to adjusting the average spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the t shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing "tighter"), or else increase the average spacing ("opening up" the text), depending on what's needed. Because the raw, unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you'll have to decide which one is necessary for your particular t shirt design. But a good trick used by professional tee shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increasing the tracking before words look right.

Kerning is very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: rather than adjusting the average spacing across 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 single letter pairs that still don't look quite right, even after the text has been tracked.

In general, the very best practice is to use tracking to obtain the entire selection of letters in a tee shirt slogan to look very good, and then use kerning to fine tune the spacing between letter pairs until your tee shirt text looks perfect.

camisa de time -Shirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing
After the letters of a tee shirt slogan have already been properly tracked and kerned, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between your words. Adjusting word spacing is very much like tracking and kerning -- in fact, it's done a similar way as kerning and is actually just kerning the spaces between words instead of letters -- but the guideline for proper spacing between words is really a little different, therefore word spacing is really a whole step unto itself.

In general, the very best practice when adjusting spacing between words is to visualize the width of a lowercase "L" in the font that's being used, and then make the area 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" differs from font to font), but it also means that the spacing will be custom created for the font in question. Creating the proper level of space between words will support the consequences of your tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to carry together better as separate visual units and improving readability.