We are increasingly getting a lot of t-shirt printing jobs from uploaded artwork that our customers have created off-line. Most of the T-shirt designs have been very skilled and extremely advanced, but the most common mistake we see is not creating outlines from the fonts used.

It’s a very simple step in the T-shirt design process that can ensure your artwork stays just as you have created it. You see, if you use a font on your computer that isn’t on the printer’s computer, it can sometimes be substituted for a completely different font. You can just imagine how bad that can be when the format changes and the whole theme looks different.

For this design tutorial, we have created artwork that only has fonts, and lots of them. The majority of these fonts are not loaded on most computers by default. Here is the finished artwork:

This particular design tutorial is based in Adobe Illustrator, and as always, we are going to start with a blank canvas.

The next step was to create our artwork by typing our company name with over 20 of our favorite fonts.

The next step is to select all of the fonts and go to the Type menu at the top. Select the option to Create Outlines:

This will result in the fonts becoming vectored images. *Note that you lose the ability to edit the fonts after this step.

When you select this option, be sure that you’re finished with the design or you have saved a file with the fonts still editable. There you have it! One quick and easy way to make sure that your artwork is printed. Exactly like you have created it.