TSHIRT ENTREPRENEUR ONLINE » Design & Graphics

A Silly Zazzle Contest For New Logo

jjackson72 — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:38:24 +0000

I’m not really sure of the point of this but:

Hey Zazzler,Zazzle’s got a new look and a new logo! So it’s time to show your design skillZ by using the new logo to make great merchandise! Mix the logo into any kind of trendy, crazy or just awesome design you can think of (no gross stuff please) and voila, you have the perfect entry into the Zazzle Pimp our Logo contest! Learn more here.

What do you get for winning?

Grand Prize Winner: Wacom Cintiq – Digital Drawing Tablet (a $2,500 value!)

2^nd Place Winner: $1,000 USD

3^rd Place Winner: $500 USD

Honorable Mentions: $25 Zazzle Gift certificates

Contest ends October 18, 2007, so get started!

To be perfectly honest I would believe your time is better spent on your own products and designs rather than screwing around with products for the Zazzle logo. But that’s just me.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts, Uber Gamer T-shirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

Spreadshirt Webinar on Designing Shirts

webmaster — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:26:45 +0000

40 Minutes That Take the Mystery Out of Great Shirt Design
We know some things you don’t know…and we’re sharing! Join us Thursday, March 15 at 2pm EST when we’ll reveal the best practices in t-shirt design we’ve learned over the years. We’ll cover print techniques, vector graphics and more!

Click here to reserve your virtual seat.

Cafepress Graphics Software Help Forum

webmaster — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 15:23:35 +0000

From Cafepress:
Hi Shopkeepers,

A few weeks ago, the Community Team hosted a chat to get the community’s feedback on what you would like to see more of. A few Shopkeepers suggested a Graphic Software forum so Shopkeepers can get graphic help on specific software such as Photoshop or Paintshop Pro. A lot of Shopkeepers thought that was a great idea and thought it would be very helpful. Ask and you shall receive! We’re excited to announce a new set of Forums: Graphic Software Help & Sharing

The new forums are:
Adobe Help
Get help specific to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Photoshop Elements here.

Corel Help
Get help specific to Paintshop Pro, CorelDraw, and Painter here.

All Other Graphic Software
Get help specific to GIMP, Paint.NET, GraphicWorks, and all other graphic software here.

General Graphics Help (existing forum)

If you need help creating great images for you shop, or just want to help other Shopkeeper check out the new forums.

Happy selling!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: AngCP, 01 February 2007 10:00 AM

AngelaCP

Spreadshirt Announces New Products/Fonts

webmaster — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:44:50 +0000

Just in from Spreadshirt!

Product News: What’s new?

Just Added!

New Fonts!
Three new fonts have been added for your designing pleasure: Signature, Desyrel, and, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, Gaelic. The new fonts are located at the bottom of the font dropdown menu in your Designer.

Coming Soon…

Men’s Jersey Polo T-Shirt by Continental Clothing Co.: Ideal for layering during the winter months, this super soft polo feels and wears like a t-shirt. Available this month in white, black and powder blue.

Baby Baseball Tee by Continental Clothing Co.: This new addition for the little ones features the same contrast sleeves as our Men’s Baseball Tee. Made of soft, interlocked cotton this shirt includes a snap on the collar to make dressing and undressing easy. Available in white/light pink and white/powder blue in sizes 6, 12 and 18 months.

Children’s T-Shirt: This classic kid’s tee will soon be available in red and pink.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye…

Mugs & Coasters: At the end of January, we decided to discontinue mugs and coasters. The decision was based on low sales, shop partner feedback and our company focus on apparel. Click here to read more on the decision and to join the discussion.

Getting Distressed – Worn T-shirt Look

jjackson72 — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 16:45:56 +0000

Giving graphics a faux worn look is known as “distressing” the image. Some people like this type of design because it looks used and others don’t. But if you want to give your designs a distressed look how do you do it?

I use Paint Shop Pro for the vast majority of my designs, but these same techniques can be used with any major graphics editing and creation software. First create your image like this:

That’s the easy part.

Now, find an image, fill, pattern or other graphic that has some color variations and is somewhat random and cover the new layer with it using a tool like the “fill tool”. I picked a texture in Paint Shop Pro called “paper” for this example:

Now, warp the heck out of it and apply filters to make the pattern more random. I applied a “twirl” effect and also the mesh warp tool to get this:

Then I used my “pick tool” with a tolerance of 1, clicked on a section of the screen and then the select similar with a tolerance of 2 to generate the pattern for my distressing. Deleting this selection it that leave something like this:

Then deleting this same selection on the actual image leave this pattern:

And there you have it. A simple “distressed” look for your products.

