T-shirt design – how to find a good design?

T-shirt design is a river topic. If you just want to make printed T-shirts for a gift, or a simple design from just letters will suffice, then with minimal skills you are able to create it yourself in any graphics program. On the other hand, if you need something more, you will find out below:

how you can have super designs for little money
where to find proven graphic designers and illustrators for challenging jobs

In our company, we very often use the following services ourselves and recommend them to anyone who needs T-shirt designs or promotional gadgets.

1. Underground approach

Of course, you can use Google Images, type in any T-shirt idea and “take” the design from the Internet. As long as you make printed T-shirts for yourself or your friends, this is not the worst solution. Things are a little different when you want to create your own brand of clothes or order corporate prints. Then copyright comes into play.

2. Projects “by acquaintance”

How often have I heard the story: “my colleague is a graphic designer…”. Six months later, the project is still neither seen nor heard… 😉 The truth is that 95% of “familiar graphic designers” will fail sooner rather than later. Usually at the very beginning of cooperation or shortly thereafter. Why? I don’t know, that’s just the way the universe is built. There are some riddles of the cosmos that we will never know the answers to, and this is one of them. If you want to see if you’re in the unique 5% where a graphic designer friend will do your dream project for you “on the cheap,” test your luck… and then come back to read more.

Forgive my harsh realism, but it is backed up by years of experience of my own and observations of my surroundings. It turns out that projects “after acquaintance” are in general much more costly, delayed and cause more complications than using already existing solutions.

3. Professional projects

They fall into two categories:

a) custom designs

If you’re looking for a customized solution and want a design that’s 100% for you, you can enlist the help of professional graphic designers and illustrators. This solution is usually the most expensive, but I guarantee you that you won’t find the same design from someone else.

In our company for simple, but also more demanding orders you can also order graphic support.

One of the most obvious forms of finding a professional graphic designer is to consult your friends, which, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, can be an effective method. It can also cause the complications described above and limit your choice, and why limit yourself when there is a whole world of good graphic designers just waiting for your order.

It’s worth browsing through porfolio sites of people from all over the world. Among the most popular are:

Behance
DeviantArt

The advantage of these portfolios is access to truly exceptional graphic designers from around the world. The disadvantage may or may not be that you have to quickly come to an agreement on the details of cooperation. In the beginning, you don’t know what type of person you’re dealing with, and you may lose a lot of time in figuring out the specifics. In other words, there may be the “familiar graphic designer” effect described above. Of course, you may get lucky and immediately hit the proverbial 10 on a competent, cooperative and affordable professional.

If you care about speed and quality, and you don’t have the time or inclination to worry about whether the artist in question is in a creative mood or in a mood for despondency, it’s worth considering an assignment through platforms dedicated to connecting clients with professional graphic designers ready to work 24 hours a day.

Such places include:

99designs.com
Crowdspring.com

What does ordering a project look like in practice? We must admit that quite impressively. At 99designs you create an order, so to speak, a competition, in which you describe your demand. You quickly receive specific designs from many different graphic designers (!). Now all you have to do is choose the design you like best. Of course, you can submit possible amendments.

The more compensation (reward) you offer, the better graphic designers will send their proposals. In addition, they will care about completing the order as smoothly and seamlessly as possible, because everyone has an account to which you can assign your comments like a comment on Allegro. Using graphic design platforms will certainly avoid the “after-the-fact effect.”

However, you may find that using dedicated graphic design services in the case of your project will not be necessary. After all, to dig a hole we don’t always need a backhoe. There are many tasks for which a shovel is more useful and more economically justified. So explore the second solution, which costs less and can have just as good an effect as a customized design that is:

b) ready-made designs from stock photos

Stocks are banks of ready-made photos, illustrations and designs. The largest ones have millions of images in their databases. Examples of stock sites include:

fotolia
istockphoto
unsplash

When buying designs from stock, pay attention to the format of the file you are buying (bitmap or vector) and what you can do with the images you buy under the license. For example, whether you can make modifications to the design. There are usually two types of licenses available:

for your own use
for resale

If you want to buy a design for printed T-shirts or any other gadget that you will want to sell, make sure that the stock requires you to purchase an extended license for this purpose.

Stock designs can be bought by anyone. Therefore, you may find that someone else buys the same design as you and produces similar products. In most cases, this is a purely academic problem, but it is worth keeping this issue in mind when deciding to buy a project.

The above text is based on many years of experience. Do not let its short form and apparent simplicity deceive you. After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can benefit from the mistakes and achievements of others?