Are you in charge of designing your school spirit tshirts? Creating awesome and catchy school spirit tshirts can really give your pep ralley or school apparel fundraiser some pep in its step. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up with school spirit tshirts that no one wears or even wants.

To help you get the most bang for your buck from your school spirit tshirts, we’ve put together a simple guide for designing custom school shirts.


Five Tips for Creating School Spirit Wear Shirts

1. Take Some Time to Noodle Over Your Design and Concept
   
   As they say, Rome wasn’t born in a day. Your (equally important) killer tshirt design should be given a little time and effort in the design phase. For the best result, sketch out a few design ideas and then put it aside. Go bowling. Watch a movie. Run a marathon. Clear you head of all the tshirt design business, and then revisit it with a fresh set of eyes. Sometimes it’s easy to get so bogged down with a design that you get way off track, fall down a rabbit hole and then come back and realize it looks terrible.
   
   
   It never hurts to show some designs to a panel of critical yet open minded classmates to get their feedback. Make sure your peer reviewers aren’t afraid to think outside the box and to tell you their honest opinion. You might be surprised by the design that is going to get the most positive reviews with your miniature poll.




2. Don’t forget that the design will be emblazoned on a shirt.
   So you follow our first step and create a great piece of artwork for your tshirt design. Hurray! Now you go get it printed onto a thousand shirts for all your classmates, and realize that it translates really poorly onto a shirt. Instead of having a great “WOW” factor, it leaves viewers with more of a “What?” factor.

   This is because a creating a great picture and creating a great tshirt are two different beasts. After you have a basic design for your shirt, put a mock up on a shirt and pay attention to how it conveys. Does it still of the same impact on a tshirt that it does on a piece of paper or on the computer screen?




3. Pay attention to details, but keep it simple.
   
   The audience that you’re distributing your shirts to are going to give it approximately two seconds to size it up and determine if they’ll ever be caught dead in it or not. You want your design to be simple enough to convey a smashing first impression.
   
   
   This isn’t to say that your tshirt design should be basic. You can put details into your design, just make sure they are clean and beautiful, so the viewer doesn’t have to stare at it for a long period of time to understand the idea.




4. Design with your audience in mind.
   
   This is very important. If there was only one right way to make a shirt, this guide would be a lot different. However, the people who you want to wear your shirt should be the driving factor in designing your shirt. The design that a teenager would want to wear is different than that of what your school faculty would want to wear, for example. Think about your goals for the shirt, and then create a design that caters to that market.




5. Be clever but don’t try too hard.
   
   Creating a humorous tshirt design can have a powerful impact on making a mark and getting your audience to really pay attention to your design. But if your single-most goal is to be funny, it can really come off cheesy and lose any credibility. Not to mention that a joke loses its punch fast, and then becomes “old news” (remember that song that you couldn’t get enough of at first, and then it got played over and over and over, and eventually you felt sick every time you heard it? Shirts that are only funny have this impact on the audience.)
   
   
   Be catchy and clever with your design, but keep it subtle, so that it will still be something people want to wear after the joke plays out.

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