5 Signs You Should Redesign Your Business’ T-Shirt

Custom T-Shirt Branding

Custom branding on t-shirts

Designing a shirt is often a hit-or-miss endeavor. Here are five ways you can tell your current design falls under the category of ‘miss.’

Contrary to what some Internet shysters may tell you, coming up with an effective design is actually pretty difficult. It requires a working knowledge of a lot of design elements and principles that are likely outside your area of expertise, along with a deep understanding of your target audience.

Suffice it to say, it’s pretty easy to do things wrong, and wind up with a shirt that no one really wants to wear. How can you tell if you’ve done so, though? How can you be certain a shirt’s not selling due to a bad design, and not just due to poor marketing?

As it turns out, shirt design and logo design share a lot in common. With that in mind, we can look at a few reasons logos fall flat, and apply that to your shirt.

The Font or Colors Are Awful

Does your shirt make liberal use of horrendously clashing colors or shades such as green and pink or yellow and white? Is the font a distorted, difficult-to-read mess, or a completely unfitting use of Comic Sans? Take a close look at what you’ve created, and answer those questions honestly.

There Are Twenty Other Shirts With The Exact Same Design

It’s incredibly rare – one could argue almost unheard-of – for someone to genuinely profit off of somebody else’s idea if they’ve made no creative attempts of their own. If your shirt is a rip-off of something you’d see on the rack at Hot Topic or a riff of an already-popular design, scrap it. Come up with something original, or find someone who can help you do so.

It’s Overly Complicated (Or Way Too Simple)

A bit of intricacy is well and good, but be careful you haven’t thrown together a design that makes people’s eyes bleed. A simple, eye-catching design is better than a needlessly complicated one, and a shirt that’s too busy will repel the eyes rather than drawing them in. You need to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity.

“Everyone appreciates great drawing ability and attention to detail,” reads a post on the Creative Bloq blog. “There is nothing better than seeing a really well executed masterpiece on a tee, that you can study for hours. But equally, some of the most classic designs have been the simplest and get the message across through their simplest form. Anywhere in the middle and you may struggle to deliver a successful design.”

Your Design’s More Of An Ad Space Than A Shirt

We’ve all been handed shirts that display a company logo and little else. But who among us proudly wears them outside of company events? Who among us would, if we saw a shirt like that on the rack at a clothing store, actually buy one? If you want to market your brand through a shirt, that’s awesome – but you need to have some subtlety about you, or your efforts will fall flat.

There’s No Symmetry

Perhaps two of the most important pieces of understanding where T-shirt design is concerned involve negative space and symmetry. A working knowledge of proportions goes a long way towards a successful design. Similarly, an incomplete knowledge can be disastrous.

“Some people can get carried away with discussions of proportion and symmetry, but if we strip out the crazy, there’s still some important lessons here,” writes Design Shack’s Joshua Johnson. “Consider the new Twitter logo. Circles aren’t used to convince you of some strange cosmic tale that makes no sense, they’re simply used as a guide to create a well-balanced logo with consistent curves and arcs.”

Closing Thoughts

Not every T-shirt design is going to work. But don’t get discouraged! Keep at it, and you’re sure to eventually hit on one that resonates with your audience…even if you do have to discard a few duds along the way.

Author is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCotton, a website that allows you to custom design your own T-shirts and get them delivered at your doorstep.

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Brad Wayland

Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCotton
Brad Wayland is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCotton, a site with high-quality, easy-to-design custom t-shirts

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