Top T-Shirt Design Tips - 5 Secrets For Perfect T Shirt Text (Plus One Bonus!)

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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 designers, you can quickly turn those amateur custom t shirts into perfect and polished works of t shirt art.

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

While this may sound like common sense, many new t shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this step 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're careful to choose a font that represents the content of your words, however, you can avoid this fate and your shirts will always be one step ahead of your competition.
Must Read: 5 Things to Consider while Buying T Shirts

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
Most of the time, when font text is typed into a computer program, the spaces between the 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 difficult to read because the words don't visually hold together as units. Even if the viewer doesn't notice it, the eye and the brain have to work a bit harder and that extra bit of difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

Fortunately for the novice t shirt designer, this problem can be addressed by a combination of tracking and kerning, which are simply two methods of adjusting the spacing between letters.

Tracking has to do with adjusting the average spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the t shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing "tighter"), or else increase the average spacing ("opening up" the text), depending 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 t shirt design. But a good trick used by professional t shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increasing the tracking until the words look right.

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

In general, the best practice is to use tracking to get the entire range of letters in a t shirt slogan to look pretty good, and then use keening to fine tune the spacing between letter pairs until your t shirt text looks perfect.