If your funny t-shirts are turning out funny-looking, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool tee 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 right Font

When choosing a font for the t shirt text, be sure to pick one that supports your message. For instance, if you are 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 that 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 appear to be common sense, many new t shirt designers and would-be tee shirt entrepreneurs skip this step and just pick any standard font they could have lying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious within their results; what could have been a fun tee shirt design ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you are careful to select a font that represents the content of your words, however, it is possible to avoid this fate and your shirts will always be one step ahead of your competition.

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning

Quite often, 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 merely makes your text look a little awkward and unprofessional, it also makes it slightly more difficult to read as the words don’t visually hold together as units. Even though the viewer doesn’t see it, the eye and the mind have to work a little harder and that extra bit of difficulty gives the viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

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

Tracking has to do with adjusting the common 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”), or else raise the average spacing (“checking” the text), depending on what’s needed. Since the raw, unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you need to decide which one is necessary for your particular t shirt design. But a good trick used by professional tee shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font too much (therefore 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: 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 with the written text has been tracked.

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

T-Shirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing

After the letters of a tee shirt slogan have already been properly tracked and kerned, the next important step would be to adjust the spacing between your words. Adjusting word spacing is very similar to tracking and kerning — actually, it’s done exactly the same way as kerning and is actually just kerning the spaces between words rather than letters — but the guideline for proper spacing between words is a little different, and so word spacing is a whole step unto itself.

In camisa de time , the best practice when adjusting spacing between words would be to visualize the width of a lowercase “L” in the font that’s used, and then make the space between each word that wide. Which means that the width of the spaces between words changes from font to font (because the size of the lowercase “L” differs from font to font), but it addittionally means that the spacing will be custom created for the font in question. Creating the proper quantity of space between words will support the effects of your tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to hold together better as separate visual units and improving readability.