You know at You Design It that we eat, sleep, and breathe t-shirts. It is a 24/7 love affair that we have for all things t-shirts and we want to spread the love. Here is a short list of t-shirt blogs that we frequently read in our feedreader:

1. I Love Your Tshirt – Really cool and trendy blog about hip-hop style tees, hats, and shoes.
2. The Tshirt Blog – an all around t-shirt blog about printed tees on the interweb.
3. The Daily Tee – one of the original t-shirt blog pioneers. These catch and cover all styles of t-shirts.
4. Custom T-Shirts Blog – an affiliate based blog that will disperse t-shirt information nuggets that go a long way.
5. Custom T-Shirt Talk – This blog is great about testing companies out and providing news-breaking information on mergers and acquisitions, and other related t-shirt news.

Check these blogs out because they are doing a great job of serving their niche in the internet t-shirt world.

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.

We want to take a little more time and create some higher quality posts that illustrate more of what we do and how we do it. Our goal isn’t so much to teach you how to use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or any other tool that we incorporate in t-shirt designing. But more to teach you little tips and tricks that can set your t-shirt designs apart. One of our more popular design tricks that we use quite often is creating the stitch look with a screen printing. You’d be surprised to see just how easy this trick is. Before we start, here’s the final picture of what we will be creating:

So if you are following along with us, you will first begin by opening Illustrator up and choosing the text tool.

With the text tool we’re going to create the text that we will manipulate, and we have chosen a thick script font. You can just about choose any solid font for these purposes. We always like to use a thick script font because it conveys the traditional stitch look from an appliqué.

As with any good t-shirt design that involves fonts, out of habit, we are going to create outlines. This way, if we send this file to our customers or other printers, they won’t have to be concerned with natively running or owning this font.

Once we have created outlines, we’re going to add a 10 PT stroke of the same color to our text. You can choose any size you would like but you will see in the end that you can have the stroke too big or too small.

We are then going to make an exact copy of what we have created so far and we have put this in a bright green to make it clear for illustration purposes.

The next steps are to stack the two images right on top of each other, then make the fill color transparent and drop the size of the stroke down to 2 pt.

Now we are headed into the final stages. The first thing we like to do is change the stroke to white just out of preference. Then we are going to select the box for a dashed line in the stroke options. For this instance, we are going to choose a 3 PT dashed line.

And there you have it! Here’s the final image again to show you what we have created.

As teams gear up for rugby season we can really feel the excitement.  Rugby has been growing in popularity over the past few years and more and more schools are now starting teams.  As the teams practice and play hard in anticipation of the season we know there’s one thing they won’t want to forget: custom rugby t-shirts.  These personalized t-shirts are the perfect way to spread even more awareness about the sport and help get the team even more attention.  They’re also a great way to show your team spirit and your school pride!  That’s why our designers have been working hard to design rugby t-shirts in our galleries.  Check out this great template:

You can modify this design to fit the needs of your team, or you can create something completely different.  We look forward to being a part of your season.

The student council is a major part of any school body.  This group represents the students and has a big role in class decision.  As such it’s important that these exemplary students stand out and are easily recognizable to their peers.  That’s why we’ve created a great gallery filled with custom student council t-shirts designs.   We can create custom student council t-shirts for your club based on any of these designs, just modify them to fit your needs.  Here’s one great example:

If you’d rather personalize the shirts even more you can design student council t-shirts in our design studio and then send us any additional artwork that you might want to include.  We look forward to creating great shirts for your organization!

Students in the beta club are usually among the best and brightest at the school. That’s why we’ve been working hard to provide them with a great design gallery filled with ideas for their own custom beta club t-shirts. These shirts are the perfect way to reward the members and give non-members yet another reason to work on boosting their GPA and joining the club. Check out this great example of one of our templates:

You can create your own personalized beta t-shirts in our online t-shirt design studio. Remember you can also send us your own artwork, names, and other club information!