Designing Custom Tshirts With the ShirtsForBands.com Design Lab

Designing a killer tshirt is a major deal for bands. The humble tshirt wears a lot of hats for a gigging band. Merch is blood, next to the gigs themselves (sometimes), it’s a beefy chunk of a band’s income. Having bad ass tshirts is a necessity. That means a lot of variables. Garment style, color & artwork are all critical points in cost and resale value. If your merch is good, people don’t even HAVE to like your band, but if your tshirts suck, people will have to REALLY like you to buy one.

Good tshirts define people’s preconceptions of your band too, regardless of what kind of music you play or what kind of gigs you’re trying to get.

Get creative.

We have design tools up to spark your creativity. We have killer artwork, and we loaded it into our designer with the intention of them being design “legos”. Our design tool has the ability to layer artwork on top of artwork, so you can stack design elements on top of each other to make more eye catching designs for your band. That’s the point! Sometimes, merch sells a band more than their music does!

Don’t limit yourself to just a font across a shirt. You’ve got options, use them! While the black tee with white letters will forever be a staple, how many of those shirts can one person own? Generic design has a effect on the onlooker’s eye, kinda like banner ads. They just get overlooked. It has to be something truly unique to grab their attention.

Using more pieces of artwork doesn’t affect the cost of your shirts at all, the only thing that affects price is number of colors. If you use a hundred pieces of art, but they’re all black, it’s the same price as one piece of art.

Making Text Sexy.

You have a lot of options when it comes to fonts, but the possibilities don’t stop there. Our design lab has several special settings you can use to make text more interesting.

Check out the arching tools in the text properties menu. You can shape the path that text curves along by turning on the arch you prefer and modifying its settings. You can also kern letters (change the whitespace between the letters).

Layering Artwork

Look at some of the elements we provide. There are wings and circlets that are supposed to be layered with other pieces. Need a flying skull of death? No problem. As you add new art, they appear as a stack of layers.

Take a wander through our library… we continually add to it, so no matter what your vibe, there will be some artwork to fit it.

When you first add artwork it will default to black, so you will need to change the color of the new art you’ve dropped in.

Keep adding elements until you’ve assembled the design you want, remembering you can move the priority of layers up and down to put them in front of or behind other pieces of art.

Don’t Forget The Back!

With our design lab, you can adjust artwork for multiple print locations, depending on what garment you’re working on designing. For a regular tshirt, you can print on the front or the back (sleeves coming soon). Just swap the location. Your old artwork will be kept intact. Keep in mind, multiple print locations affects price.

Wrap It Up!

When you’re finally satisfied with your design, do a quick review.

Then save your design. This logs your artwork into our database, so you can always get to it, if you need to reorder more merch later. We keep your layouts forever, and you can even add designs that you haven’t even ordered yet, so you can make a few designs and then consult with the other members in your band before deciding which designs to go with.

Ready To Get Started?

Tags: custom printed t-shirts, custom printed tshirts, custom screen printing, custom shirts, custom tees, design tshirts online, online designer, screen printed tshirts, shirts for bands, tshirts for bands

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 1:08 amand is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.