We are proud to announce that the custom t-shirt design gallery for You Design It has finally launched.  It has taken a lot of hard work and long hours, but it has been well worth it.  It’s going to continue to be a work in progress, but we can promise that we will continue to add great t-shirt artwork for your use.  These t-shirt templates can be remixed and altered any way that you want to your next t-shirt printing project.

Please take your time and browse our tee shirt designs and let us know how we can be your t-shirt printing company.

One of the benefits of working at a t-shirt printing company, is the ability to create t-shirts on a whim as funny gifts for your friends. I am at that age level right now where quite a bit of my friends are giving big announcements about their newfound pregnancy. Some of those announcements have been delivered in a funny way such as wearing printed t-shirts that say you’re pregnant, so you don’t have to.

I created a funny pregnant t-shirt for a friend of ours as a joke that is a word-play on a popular song. Now I am not the greatest graphic designer and I have never been accused of being so. So I had to stick to a stick figure on this design, but here goes:

I made sure I put it on an extra soft t-shirt, because being comfortable is key. The mom-to-be loved it and we had a great time producing it. As with anything else, you’re welcome to use it if you’d like to.

When it comes to t-shirt printing, the best artwork is vectored spot colors. What are vectored spot colors you ask? Before we break that down for you, it is important to point out what the opposite of vectored spot colors is. This would typically be a photograph or jpeg that has hundreds or possibly thousands of colors in them. The whole premise for this post is because we get a lot of requests to print photographs or jpeg’s onto t-shirts or hats.

Now back to vector graphics. They are defined Wikipedia as:

“the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based upon mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.”

In more simple terms, vector graphics are simply creating artwork from scratch in programs such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The best feature about vector graphics is that you can scale them up or down in size, and they never lose their quality. This is very important as it pertains to screen printed t-shirts, because there is a lot of resizing involved with getting the artwork ready for print. If you magnify a vector graphic, you will always see the sharp edges and a very clear image. As you begin to magnify a photograph or jpeg, the quality starts to deteriorate, and everything begins to blur. Wikipedia has a really cool image of what I’m describing here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

With that description and illustration of what vector graphics are, coupled with the fact that screen printing T-shirts revolves around single ink colors… everything should begin to come full circle. The “screen” in screen printing actually represents one screen per color in the artwork printed. So you can imagine that a photograph with thousands of colors should be impossible to print on t-shirts. Right? Wrong.

Printing photographs and jpeg’s on t-shirts is possible with four color process. What is four color process? we are going to leave that explanation for another blog post, but for now understand that it is a very inexact science and considered lower quality most of the time. Not to mention, four color process can get quite expensive as well.

On the flip side, printing four color process on paper can look amazing. So when we are presented with a request to print something on t-shirts that has already been printed on paper, we usually have reservations. This was the case recently, when we were quoting on a t-shirt printing job and the artwork supplied was from a poster for an event coming up. The print on the poster was from a painting that was relevant to the event. Here is what that artwork looked like:

We were faced with a few dilemmas when we viewed the artwork. The first being what we prefaced earlier, that the artwork would need to be accomplished with four color process. The second being that the customer was on a budget. The final being that the customer wanted dark t-shirts and four color process is even harder when printed on dark t-shirts. As we spoke with our client, we explain the situation and suggested converting the artwork to a single vectored spot color. This would require a lot of time in artwork, but would guarantee a great print at a low price. Here is what we were able to do when converting a jpeg to vector:

Our client was very pleased with the vectored t-shirt design and loved the price. Here is a picture of what the final print looked like:

If you learned one thing from this post, please understand that there are many options for printing t-shirts and those options are worth exploring when it comes to complex jobs. Please feel free to contact us at any time you have a t-shirt printing job no matter how big or small, hard or easy.

That is the question… sometimes they can make all the difference in the world.  We are referring to whether you should distress t-shirt designs or leave them as they are.  The difference it can make can really go either way.  It can be the final touch on a t-shirt design that makes it look great or an additional step that should never be done.

So how do you determine whether you should use a distressed filter on your artwork?  We think it has everything to do with the intended audience and the content of the design.  If you’re going for the vintage look, or the design is supposed to look old-school, then they distressed filter is definitely the way to go.  If you are looking for your colors to pop off the shirt and want to design to be more contemporary, then a distressed look wouldn’t be appropriate.

Let us show you an example of what we’re talking about.  This first design could represent a number of things, but for these purposes let’s just say they were given out for a primary school graduation.  This is what it would look like:

That design would look great and really pop off some screen printed tee shirts.  But now let’s say that design is for a summer camp with high school students attending.  These kids would find it much cooler at their age to have the distressed, vintage look.  So here is the same design with a distressed overlay:

Ultimately, we will leave that decision up to you of whether or not to use the distressed filter.  We just want you to know it’s available when you need it!

We just got finished printing a T-shirt on the digital t-shirt printing side that really blew us away with creativity.  One of the things we pride ourselves in, is giving you an online t-shirt designer with all the tools to create top-notch t-shirt designs.  We are not satisfied with just regular clipart and simple fonts that limits you to designs that won’t impress your friends.  It makes us proud when we look through the hundreds of tee shirt designs that we receive a day and some just completely stand out.

It is every bit of our job to continue improving the experience you have when designing t-shirts at You Design It.  As we have mentioned before, some of the t-shirt designs speak for themselves.  This next design that we’re about to show you is definitely one that is good for digital t-shirt printing at a small quantity because it has so many colors.

It obviously came from some funky designer who is all about keeping the funk.  There was a lot of artwork rotating, coloring, and resizing to accomplish this design:

Great job!

After we complete in order of screen printed t-shirts or embroidered hats, we don’t stay in our customers face asking for more time or information.  We want to let our work speak for itself and encourage you to come back just by giving you exactly what you wanted.  Our goal is to impress you so much that you want to tell us about it instead of us asking for a good quote.

This was the case from an order place by a nice lady named Anna, who needed some custom t-shirts in a short timeframe.  Here’s the e-mail we just received from her after she received her t-shirts:

“Thank you sooooo  much for the wonderful T-shirts! The kids loved them! And even though I ordered them a little late, you were able to complete the order AND ship them in time for the game. That was only 8 days from order placement until the arrival of the T-shirts! I will definitely use your company whenever I want team shirts again!”

Thanks again for that Anna, you couldn’t have made us happier!