5 Tips For Making Your Screenprinted Promotional T-Shirts More Legible

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Whether you run a single restaurant or own a whole chain of summer camps, promotional t-shirts are an affordable and popular way to market your business. However, getting people to wear your logo on their chest or back does your business little good if no one can actually read what the design says. Design logos and artwork for screen printing remain legible at long distances by considering both common typography tenets and the limitations of the printing method.

Pare Down To The Basics

First, aim to use only one or two lines of text on the shirt or a single large piece of artwork. If you tuck your company's name into an artistic design, you're hiding it and lowering its legibility. Drop your tagline, forget about listing your products, and consider even foregoing the phone numbers and addresses usually added to promotional shirts. The spread of Internet access allows interested viewers to look you up immediately just by name, so minimalist designs can still pay off.

Put Contrast First

If you're including artwork or your existing logo on the t-shirt, look for ways to increase the contrast of the design. While skilled screen printing experts can create amazing effects with multiple color layers, this results in a busy look best appreciated up close. Paring down your artwork to a single color against a strongly contrasting fabric background is a good way to keep it recognizable at 20, 50, and 100-foot distances. For more complex details, aim for only two or three colors that all contrast against each other.

Watch Your Color Combinations

Some color combinations are still hard to read at a distance despite offering plenty of contrast. These combinations backfire on you whether they're splashed across a t-shirt or used on signage. The screen printing company will likely try to steer you away from pairings like:

• Two different shades of the same color, such as light green on dark green
• Red and blue, which pop in a bad way no matter how dark or light
• Either neon or very light pastel colors and practically any other color, even black backgrounds
• Gray ink paired with pretty much anything darker than white
• Yellow text on a red background, which suffers from a similar "floating" visual problem as blue
• Light colors on light or white backgrounds

Look For Font Features

Most promotional t-shirts work best at long distances when there's a clear message typed out in an easy-to-read font. It's tempting to go with the font you use on other marketing and branding materials, but it's better to choose a font on its features when designing a screen printed t-shirt. Font features that contribute to maximum legibility include:

• A relatively high X-height, which usually indicates a longer vertical line
• Strong features like wide crossbars and open counters, which help distinguish the differences between letters like lowercase "e" and "o"
• A medium stroke width, since overly bold or excessively narrow fonts become hard to read at long distances

Pay Attention To Spacing

Finally, consider how the text is spaced. "Kerning" refers to the space between individual letters, and increasing it can greatly help legibility by avoiding the appearance of run-on letters. You don't want lowercase "c's" and "l's" running together to look like "d's." However, spacing the letters out too far apart also makes it hard to understand the words at a glance since it makes individual letters stand out too much.

Aside from kerning, consider the vertical spacing of your message. Keep a good gap between two lines of text, and continue that white space when text is placed near artwork. An inch or two of vertical space between the various elements allows a viewer to take everything in at once instead of struggling to pick apart the design.

For more information or help with your design, consider contacting a professional like those at Absolute Screen Printing.

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9 December 2015