Taking your t-shirt design from an idea to conception is an easy task. Here’s the basic process and things to consider when taking your vision and getting it designed to be printed on a t-shirt.

Ponder on what your design will represent. What are you advertising about? A rock band? Whether you’re making a shirt for your comapny, a business, organization, a basketball team or some club, the purpose will determine the t-shirt design you will create.

Choose the right color scheme. Color contrast is important in designing the shirt. Try color combinations, and you will see how some ink colors may look vibrant in the dark color shirts than light colored ones. Some ink colors change vibrancy once actually printed in cloth, so be careful in choosing your colors.

Determine the dimension of the design. After picking the color combinations, you can make the design nicer by creating more depth to some part of the design. You can do this by shading or make the images pop like a 3D. You can also make certain dimensions pop with the use of software programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and others.

Make sure the design is balanced. Once you combine all the elements and parts of your design to form a whole, you’ll achieve balance. This would depend on your design’s composition. You can make a design with small elements that balance with larger ones on the opposite side, or you can make the large design as the primary focus, or you can go with a minimalistic approach. Always remember the rule of thirds in creating balance in your design.

Determine where in the shirt you will place the design. Does it look better in the center? How about in the left chest side. Do you see your design covering the whole front shirt? How about the back? If you need to place the company slogan, where would it effectively go?

Draw a mock-up of the design. It’s faster if you sketch several ideas on paper first before actually putting them on the shirt. Try drawing several designs with different versions and color combinations. With several trial and errors, the perfect design that’s cohesive and balanced will eventually appear before your eyes.

Make a digital image of the design. After you’ve chosen your final design from the sketches, scan the drawing into your pc and edit it in Photoshop. Erase the dirty lines. Adjust the levels and play with hues, colors, and filters. You can also convert the image into the vector in Illustrator so you can play more and morph your design to make it high quality. Add appropriate lines, shades or shadows to achieve your vision.

Print a prototype. After finishing your design, you can test how it would actually look in a shirt by printing it and ironing it to the actual shirt color before handing it out to a printing company for mass production.

Mass Produce the t-shirt design. If you’re making shirts on a small scale, you can do the job by ironing a couple of shirts with your design. But for mass productions of 50 shirts and up, you have to look for a printing company that can print the design on the shirt the way you want to.

Want to get started on designing your t-shirt? Call us, at Plan B Printing today and we can design your t-shirt today!