You can play around with different patterns to start with and generate an infinite number of distressing patterns so take your time until you find one you like.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.

Anatomy of a T-Shirt Design

jjackson72 — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:07:08 +0000

Some people have asked me how exactly one goes about creating a design for a t-shirt or a mug or a hat or whatever. I’ll tell you this, everyone has their own methods and many of us have different methods depending on how the design comes to us. For example sometimes I will create a design on canvas with oil paints and sometimes I will work them up on paper with water colors and then scan them into the computer and create the end product from that base. Still other times I will start with a pen or pencil sketch. Other times I will do the entire design from conception to finish in Paint Shop Pro and never touch a piece of paper.

Usually however I do start with a pencil or pen sketch like this:

This was the original concept art for my Area 51 Gentlemen’s Club T-shirts available at Funny When Wet T-shirts. It started out as a sketch in a tablet during my lunch break with, as you can see, a bunch of theories about what to do with this design.

With this design I didn’t scan it into the computer because my scanner is on the fritz. So I tacked it up next to my monitor and fired up Paint Shop Pro.

I started with a couple elements (namely the alien girls) and roughly added them to the picture as thus:

Notice that they do not look exactly the same as I sketched them because I changed my mind about their appearances during the process. This happens often during the creative process.

I then added details to the alien girls giving them clothes and features to make them stand out.

Then I add some color to the clothes

I then went in and added the featured text to let people know what the design was meant to convey:

The design did not look very complete but I was uncertain about what to do. I saw the design as containing far too much “white space”. So I started fiddling around with ways to fill that space.

I tried adding additional alien girls but that made the design far too cluttered. I tried stretching the existing three girls but it ceased making them look like tall, thin aliens which was the desired effect. So I settled on adding some sort of background image. I first tried using a quickly sketched desertscape but eventually after looking at some of the t-shirts I have around the house to come up with this:

How long did this take from start to finish?

The pen sketch took about 5 minutes. When I started to sit down and work on the design in the computer there was about another to 4 hours invested. Then I spent about an hour tweaking the colors to make sure they would not only print correctly but also so that the elements were easily distinguishable and did not run together.

So total time was just under 5 hours start to finish.

Not all designs take that period of time. Some take less but many take much longer.

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Different Products Need Different Images

jjackson72 — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 21:10:41 +0000

One mistake a lot of people make when selling t-shirts and gifts online through a company like Cafepress is that they slap the same image on t-shirts as they do on mugs as they do on clocks as they do on buttons. The problem is that different products have different usable spaces and slapping the same image on every potential product leads to some ugly looking products!

The solution to this is simple – you have to have different images for different types of products.

Let’s look at an example of how slapping a single image on different items looks. Here is Mr. Happy Clown on a variety of products from CafePress:

Mr. Happy Clown was designed as a 10″x10″ 200 DPI non-transparent image which as you can see means that on the black t-shirt makes an ugly white background around the graphic, looks good on a standard t-shirt, leaves a lot of white space on the oval and bumper stickers and uses a very small amount of the available space on hats as well. The problem from the last two types of products happens because you are trying to fit a square image onto a non square image space.

To solve these problems you would, create a transparent version of this graphic for the black and other dark colored shirts, and special designs for odd shaped objects such as oval stickers and hats. How you fill in the “white space” is up to you but it should be considered in order to make your images not only appealing to potential buyers but also allow you to offer a full range of products for each design.

Remember there is no accounting for taste and just because you don’t think your customers would like a bumper sticker doesn’t mean you are not losing sales because you do not have them.

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Borders Are Good – Separate Similar Colored Design Elements

jjackson72 — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:22:07 +0000

Ok, so you’re designing your latest and greatest T-shirt but there’s a problem. You want to use two colors that are similar colors on top of each other. While that may look ok, it probably won’t. Try to avoid stacking similar colors on top of each other especially if you are not aware of how RGB converts to CMYK. If you start out with this:

in RGB, you’ll get this in CMYK:

Not very easy to read is it?

So to make the design stand out think about adding a border around some elements. In this case we will add a double border to the word “welcome”:

And wala! Much easier to read.

It’s still not necessarily the greatest looking design in the world because of the colors chosen but it certainly is much better.

