Design Considerations

Designing for t-shirts requires a consideration of the unique aspects of the t-shirt as a canvas for your image. Unlike printing on paper, the dimensional limits of this canvas rarely effect the image. The image floats free on a flexible plane and the substrate is often a color other than white. It is this lack of boundaries that motivates experienced t-shirt artists to use more emblematic or diffused compositional tactics. Square boxes on shirts never wear square. It is not against the rules to put a box on a shirt but to do so is to ignore the expanded possibilities. The color of the substrate must be taken into account as well. A well executed design will integrate or complement the shirt color. All of these factors should be taken into consideration if one intends to create art that lives up the impact potential of the medium.