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How to prepare your t-shirt design for printing

by Andy on September 28, 2011

in Advice,Business,DIY

how to prepare artwork for printers

Blake from YouDesignIt (who guest posts here from time to time) has written a guest post over at Design Juices explaining to people that are new to the t-shirt game how to go about preparing your file for the printers, which is something that may not be immediately obvious to everyone. It’s by no means an exhaustive guide, but it definitely sets you along your way.

3 Helpful Tips to Get Your T-Shirt Design Print Ready

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How to get the best engagement from your Facebook Page

by Andy on July 21, 2011

in News

improving facebook engagement

When I’m putting updates on the HYA Facebook page sometimes they get a good response from the 2,700+ fans, and sometimes they don’t. I had always presumed that it was because I just wasn’t interesting sometimes, and that is probably the case, but apparently there’s a bit more to it than that. Mashable put together a post that if you own a t-shirt brand is absolutely invaluable to improving how well you engage with the people that follow your brand. If you don’t own a brand you might just want to move on or wait for the next post to go live (in 4 hours or less). The post explains how the time of day and what day you post updates on and how they can be beneficial for you. Some of it is common sense (writing about the NFL will be more popular on a Sunday, for example), but it certainly does give some good pointers and get you thinking about how you can improve response to your updates on Facebook, and by extension other social networks.

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How to make your next press release suck less

by Andy on July 18, 2011

in News

press release advice

I get sent a lot of press releases, some are good and some are bad. I think that most of the bad ones come from people who are just getting started in the business and think that they need to have a grand press release that shows they’re the latest and great people to put their name on a shirt, but don’t really think about it’s going to be read, or if it’s any use to the person reading it.

Openforum.com has a list of 5 things that you’ll want to avoid when writing up your press release. It was written by a guy that works at Serious Eats, but all of the points do apply to people with a t-shirt brand, which is of course why I felt the need to mention it here.

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Fibers offer great advice for submitting to t-shirt blogs

by Andy on June 23, 2011

in Admin,News

t-shirt blogger advice

Print-on-demand service Fibers have put together a really good guide telling their t-shirt designers (though the advice applies to anyone) about the best practises that they can use when contacting t-shirt bloggers to get their designs written about by guys like me.

The main takeaways are very sensible; have a good promo picture, write clearly and plainly making things simple for the blogger, offer them an incentive like a coupon code or maybe a free t-shirt, and don’t expect them to respond immediately, or perhaps even at all.

I should have something comprehensive like this myself and I’ll think about putting something together because I think it would be very useful. Of course, it needs to be read for it to be useful and in my experience with the submissions I receive most people just do what they want anyway and don’t necessarily follow any of the instructions on a site (my number one request is that people address me by name and it often isn’t met, so I know people are just sending out a form e-mail, and if they don’t give me that shred of respect why should I bother with their pitch?), but hopefully this information will get through to a few people.

Guide to Submitting Designs to t-shirt blogs

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ShirtMockup.com – for when you want to mockup a shirt

by Andy on August 24, 2010

in News

Shirtmockup.com

This is actually pretty cool. Yes, you could pretty easily do this in Photoshop but some people don’t have Photoshop, and this is a very quick process if you want to mockup a shirt in about a minute. You upload a jpg, scale it, rotate it, refine the colour of your shirt, and you’re done, a near instant mockup.

There is one problem for me in that if you use a jpg file then it isn’t transparent, so you end up with a white box around the edge of your graphic, but you can of course work around this by matching the colour of your graphic to that of your intended tee colour, or by using a transparent gif.

ShirtMockup.com

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250 Beautiful Typography T-shirts

18.08.2010
Thumbnail image for 250 Beautiful Typography T-shirts

Typography t-shirts are probably my favourite category of t-shirt design styles, you know why? They get a reaction, they make you think, and they can be some of the most beautiful tees you’ll ever see. I have literally hundreds of t-shirts in my wardrobe, but if I’m in the mood to wear something that people [...]

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10 Things You (probably) didn’t know about t-shirts

26.07.2010
Thumbnail image for 10 Things You (probably) didn’t know about t-shirts

You Design IT have put together a cool infographic explaining a few things that I didn’t know about cotton and t-shirts, it’s not exactly mind-blowing but I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it if you’re anything like me.

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Stop mocking me!

22.01.2009

See that t-shirt up there, that is not a t-shirt, that, apparently (and I am skeptical) is a mock up. It was made up (I think) by Jeff Finley from Go Media (you’re probably more aware of their blog if you’re the kind of person that designs rather than hires designers), and I’d really like [...]

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So you want to start a clothing line, huh?

14.01.2009

I’ve never started a clothing line, so coming to me for advice on the nuts and bolts of everything would be, to be frank, risky. So instead of writing up some pointers for you that might not necessarily make any sense, I’m going to point you towards a few links, that may be of help. [...]

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Eric from Linty Fresh tells you have to make your brand suck less

14.01.2009

Eric Terry, the man behind Linty Fresh (that’s him up there!), held a video webchat on Sunday evening in which he would answer people’s questions about the indie tee industry and share his experiences. With the time difference between the US and UK Eric’s Q&A sessions are on a little late for HYA’s bed time, [...]

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Go Media’s Hoodie Design Package/Templates

19.12.2008

I know I’m venturing into unchartered waters here, but I’d like to think that HYA has a duty to help out clothing designers as well as clothing buyers (yes, very much overlapping groups, but you know what I mean), and if it means that I don’t have to post pictures of poorly mocked-up hoodies, then [...]

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See the sites, hit the bars

30.09.2008

[I don't know what that sign is about, I took this photo in Manchester!] I’ve got a bit of random site news to bring you, and since they didn’t seem quite big enough to mention on their own, this post is packed with not one, not two, but three things that you might want to [...]

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Are you a t-shirt designer? Read this.

01.08.2008

I think its well established that I’m not good at drawing (see), but I know that there’s a fair few designers amongst you, so I thought that you guys might benefit from checking out a series on Go Mediazine called ’15 Awful Mistakes Made by Designers in the Music & Apparel Industry’ especially if you’re [...]

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Why Johnny Cupcakes is awesome, by Johnny Cupcakes

10.06.2008

That title is fairly well laced with snark, but its only meant in jest, Johnny Cupcakes is an inspiration to a lot of small clothing brand owners, and he seems like a nice guy too.One of the nice things that he does is give out advice to pretty much anyone that asks. The latest example [...]

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