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If your funny t-shirts are turning out funny-looking, the problem may be your text. No matter how awesome your cool t shirt designs are when you imagine them, if your text is badly designed, your t-shirts will always look of little substance. But don't fear! With one of these 5 tricks of professional graphic designers, you can quickly turn those amateur custom t shirts into perfect and finished works of t shirt art.

T-Shirt Design Secret Choosing the right Font

When choosing a font for your t shirt text, make sure to pick one that supports your message. For example, if you're designing a funny t shirt, choose a font that has a funny feel to it. If you're 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 lawyers, you probably don't want to use that font with letters formed like kittens.

While this may sound like common sense, many new t shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this task and just pick any standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it's obvious in their results; what has been a fun t shirt design ends up being boring and amateur-looking. If you're careful to choose a font that represents the content of your words, however, you can avoid this luck and your t-shirts will be one step ahead of your rivals.

T-Shirt Design Secret Tracking and Kerning

Most of the time, when font text is tapped out into a computer program, the spaces between the letters and words 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 of little substance, it also makes it slightly more difficult to see because the words don't successfully hold together as units. Even if the person doesn't notice it, a person's eye and the brain have to work a bit harder and that extra bit of difficulty provides the person a unconscious feeling of unease.

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

Tracking is because of modifying the average spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By modifying the tracking, the t shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing "tighter"), or else increase the average spacing checking the written text, depending 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 a good trick employed by professional t shirt designers is to start by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and then slowly increasing the tracking prior to the words look right.

Kerning is much like tracking, but with one important difference: instead of modifying the average spacing across an entire choice of letters, kerning only tunes its the spacing between two letters at a time. This permits a greater degree of control than tracking, and allows a t shirt artist to fine tune the spacing between single letter twos that still don't look quite right, even with the written text has been monitored.

In general, the best practice is with tracking to get the entire choice of letters in a t shirt saying to look pretty good, and then use kerning to fine tune the spacing between letter twos until your t shirt text looks perfect.

T-Shirt Design Secret Word Spacing

Once the letters of a t shirt saying have been properly monitored and kerned, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between the words. Modifying word spacing is much like 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 a little different, and so word spacing is a whole step on to itself.

In general, the best practice when modifying spacing between words is to see the width of a lowercase in the font that's being used, and then make the space between each word that wide. This means that the width of the spaces between words changes from font to font (because the size of the lowercase differs from the others from font to font), but it also means that the spacing will be custom designed for the font in question. Creating the proper amount 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.

T-Shirt Design Secret Leading, sometimes referred to as "Line Spacing"

Another place that new t shirt designers often go wrong is in the leading, or "spacing between lines of text. inch Leading -- which is evident like the metal "lead" rather than like a "leader" taking people somewhere -- extends back to the days of the printing press, when a person would actually use small, thin waste lead to create directory space between the lines of type. These days, of course, computers handle the leading for us. Unfortunately, when it comes to t shirt text, they often times handle it badly.

When a t shirt saying is tapped out into a computer program, it often starts with a touch too much space between the lines high standard. This is the text look very "fonty" rather than natural, as well as making the t shirt design (and the designer) seem very amateur. With just a small change to the leading, however, that same t shirt text can be built to look very tight and professional.

With leading, the goal is to create enough space between the lines of text so they really fit nicely together , nor conflict with one another, without creating so much space that they look artificial or become difficult to see. A person's eye should be able to easily jump successfully from line to another location without losing its place, and without any effort at all. While there is no real rule of thumb for the proper amount of space between lines, a t shirt designer who begins modifying the leading will quickly learn to "feel" when it's right. In general, the best way to start is to decrease the amount of leading -- tightening the space between the lines -- and then keep tweaking it up or down until it feels successfully balanced. When it looks natural and reads efficiently, your t shirt saying is one step closer to the big time.

T-Shirt Design Secret Phrasing, sometimes referred to as "Line Breaking"

Phrasing is because of where a t shirt designer prefers to break the lines of text, and is yet another area of good t shirt design that's often overlooked. Many new designers will just type their text at the size they want, and pay no awareness of which words the lines end on, and how those line breaks affect the t shirt's readability. More often than not, this results in a t shirt that reads horribly and feels amateurish.