When it comes to custom t-shirts and gear, the most important part is your design! Custom designs can be anything from company logos to an inside joke. Some designs can even represent a great cause or inspirational story! Regardless of the meaning behind the design, each individual element added is crucial, including the font selection! For example, a “silly” font like Comic Sans is not professional enough for a corporate logo.
Also Read: Best Fonts for Custom Printing
Choosing the best font for your design or logo can be hard. Luckily, we’ve been helping customers just like you create the perfect designs for their custom apparel and have tips that can help! Here are our tried and true tips for choosing the best font (or fonts!) for your custom designs:
Product Selection and Print Location
Depending on the product you choose and where you want your design to be, font selection can make or break the design! Print locations vary depending on the type of product you choose but if you want your design to be smaller or on the sleeve of a shirt, you’re going to want a very clean, legible font. Fonts where the letters are close together and some cursive fonts can be hard to read when the design is on the chest or sleeve rather than the entire front!
Legibility
For all designs, you want the font you choose to be legible. Assuming you’re on the move, you want people to be able to see and read your shirt even in passing! The best way to ensure legibility is to choose a font that isn’t too thin and make sure the color it’s printed in contrasts well with the garment color.
Decorative and Cursive Fonts
Decorative and cursive fonts are pretty and fun but should be used sparingly. If your message is short and sweet, these styles of fonts can look great but if you’re printing a lot of words or want the text to be small on the shirt, these fonts may not be the best fit.
Design Theme
When finding the right font, you also want to make sure you choose fonts that match your subject! For example, if the message you want to convey is serious, any sort of bubble font can make your design seem more fun than serious.
Using Multiple Fonts
If you’re planning to use multiple fonts, make sure you choose fonts that complement each other! Comic Sans and Times New Roman are very different and would likely not pair well together in a design.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy refers to arranging different parts of your text to show the order of importance. If you’re creating a t-shirt for a restaurant, you wouldn’t want to make the established date larger than the name of the restaurant!
Less is More
A t-shirt has a limited amount of space so you want to make sure you don’t crowd your design. “Less is More” is one of the best tips for custom designs as it’s easy to get carried away with graphics, elements, and text. In some cases, getting carried away with the design can end up taking away from the message behind the shirt and can be overwhelming for someone trying to understand the shirt. This also goes for the number of fonts. There’s no need to use 10 different fonts when 2 or 3 would do the job, look great, and save time when creating the design!
Experiment
Sometimes, the best way to find the perfect font is to experiment! There are thousands of fonts out there and the best font for your design might be lesser known. A great place to find thousands of free unique fonts is through a Google search. There are tons of great sites with fonts you can download and use for free such as DaFont and Fonts Family! Plus, if you find a font you like online, our art team can get the font and add it to your design for you!
Know Your Audience
If you’re designing for an event or large group, it can be hard to please everyone. That said, choosing a font consistent with the brand or event theme is vital! For a sports event, it makes sense to use a more “sporty” font instead of something more professional or decorative. For large orders, it’s also to consider the size of the garment you’re printing on. Since large orders tend to vary in t-shirt sizing, it’s important to consider how the font and overall design will look like on an extra small shirt compared to an extra large shirt!
Choosing a font can be hard but it doesn’t have to be! As long as you consider these 9 tips when experimenting with your design, chances are the final design will turn out amazing. Also, be sure to check out our other blog, Best Fonts for Custom Printing to find some great, unique fonts and design inspiration!
Need some help with your custom design or don’t know where to start? Reach out to us! Just send an email to help@undergroundshirts.com or stop in one of our locations, we’re always here to help!