Personally I would make sure the colors contrast a little more at least and do something like this:

The size and type of border you use is up to you but make sure that what your finished product looks like is at least visually appealing to potential customers.

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RGB v. CMYK

jjackson72 — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:00:00 +0000

What you see is not always what you get when designing graphics for t-shirts and other items to sell online. The most common mistake that would-be T-shirt Entrepreneurs make is that they think that what is displayed on their screen in their top end graphic software program is what is going to get spit out on canvas (t-shirt, mug, etc).

Well, it’s not. And to understand why it’s not, you have to understand that there are two different ways in which colors are generated for our eyes; RGB and CMYK.

That computer monitor you are looking at generates colors by an additive process combining Red, Green and Blue light. Hence the name RGB. But fabrics and other materials on which graphics are printed do not emit light like a computer monitor. Instead printed colors are generated through a subtractive process by removing one of four colors cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black.

And needless to say that when you make colors in different ways, you run into problems. The simple fact of the matter is that there are colors in the RGB spectrum that CMYK printers cannot print. This is often referred to by the fancy term “out of gamut”. When a color is out of gamut it gets replaced with another color that is in gamut and may not look right with the design.

Understanding this problem is half the battle. Dealing with it is the other half.

Some graphics software such as Adobe CS2 have the ability to display colors on your monitor the same way they would appear on your finished projects using filters to convert the RGB colors to CMYK. Others like Paint Shop Pro (which I use) however do not have such a function.

For me, the fact that PSP does not covert the image on screen has never been much of a problem because I have a habit of printing every design I create on my CMYK printer anyway to see how it looks. I have also run into problems where the algorithm programs like Adobe use still do not show colors completely accurately. So I have just gotten used to working in the RGB format and can eyeball colors that are “out of gamut” from experience 99.9% of the time. The other .1% of the time I catch it on the printout and fix it.

The best way to check your colors and get an idea of how your finished project will look is to always print it out. It is also important to remember that variations in how the colors appear on your final products can still occur based on the types of material they are printed on and the type of ink used as well as the exact application process.

The same image on mugs and t-shirts I have ordered from Cafepress as gifts have had slightly different colors. Note that they were not hideously different but the shades were certainly noticeably different.

So take the time and make sure you are using colors that will print right and your designs will look great. The alternative could be a high return rate and many unsatisfied customers. And that certainly is not good for business.

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What Graphic Designers Must Know in Graphic Designing

webmaster — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Creating a good graphic design is a very crucial job. It takes a lot of artistic quality and resourcefulness to be able to come up with a one-of-a-kind design for your graphic needs. If an excellent graphic design is what you�re after, then hiring a graphic designer is the best thing to do.
For those who are still unaware of the real role of graphic designers, this article can give a little idea of what they can actually do for you.
You see graphic designers are those who are adept on building visual solutions to certain issues concerning communications. They are also known as graphic artists. These talented artists are the ones responsible for planning and analyzing how your marketing message will be conveyed to your potential clients. Various forms of media are utilized such as electronic, film, and print.
There are certain things that need thorough consideration in order to become an effective graphic designer. Here are some of the main pointers that you must take into account.
The first thing to think about is the audience. It is very important for a graphic designer to get to know the audience. Most people would think that this step is very simple. But actually it�s not. Always keep in mind the interest of the audience and how they see the message that you are trying to convey. Remember that a graphic designer creates design not for themselves but for others� consumption. The main objective in designing is to connect to the client that�s why a graphic designer should focus on the fundamental needs of his audience.
The second element that needs to be considered is the layout. A graphic designer knows that concept and content is the meat of the entire graphic design. It is suggested to begin the layout with the big concept. Don�t be afraid to commit mistakes. You can revise them as you work through until you�ve polished up the design. It would be safe if you would keep the design as simple as possible since the graphic design is really meant for supporting the content. Also, don�t let bad design ruin the content you�re trying to communicate to your prospects.
The third element would have to be the image. This is also a very vital component that every graphic design should have. Making an impact is easy when you make use of color images and other graphic devices. Using graphic devices will really be of help in directing the viewers through the material.
Last but not the least is the color. Color is very vital in emphasizing the type or graphics of the graphic design. Injecting color top the layout will add zing to the overall design, making it more attention-grabbing to potential clients. What�s more, color will make the information look more intelligible to the viewers. Thus, you can get your message across to your prospects with no trouble.

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