Think about your target audience
This is probably the most important part of t-shirt design, no matter what you’re designing for, be it a promotional campaign or a fashion label, consider the target audience.
If you need clothing for your staff at an event, you’re going to want design work to be bold and striking, so in turn your staff stand out. This could be anything from a simple 1 coloured design on a bright t-shirt to a more colourful bold print on a darker t-shirt. Regardless to how you make your design stand out, the key is to keep it simple as you want it to be easy for your audience to distinguish you from others.
This process is again very similar with promotional t-shirts; you need the design work to be bold to draw attention, but simplicity will help in ensuring better brand recognition. As well as this, a simple design is far more memorable, and you want people to remember your brand don’t you?!
When it comes to fashion brands the rules aren’t quite as straight forward. In a very saturated market, it’s your job to create something that stands out from the very crowded market. What you don’t want to do is just jump on the latest hot trend, for example right now that’s sublimation printing. To stand out you need to be thinking of what is next and what will make you a little different from the hundreds of thousands of other t-shirt companies out there.
Branded uniforms are a different kettle of fish again, as with this it’s not about being bold, or ahead of the trends. The aim with uniform is to create something that firstly reflects your company's values (so go for Fairtrade t-shirts if you’re a Fairtrade company), as well as being a little bit more premium than one off event clothing. Branding is normally more subtle and simplistic, as this isn’t about standing out, the goal here is to create a consistent professional appearance across your staff.
