Among the many thousands of cool things you can do on the Internet these days is design custom t-shirts (not to mention mugs, hats,etc), have them printed and sent to you, even resell your designs online for free!
I've been toying around with the idea a while, and finally finished my first design, shown below.
You can find it (and buy it) at
http://www.zazzle.com/abstract_syntax_mas_tree_shirt-235439264930650299
It's quite geeky, I'll admit and probably doesn't make sense to 99% of people out there, only that strange breed whom call themselves computer programmers. It stems from a concept in computer science called an abstract syntax tree, which is a graphical representation of the syntax of some source code. An example of the statement x = 3 * (y - z) can be found here.
Anyway, to share the knowledge for anyone interested in making their own shirts, here's are some basic steps...
1. Get an idea. This is, of course, the hardest part, but for your first design, try something simple. Looking at the links below, a t-shirt can be as simple as photo , some text or a simple geometric design. I am, by no means, an expert t-shirt designer, but a couple of basic principles I use
- Keep the design simple. I, like everyone, suffer from the issue of over-complicating things, and I've found that what actually takes time in designing a shirt are the decisions to remove stuff and simplify. For instance, in the Abstract SyntaX-mas Tree design, my first draft included Christmas lights and colored balls. After taking a step back a week later, I realized this stuff just tends to clutter the design and doesn't help to get the message across any better.
- Keep the colors to a minimum. Typically, the best shirts are screen printed, where each color has be a separate screen, and are generally limited to 3 or 4 colors to reduce the complexity of making them. Shirts from sites like Zazzle and CafePress I believe are some type of iron-on design (I haven't seen my shirt yet) and allow for as many colors as you want (like a photo), but there is something to be said for the cartoony simplicity of a 3-5 color design.
2. Learn to use some design tools. Another great fact of the modern Internet is the amount of free, high-quality software there is out there. Two programs I've come to love are GIMP and Inkscape . GIMP is a Photoshop clone, that aside from some small usability issues, is a great free alternative to Photoshop. Inkscape is an Illustrator-like tool for producing scalable vector graphics (SVGs). The different between working with these two programs is GIMP is designed for working with photos and images, while Inkscape uses more of a mathematical representation of the design, which can then easily be scaled up or down to any size without losing resolution. While I don't have time to get in a lengthy discussion about the difference between the two approaches, I think most designs would agree you should generally try to create your design using Inkscape, otherwise you make sure that you make you design really large using GIMP so that you can shrink it without losing clarity.
3. Execute your design and upload. After creating your final design, create an account on a site like CafePress or Zazzle to upload and sell your design. This seems to be a pretty competitive market (custom product manufacturing/marketing) at the moment, so I can't say which is better, they both seems to have certain advantages. I choose Zazzle for my first design, but might try CafePress with some others. Here are a few things I like about Zazzle...
- Slightly cheaper, atleast in the T-Shirts department, but only by a $1 or so and this is probably not true for every product each site offers.
- Integration with Google Analytics. Zazzle offers integration with Google Analytics, and although I haven't gotten it work yet, it sounds like a great way to see how many people have viewed your shirt.
- One type of store front. It seems that CafePress has two different store types, a free one and a premium one, whereas Zazzle on has one, which puts everyone on the same playing field.
- Zazzle recently began offering custom embroidery, which is a cool option I would like to explore in the future.
This should be taken with a grain of salt as I have yet to explore CafePress and I'll let you know more once I do.
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