If your funny t-shirts are turning out funny-looking, the issue may be your text. LiveVloneShop No matter how awesome your cool t shirt designs are once 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, it is possible to 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, make sure to pick one which supports your message. For example, if you are designing a funny tee shirt, choose a font which has a funny feel to it. If you are 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 lawyer, you probably don’t desire to use that font with letters shaped like kittens.

While this may sound like common sense, many new tee shirt designers and would-be tee shirt entrepreneurs skip this task and just pick any standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious in their results; what might have been a fun t shirt design ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you’re careful to select 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.

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning
Usually, when font text is typed into a computer program, the spaces between your letters and words certainly are a little uneven, and often a touch too wide. This extra and uneven space not only makes your text look a bit awkward and unprofessional, in addition, it makes it slightly more difficult to read because the words don’t visually hold together as units. Even though the viewer doesn’t notice it, the eye and the mind have to work a little harder and that extra little 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 mix of tracking and kerning, which are simply two ways of adjusting the spacing between letters.

Tracking is due to adjusting the common 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 of the letters in the selected range (making the spacing “tighter”), if not raise the average spacing (“opening up” the text), based 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 an excellent trick used by professional tee shirt designers is to start out by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and slowly increasing the tracking before words look right.

Kerning is very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: instead of adjusting the common spacing across an entire selection of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at the same time. This allows a greater amount 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 after the written text has been tracked.

In general, the very best practice is to use tracking to achieve the entire selection of letters in a tee 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
Once the letters of a t shirt slogan have already been properly tracked and kerned, another important step is to adjust the spacing between your words. Adjusting word spacing is quite similar to tracking and kerning — in fact, it’s done exactly the same way as kerning and is really just kerning the spaces between words rather than letters — but the rule of thumb for proper spacing between words is really a little different, therefore word spacing is really a whole step unto itself.

In general, the best practice when adjusting spacing between words is to visualize the width of a lowercase “L” in the font that’s used, and then make the area between each word that wide. Because of this the width of the spaces between words will be different from font to font (because the size of the lowercase “L” is different from font to font), but it addittionally means that the spacing will be custom designed for the font in question. Creating the proper level of space between words will support the consequences of your tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to carry together better as separate visual units and improving readability.