DESIGN TIPS

Master Art Standards

For an image to look good printed, it must have a natural resolution of no less than 200ppi at full size. This means that images you download from the web, or that you may have prepared and optimized for the web, should never be used. If you are using the Design your own shirt program here, your image will be very large for a web graphic - I reccomend 300ppi master at full size saved as a png24 image for the very best possible quality.

Understand that adding resolution does nothing to improve image quality. If a web image has jpeg artefacts or few pixels, all adding resolution does is to makes the artefacts larger and the original pixels more apparent.

Here's a sample image found online

Here's the same art scaled up to fill a t-shirt, adding resolution to an image or scaling it up destroys image quality by making the pixels too large or the jpeg too blurry with obvious compression defects.

Remember your art needs to be at least 200ppi when scaled for your shirt. If your art needs to be scaled 300%, the minimum resolution would be 600 ppi. 200-300ppi is ideal for customers uploading art at full size, use the png24 or PNG32 format if it is available. If you must use jpeg, use the maximum quality possible and understand there will still be image degradation.

Online images are often someone's property, the image used above, for example, is ©2007 Michael R. Cooke and used with permission. An alternative to using an online image may be to trace the image, with tracing paper or digitally with a good art program like Photoshop, Illustrator or Gimp. When taking digital photos, the largest file your camera can make should be used, for an attractive t-shirt the photo may need to be scaled a lot.

How should you save your artwork digitally? Our website accepts jpeg, gif and png. Both Jpeg and Gif will destroy image quality mildly to severely to achieve file size compression.

Only .png has lossless compression and a true alpha channel (for better transparency). 8bit png is comparable to gif (few colors, bitmap dither to approximate more) and should be used for flat color images, like cartoons. 24bit png is full color, it's makes a larger file than 8bit png - but for the purpose here, we believe it will give you the best possible print for full color images.

Now, if you are a pro and are submitting art to be sold by this website - you will do so by using ftp. We prefer your art be in native Photoshop or Illustrator format, or .tiff, .eps or (for vector art) .pdf. Email us for ftp information

A Free Design Program

http://www.gimp.org/ This is the premiere open source image editing software, it's FREE. It's also very good, comparable to professional software like Adobe Photoshop. If you don't already own a very high quality image editing program we strongly reccomend Gimp. It's available for almost any operating system.

GimpShop This is an add on to Gimp, if you have experience with Photoshop already this will customize Gimp to work similarly to Photoshop. Available for most operating systems.

Design Tips

Designer Michael Cooke has some design tips to share with you.

LESS IS MORE: Consider limiting the number of colors you use in your design. A single color can match with other garments, simplicity is a design virtue.

AVOID THE BOX: yes, we are all used to works on paper and canvas that assume rectangular shapes, but for t-shirt design the frame is the shirt. Use the shirt as part of the design. When you design into a rectangle and print that on a shirt, it divorces the design from the shirt. Circles can work on t-shirts, but generally it is far better to allow the shirt itself to be your design backing.

FILL THE SPACE: this is a rule of thumb for attractive design, good design is a balance of positive (the design) space and negative (the shirt) space. Make sure the most relevant part of the art also takes up the most space.

That's the classic advice. But we're creating t-shirt designs, not paintings. We have only a roughly maximum of 14" x 16" to work with for premium art, less if you're using the designer program. That's far less than the entire face of the t-shirt. Use the shirt, as advised in the 'avoid the box' paragraph, as part of the design. Consider a specific color or type of shirt, you can work with the color rings to echo a design color and integrate the shirt color into your design. It's harder to design well for tees than for paintings.

CONCEPT RULES: This is tee shirt design, folks buy tees to express themselves. A funny or clever idea will sell better than a beautiful drawing with no apparent narrative or idea attached to it. Many of the best selling t-shirts have nothing but words printed on them. If you have a great idea, the image could be drawn with a burnt matchstick and it would still sell.

If you have a body of artwork already, sit around with it and play a game of putting words in your characters mouths, imagine ironic or funny contexts for an image. The idea or concept doesn't have to come first, but it should be there if you want to be successful. Look at other tshirts designed to sell, you can learn that way.