Tips For Your Next Custom T-shirt Design

At Branded we offer screen printing, embroidery and heat transfer for your designs, but what’s the difference?

Heat transfer designs are made with either printed or solid colored vinyl, that is cut and adhered to your shirt with heat. This process is best for small quantities, photos, unique names/numbers and simpler designs with thick lettering and characters. Advantages of heat transfer are that you can make one shirt with a simple design at a lower price.

The first thing to do when choosing a design is to look around for inspiration. Find other logos and art you like and take note of the colors and shapes. What is it about them that you like? Make a sketch, and ask friends and family for their opinions.

Screen printing is made by creating a screen for each color in your design. Once the screens are made the ink is applied to the shirt. This process is the most durable and best for high quantities of the same design. It is also a great option for  bold contrasting colors, more detail, and clean lines.

Embroidery is a method where a machine uses thread to make your design. The best use for embroidery is for custom names and more simple logos. Embroidery can be as small as a 1” Left Chest logo to as big as a 10” wide design. Embroidery is heavy duty and will likely last as long as your garment.

Once you’ve decided on the basic layout its time to find the colors. Look at a color wheel. There are many different ways to choose a color scheme. First decide how many colors you’d like then use the color wheel to decide which colors look good together.

Once you have your ideas together let us know. Give us your sketches and lists of fonts and favorite colors. We’ll have our designers get to work on creating something you’ll love! You can visit our graphic design page if you would like to see examples of our previous work.

If you have your design ready to print, please upload it or you can visit our art guidelines  for more information.

Another thing to keep in mind when you are designing a shirt, is font choice. Ideally you wouldn’t want to choose more than 3 types of fonts because it can make your design look messy and confusing. The best option is to choose one serif font and one sans-serif font and or a script font. If you choose a very decorative font you’d want your secondary font to be much more simple. When in doubt less fonts are better.