The pitfalls of designing t-shirts

I’ve been a designer for awhile now but I’ve never designed apparel before, t shirts and designing them have become quite a hot subject of late with sites like threadless allowing user submission and the lucrative potential of gaining money and fame from having your shirt featured.

But since its my first time I’ve been researching designing shirts. I’m specifically looking at doing some for Ragnarok so I’ve also spent some time thinking about what makes me buy shirts and looking at the Nuclear Blast shop which contains a vast array of heavy metal shirts.

I’m a bit of a fan of Computer Arts, the site gives away its featured tutorial of the month on its site. Of course you don’t get the resources that you get with the magazine but its still a useful source of inspiration. They have a design tutorial for creating one colour prints in photoshop. Theres also this tutorial over at GoMedia zine.

I was also really taken with a tutorial in Digital Arts magazine, I actually have the mag that its from but if you don’t then it can be found on their site here. Skulls on shirts are a kind of timeless classic, they look cool and can appeal across genders. Its become one of the icons of metal. That lead me onto another tutorial about Tattoo art, something also very close to the hearts – or skin – of metal culture.

Personally I’ve always been facinated by tattoo art particularly the font styles and the quality and crispness of line work. Great tattoo art is really something else, I must say I really like the work of Chris Garver too.

Anyway I’d recommend checking out the website of Chris Parkes, hes done a lot of shirt designs for clothing labels but also has a site of vector resources and fonts which are rather snazzy.

Anyway the Ragnarok shirts will eventually be printed on cotton shirts by me silk screening which does of course mean custom orders can be done too.

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