Posts tagged as:

resources

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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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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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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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

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

by Andy on August 18, 2010

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 will comment on it has to be a text tee, I’ve literally been stopped in the street to ask where I got some shirts, and that only happens with text tees because when people see text on a tee their eyes are drawn to it. Hmmm, did that last sentence make it seem like I’m desperate for attention? Validate me! Love me, love me, buy my t-shirt (that I persauded myself I shouldn’t include in the list despite it’s custom typework)!

It’s actually quite surprising that with my love of this style of t-shirt that I waited so long to post a ridiculously long list of typography t-shirts. I have no reason, but clearly in my mind people would rather see robot and Star Wars t-shirts (and even a list of t-shirt lists) before typography tees. I have bent the definition of a ‘typography t-shirt’ a bit here, I feel that in their pure form a typography shirt should be composed of great typework, and be about typography, but because that is a bit of a limiting category, I’ve decided to include t-shirts that display good and interesting uses of type.

It should be noted that I would not describe myself as an expert when it comes to typography, far from it, and that isn’t me being modest, I genuinely don’t know the principles of ‘good’ typography, or even if typography should be described as ‘good’. However, I do know a good looking and interesting t-shirt when I see it so hardcore typographers will hopefully not be too disappointed by the selection I’ll be listing today. Similarly, these shirts aren’t ranked in any order, the numbers are just there for reference, in fact I think this is one of the strongest lists I’ve put together, there’s real quality all the way through it, so it’s well worth clicking through to the next page (you thought I was going to put 250 t-shirts on one page?).

Okay, enough waffle, let’s look at a huge amount of t-shirts!

[click to continue…]

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

July 26, 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!

January 22, 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?

January 14, 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

January 14, 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

December 19, 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

September 30, 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.

August 1, 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

June 10, 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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