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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 once you imagine them, if your text is poorly designed, your shirts will always look unprofessional. But don’t fear! With one of these 5 tricks of professional graphic artists, you can quickly turn those amateur custom tops into perfect and polished works of tee shirt art.

T-Shirt Design Secret #1: Choosing the Right Font

When choosing a font for the t shirt text, make sure you pick one which supports your message. For instance, if you are designing a funny t shirt, choose a font that has a funny feel to it. If you are 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 law firm, you probably don’t want to use that font with letters shaped like kittens.

While this may appear to be common sense, many new tee shirt designers and would-be t shirt entrepreneurs skip this step and just pick any standard font they might have lying around. Unfortunately, it’s obvious in their results; what might have been a fun tee shirt design eventually 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 fate and your shirts will be one step ahead of your rivals.

T-Shirt Design Secret #2: Tracking and Kerning

More often than not, when font text is typed right into a computer program, the spaces between your letters and words certainly are a little uneven, and often a little too wide. This extra and uneven space not merely makes your text look a little awkward and unprofessional, in addition, it makes it slightly more challenging to read because the words don’t visually hold together as units. Even if the viewer doesn’t notice it, the eye and the mind have to work a bit harder and that extra little bit of difficulty provides viewer a subconscious feeling of unease.

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

Tracking is due to adjusting the common spacing of letters across entire words, sentences, or selected ranges of letters. By adjusting the tracking, the t shirt artist can either decrease the average spacing between all the letters in the selected range (making the spacing “tighter”), if not increase the average spacing (“checking” the text), depending on what’s needed. Since the raw, unadjusted spacing varies from font to font, you need to decide which one is needed for your particular tee shirt design. But a good trick used by professional t shirt designers is to begin by tightening the font too much (so the letters are too close together) and slowly increasing the tracking until the words look right.

camisa de time retro is very similar to tracking, but with one important difference: rather than adjusting the common spacing across an entire selection of letters, kerning only adjusts the spacing between two letters at a time. This allows a greater degree of control than tracking, and allows a tee shirt artist to fine tune the spacing between single letter pairs that still don’t look quite right, even after the text has been tracked.

In general, the very best practice is to use tracking to achieve the entire selection of letters in a tee shirt slogan to look pretty good, and use kerning to fine tune the spacing between letter pairs until your tee shirt text looks perfect.

T-Shirt Design Secret #3: Word Spacing

Once the letters of a tee shirt slogan have been properly tracked and kerned, the next important step is to adjust the spacing between your words. Adjusting word spacing is quite much like tracking and kerning — in fact, it’s done exactly the same way as kerning and is actually just kerning the spaces between words rather than letters — but the guideline for proper spacing between words is really a little different, and so word spacing is a whole step unto itself.

In general, the very best practice when adjusting spacing between words is to visualize the width of a lowercase “L” in the font that’s being used, and then make the area between each word that wide. Therefore the width of the spaces between words will be different from font to font (as the size of the lowercase “L” differs from font to font), but it addittionally means that the spacing will undoubtedly be custom created for the font involved. Creating the proper quantity of space between words will support the consequences of your tracking and kerning, thus helping your words to hold together better as separate visual units and improving readability.