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Top T-Shirt Design Tips - 5 Secrets For Perfect T Shirt Text (Plus One Bonus!)
If your funny t-shirts are turning out funny-looking, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool t shirt designs are when you imagine them, if your text is poorly designed, your shirts will always look unprofessional. But don't fear! With these 5 tricks of professional graphic artists, you can quickly turn those amateur custom tops into perfect and polished works of tee shirt art.

T-Shirt Design Secret #1: Selecting the most appropriate Font
When choosing a font for the t shirt text, make sure you pick one that supports your message. For example, if you're designing a funny tee shirt, choose a font which has a funny feel to it. If you're designing a sexy tee shirt, choose a font which has a sexy feel to it. And if you're designing a t shirt for a serious, professional lawyer, you probably don't desire to use that font with letters shaped like kittens.

While this may sound like common sense, many new tee shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this task and just pick any standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it's obvious in their results; what could have been a fun t shirt design ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you are careful to choose a font that represents this content of your words, however, you can avoid this fate and your shirts will always be one step ahead of your competition.

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
Most of the time, when font text is typed right into a computer program, the spaces between your letters and words are a little uneven, and often a little too wide. This extra and uneven space not only makes your text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, it also makes it slightly more challenging to read because the words don't visually hold together as units. Even if the viewer doesn't notice it, the eye and the mind have to work a little harder and that extra little bit of difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

Fortunately for the novice tee shirt designer, this problem could be addressed by a mix of tracking and kerning, which are simply just two methods of adjusting the spacing between letters.

Tracking is due to adjusting the average spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the tee shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing "tighter"), if not raise the average spacing ("checking" the text), based on what's needed. Since the raw, unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you'll have to decide which one is needed for your particular tee shirt design. But a good trick used by professional tee shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font an excessive amount of (so the letters are too close together) and slowly increasing the tracking before words look right.

Kerning is very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: rather than adjusting the average spacing across an entire range of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at the same time. This allows a greater degree of control than tracking, and allows a tee shirt artist to fine tune the spacing between single letter pairs that still don't look quite right, even after the written text has been tracked.

In general, the very best practice is to use tracking to get the entire selection of letters in a tee shirt slogan to look very good, and use kerning to fine tune the spacing between letter pairs until your tee shirt text looks perfect.

T-Shirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing
Once the letters of a t shirt slogan have already been properly tracked and kerned, another important step would be to adjust the spacing between your words. Adjusting word spacing is quite much like tracking and kerning -- actually, it's done a similar way as kerning and is actually just kerning the spaces between words instead of letters -- but the rule of thumb for proper spacing between words is a little different, and so word spacing is a whole step unto itself.

In general, the best practice when adjusting spacing between words is to visualize the width of a lowercase "L" in the font that's being used, and then make the area between each word that wide. Which means that the width of the spaces between words will be different from font to font (because the size of the lowercase "L" is different from font to font), but it also means that the spacing will be custom designed for the font involved. Creating the proper amount of space between words will support the effects of one's tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to hold together better as separate visual units and improving readability.

T-Shirt Design Secret #4: Leading, aka "Line Spacing"
Another place that new t shirt designers often go wrong is in the leading, or "spacing between lines of text." Leading -- that is pronounced like the metal "lead" rather than like a "leader" taking people somewhere -- goes back to the times of the printing press, when a person would actually use small, thin pieces of result in create vertical space between the lines of type. These days, of course, computers handle the best for us. Unfortunately, with regards to t shirt text, they often times handle it poorly.

When a tee shirt slogan is typed into a computer program, it often starts out with a little too much space between the lines. This helps make the text look very "fonty" instead of natural, and also making the t shirt design (and the designer) seem very amateur. With just a small change to the best, however, that same tee shirt text can be made to look very tight and professional.

With leading, inspiration t shirt is to create enough space between the lines of text so that they fit nicely together and do not interfere with one another, without creating so much space that they look artificial or become difficult to read. The eye should be able to easily jump visually in one line to another without losing its place, and without the effort at all. While there is no real rule of thumb for the proper level of space between lines, a tee shirt designer who begins adjusting the best will quickly learn to "feel" when it's right. Generally, the easiest way to start is to reduce the amount of leading -- tightening the space between the lines -- and keep tweaking it up or down until it feels visually balanced. When it looks natural and reads smoothly, your t shirt slogan is one step nearer to the big time.

T-Shirt Design Secret #5: Phrasing, aka "Line Breaking"
Phrasing has to do with where a tee shirt designer chooses to break the lines of text, and is yet another aspect of good t shirt design that's often overlooked. Many new designers will just type in their text at the size they need, and pay no focus on which words the lines end on, and how those line breaks affect the t shirt's readability. More often than not, this results in a t shirt that reads terribly and feels amateurish.
Homepage: https://inspirationwear.com/