We are pleased to announce the release of our Cooler Than A Hipster t-shirt. Typically of course at You Design It customers create their own designs for print; however, we wanted to step outside the norm a little bit and make a pre-designed t-shirt available for purchase. We had several reasons for creating this design. First and foremost it was just fun! It also provides a nice uniform t-shirt that we can all wear around the office that everyone can enjoy and be proud of. Another good reason is that it allowed us to experiment with different t-shirts and test different inks.

Check out a few of the features we had the most fun with on this design:

The Hipster Glasses – We created the vector eyeglasses completely from scratch. It wasn’t that time-consuming, but ultimately very rewarding since we were able to get the exact look that we were going for. In many ways the glasses are the focal point of the design so it was definitely essential that we get them just right.

Typography – We wanted to experiment with the typography of the t-shirt and create our own unique font. We’re really pleased with the way “cooler” came out and how it contributes to the overall design. Getting the look of the letters right is an often under appreciated aspect of a design, but for many designs it is vital. We’ll hope you agree that the type is just right for the design.

Uncommon Color Combos – Doing this design also gave us the opportunity to play around with unusual color combos. Getting the coloring of the design just right is another key aspect of the design and we thought long and hard about the colors we ended up settling on.

Color Shading Effect – Here at You Design It we usually print in solid spot colors without shading or gradients. That is because it is difficult to get shading just right in the final printed product to yield the type of results that the original design mock up called for. Doing this shirt gave us a great chance to practice executing this skill. It was also a pivotal part of the design which sets the tone for the shirt.

Mock Photo Shoot – One of the most enjoyable parts of the whole experience was the fact that after the t-shirts were printed we did a mock photo shoot to display the shirts. It was a ton of fun getting our friends together to model the shirts and figuring out the best poses, lighting, and setting.

Considering how much fun it was to put together this hipster t-shirt you can definitely expect more cool original designs to be coming soon. We’re already tossing around new design ideas for future projects and we also appreciate any feedback you may have to offer. So please let us know what you think of this t-shirt and if there are any other design topics you would like to see in the future!

This is a pretty clever sale that I had never seen before. Shred Clothing, run by Jonathan Kruse, is having a Christmas sale that lowers the discount each day closer to Christmas. Talk about needing to hurry to buy the goods. The sooner you buy, the more you save. This will really help those that procrastinate and worry about delivery at the last minute.

I guess it is safe to say that you can save more money and save yourself a headache by ordering early. Sounds like a win/win situation to me.

One of the blogs/clothing lines that we follow regularly is called Linty Fresh out of Marietta Georgia.  They are an operation that is founded and run by one single guy named Eric Terry.  He does one heck of a job doing it too.

One of the things he is doing to get a bigger following for his products are videos that show his personality.  His latest video had a few tips for a fan that e-mailed him asking him questions about starting a t-shirt line.  His designs are awesome and his skills are very advanced and you can easily witness this in the tutorial he gave on separating colors for a printer. Since we are a fan of his, we would like to reach out to give him a little tip on separating his colors inside Illustrator (the native program he creates his designs in).

In the video he took his vector artwork from Illustrator and opened it up in Photoshop.  We recently completed a tutorial for VectorTuts that explains the quick process of separating your colors within Illustrator.  This way, he doesn’t have to deal with a raster version of his artwork, nor the pain of taking the design from one program to another.

It is worth giving a try and we hope it helps with Linty Fresh’s well-deserved success.  Click on the picture below to see the tutorial.

Recently we came across a pretty cool site called Bear Annihilator.  All the shirts on the site feature an angry looking bear in an array of different situations.  The shirts are printed on American Apparel.

Our favorite is called Astrobear.  Check this fella out:

The understated product description simply says “One giant leap for bearkind.”  I’ll say!  How would you like to be an alien out for a relaxing stroll and come across this guy?

We’re looking forward to seeing this grizzly mug in still more scenarios. Keep up the good work Bear Annihilator!

Over the past few weeks we’ve created a series of blog posts to assist people in creating their own t-shirt line.  The past blogs have acted as an introduction to the process, help with design, and knowing your audience.  Today we would like to focus on a topic which goes hand in hand with knowing your audience, knowing your competitors.  This is something which we’ve touched on lightly in our past blogs and today we would like to nail down a few more of the specifics.  We hope that you’ll find this helpful and we encourage you to check out the other blogs in the series as well.

Knowing who your competitors are is essential.  It lets you know what you’re up against.  If your customers repeatedly mention ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ or compare your products to ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ then you can bet that getting to know a little bit about ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ is a good idea!  If possible, find out:

-how long they’ve been around
-how large are they in terms of sales, capital, and profit
-how large they are in terms of employee size
-where they are based
-how much they spend in advertising sales
-how many products they offer

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the possible information you’ll want to find out about them, but it’s a good start and it’s general enough to be helpful in most cases. Basically the function of all of these different questions is the same; they questions will help you learn about your competitors and it will put everything into perspective for you.

For example, you might be bummed out after your first year to find out that you only made a fraction of the sales that ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ made. On the other hand, if you know that XYZ has been in business for many years, that they have a huge staff size, that they spend tons in advertising and other overhead, then you might not feel so bad about your own first year.

Knowledge about your competitors will also help you know what you need to do to set yourself apart. Remember, you want to continue to successfully appeal to your target audience like they are (presumably) doing, but you also want to find a way to brand yourself and find a competitive edge. Without knowing about the competition in the first place, that becomes impossible.

Finally, knowing about your competitors will help you figure out what you need to do to successfully market your line to your buyers. If you’re producing similar items and selling them to similar kinds of people then it stands to reason that you will want to employ a lot of similar strategies for advertizing and marketing.

Remember doing your homework and learning about the competition and the market will be invaluable to you in the long run!

This is the third post in a series of blogs to give people tips and advice for starting their own t-shirt lines. This idea was conceived from the numerous phone calls and daily inquires people make regarding this topic and it’s our hope that the readers will find this series helpful and informative. Be sure to check out the other two posts [links?] and stay tuned for more!

Today we want to discuss the importance of doing your homework when it comes to knowing your audience. What we mean is, it’s very important to ask yourself “who am I trying to sell my t-shirts to?”. This will influence all aspects of your business! For example you come up with completely different designs if you’re marketing to baby boomers as opposed to Gen X-ers. You’ll also have vastly different designs if you’re focusing on say the tech/sci-fi crowd versus the music crowd. These are just two VERY basic examples and there’s a huge ‘niche’ potential. Of course you may want to focus on ‘mass appeal’, but even there it’s STILL important to know exactly which ‘masses’ you want to appeal to.

Once you have your target audience in mind, you’ll want to consider various aspects about them. For example, what is their culture like? What types of references and common history do they share? This too will heavily impact the designs you come up with. You’ll also want to bear in mind what they are likely to spend their money on in the first place. It’s a good idea to get a feel for where they often like to shop. Online and/or offline? Who are your competitors? What types of products do the stores that are popular with this group carry? What are prices and purchase volumes like?

Another useful thing to find out is what sites and other areas of the internet do they inhabit? This will be important to discover not only so that you can gain more information on their interests and ‘personalities’, but also so that you can consider marketing to them. Would you want to buy ad space on one of the popular sites for this group of people? Would you be able to tailor it to appeal to them?

Remember, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If something has been working well with your demographic and you’re able to establish yourself as a strong, viable option to them then there’s no reason to think similar strategies won’t prove useful to you as well!