How To Starting a T-Shirt Design

What is the most worn outfit of today? You bet, it is T-shirt. Everybody wears one. You can wear it for any occasion (depending on the style, of course). Everywhere you go, there are people wearing T-shirts.  Some are funny, some are trendy, some are cute, and some are outrageous.

They come in a variety of colors and they are relatively cheap. They are also known as “disposable” outfit. You can easily throw them out without guilt whenever they are no longer in fashion.

T-shirts are used by companies, politicians, organizations, schools, individuals and designers to convey their message, whatever it might be. Producing a designer T-shirtcosts anywhere from a whopping $1 to $10, depending on what you put on it. The selling price can be anywhere from $5 to $45+. Can you calculate how much you actually earn?

Good news is, you don’t even have to produce your own T-shirts. There are companies out there that accept outsourced orders. All you need to do is supplying them with your master design, and the rest is history. They can also distribute them for you under your brand. What more can you ask for?

T-shirt designing might sound like a no-brainer, but it is actually very interesting because there is no limit on what color and style you can make. You can design T-shirts for retail consumers, corporations or even schools, sports teams and non-profit organizations. The sky is the limit!

Well, if you think being a T-shirt designer is boring, consider these variations:

1. Sleeveless
2. Short sleeves
3. Long sleeves
4. Cotton
5. Polyester
6. Lycra
7. Iron-on
8. Screen printed
9. Embroidered
10. Beads
11. Rhinestones
12. Sexy slogan
13. Funny slogan
14. Political
15. Star power
16. Celebrity style
17. Layered
18. Pastel color
19. Black and white
20. Tan
21. Multi-color

Whenever you are ready, you can branch out your new T-shirt business by offering :

1. Jersey
2. Sweat shirt
3. Sweat pants
4. Denim
5. Baseball cap and hat
6. Sportswear
7. Accessories
8. You name it!

Would you guess that around 1.4 billion cotton T-shirts are sold in the United States every year? That equals a whopping retail value of $20 billion and the industry shows no sign of slowing down.

Starting out as a T-shirt designer also opens many new doors for you in the future, because you’ll be playing in the same the field as other “fashion designers.” Thus, you’re entitled to call yourself a “fashion designer.” After all, a T-shirt is now as fashionable as a pair of jeans and dresses are.

The Tips

You’re a cafepress store owner and you’ve spent hours on Photoshop to make an amazing design that’s going to sell millions of shirts (or so we can dream). You save the image as a .jpg or .png and start to put it onto every product on cafepress.

Now the trouble begins. your beautiful design is either invisible, has elements missing, colors bleeding through in unexpected ways, or simply looks terrible on some of the products. Why?

First, make sure you’ve got the image the correct size for the product you’re placing it on. For t-shirts, I make a 2000×2000 image at 200dpi.

Second, read the “Creating images for black t-shirts” tutorial on Cafepress at http://www.cafepress.com/cp/learn/blackshirts. It will give you a lot of background you need to know. You’ll learn that on black and dark t-shirts, the color white is printed as white, whereas on white and light t-shirts, the color white is considered to be transparent, and wont print at all.

Did you get that point? White in your design prints on dark shirts and doesn’t on light ones.

Our tips to help you deal with this feature of cafepress in Photoshop.

1. If your design has transparent portions, create two bottommost layers in yourPhotoshop design, one solid black, one solid white. (Note: if you’re really keen, you can create a layer with each color of the dark and light t-shirts available on Cafepress, like I did). By selectively making these layers visible, you can get an idea before you upload your image how it might appear once it’s on a t-shirt.
2. In your Photoshop document, identify the layers or parts of your image that are white or near white. These layers or parts will not appear on light t-shirts.If white is just part of several colors in an image layer, you’ll have to change the white portions to a different color it if you want it to show up on white t-shirts.  If it’s an entire layer that’s white, apply a color overlay in the layer style menu to change the whole layer at one. Either way, you should duplicate the layers that you need to be different for black t-shirts and white t-shirts. Then you can name the duplicated layers helpful names like, “For black Santa image” and “For white Santa image”.
3. Remember! Make the correct layers visible and turn off all background layers before saving your image as a .jpg or .png for upload to Cafepress.

I hope this tutorial on designing for BOTH black t-shirts and white t-shirts in the samephotoshop document for Cafepress has been helpful. Please email me or comment if you think I need to add or change anything in this cafepress and Phtoshop tutorial.