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Things To Avoid When Designing A POD T Shirt

With over 5 years of experience in product and content development, Susan Miller - a leader in product and content development has designed her fair share of custom t-shirts for print-on-demand (POD) services. Through trial and error with her shirt designers and clients, she has learned what design mistakes spell disaster - and how to avoid them.

If you want your POD t-shirts to impress buyers, drive sales, and get reordered over and over, the design needs to check all the boxes. It should be unique yet simple, express customers’ demands, reproduce cleanly during printing, and stand the test of time.

By steering clear of these common t-shirt design mistakes that A Creative Force in Product and Content Development - Susan Miller sees again and again, you can set your POD products up for success.

Why Avoiding Mistakes In Designing A Custom T-Shirt Is Crucial

When you’re investing time and money into creating custom apparel with print-on-demand services, you want the end product to shine. Lackluster designs riddled with flaws lead to unhappy customers and poor sales. With her knowledge, Susan believes that if the composition is too busy or messy, text illegibly small, colors muddied and distorted, or artwork inappropriate - your T-shirts simply won't resonate or spread brand reputation.

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The message in this T-shirt nearly disappears

Worse yet, you can't easily order a reprint with tweaked designs using POD fulfillment. You may be stuck with a bulk supply of subpar T-shirts that continue hurting your brand image and bottom line. You should remember that all the marketing efforts in the world can't make up for a poorly designed product at the core. Understanding this, Susan and LionKingShirt always find and fix design mistakes to have the highest quality POD T-shirts.

By taking the time to avoid known mistakes up front, you create quality, effective t-shirt designs aligned with your brand identity and poised for marketplace success. The effort pays pidends through memorable, relevant apparel people want to satisfiedly wear and repurchase down the road.

Common Design Mistakes You Need To Avoid


  • Overly Complex Or Busy Designs
When designing custom t-shirt graphics, it's easy to get carried away adding more and more visual elements. But an overcrowded composition full of competing imagery quickly becomes messy and confusing. If there are too many colors, illustrations, logos, words - the focal point gets lost.

So, keep it simple and impactful. Prioritize one dominant image or message you want viewers to take away. Busy graphics also don't reproduce cleanly on fabric during POD printing. Moreover, intricate details can get blurred and distorted when printing. Stick with minimalist designs featuring a few complementary and cohesive elements.

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This colorful T-shirt appears distorted


  • Tiny Details And Small Text
In terms of intricate details - Susan Miller has said that tiny text and fiddly illustrations turn into illegible blobs of ink when printed on fabric. If people can't read what the shirt says or make out complex aspects of the graphics, your message is lost. She suggests avoiding text smaller than 25pt font, and even that can be pushing it.

Similarly, subtle color gradients, shadows, and other minute details don't effectively translate onto t-shirts. Keep illustrations clean and simple with solid colors and thick lines. Don't rely on intricate particulars - go for high visual impact that holds up through the POD production process.


  • Too Many Colors
While a broad color palette can look striking digitally, it rarely translates well into a wearable t-shirt design. Susan’s solution is that you should limit yourself to no more than two or three complimentary solid colors for the clearest, boldest results. Additional colors increase production costs for POD fulfillment and make details harder to discern.

If using multi-colored images like logos, you should simplify elements to reduce the overall color count. Muddied, distorted graphics are hard to make out and unattractive on apparel. A clean, minimalist color profile ensures your design reproduces true to expectations.

Conclusion

Creating custom t-shirts with print-on-demand services offers immense creative potential - if you steer clear of amateur design mistakes. Prioritize simple, uncluttered compositions focused around one memorable element. Avoid tiny details and illegible text that disappear during printing. Use two or three colors max for cleanest reproduction.

By dodging the urge to overcomplicate POD t-shirt designs, you set your merchandise up for crowd-pleasing wow factor. Distilling graphics to artistic minimalism takes skill but pays off through quality products that become beloved customer favorites.
 
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