Six Tips For Designing Your Own Custom Apparel

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Are you in charge of designing the custom sports apparel for your team? Whether it’s apparel for school clubs, class teams, or other team sports apparel, you want to make sure your apparel designs are clear, eye-catching, and effective. Read on for six design tips for the best custom sports apparel look for your group.

  1. Make sure you have good contrast. Whatever team colors you’re dealing with, it’s really important to your custom sports apparel that there’s a clear difference between the color of the lettering and that of the jersey itself. A lot of schools have dark colors, like navy and dark red, but those colors don’t tend to look good with black outlines or on dark shirts. You generally want a white outline with these colors, and a darker color to outline soft blues, yellows, or pinks. Also, remember that if you have a small and detailed font it may be unreadable in certain colors.

  2. Make sure the words on your jerseys are clear. You want people to be able to read the logo and names from 50 feet away. Usually, this happens best when choosing a font with a bold, thick body. If you prefer something more ornate, that’s fine. Just make sure that what looks good on your computer will also look good on a shirt. Whatever you do, don’t ever put THE WORDS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

  3. Use complementary colors. All colors have opposites. If you’re designing custom sports apparel, take a look at the color that are opposite to one another on the color wheel. These are complementary. This is what makes yellow go with purple, and orange with blue. Think about the relationships of the colors before you start sending designs into print.

  4. Know what you’re doing when it comes to design. These days nearly any design can go on a shirt, though naturally, some are better than others. If your custom sports apparel is using a detailed design with a lot of colors, you’ll want to use cad cut imprinted film. This will be more expensive and do remember that the image you put on the shirt will only be as good as the original image you put into the computer. For something cheaper or faster, cad cut film design is good for less detailed designs using three colors or fewer.

  5. Be sure to ask for a proof. You may be able to see the design on the computer, but that really won’t tell you how it’ll look on a shirt. If you’re using custom artwork you’ll especially want to be careful to get a proof printed so you can be sure that you’re getting just the look you want with your custom sports apparel.

  6. Always listen to the design company. If the company is making custom company polo shirts and apparel for school clubs all day, every day, they likely know what they’re doing. If you have any doubts about your design, always listen to the advice of the professionals. It’s in their best interest to make you look good.

Custom sports apparel is fun to design and it’s gratifying to see everyone wearing your own special design. Just make sure you follow these tips to make it look great.