Useful Color Picking Advice:
The colors you pick to design your custom shirt are very important. Color affects both your shirts' appearance, and price. Bad colors can completely ruin your design by making it look messy and unreadable.
Color Contrast
If you are printing on a light colored shirt, use dark colors on your design. If you are printing on a dark colored shirt, use light colors in your design. This is obvious, but many people often forget to do these simple things. Don't just blindly put your favorite color on your shirt; make sure it compliments your shirt color well, so that it stands out and looks defined.
Some commonly picked bad color pairs are:
- orange on grey
- dark grey on blue
- white on yellow
- purple on black
- black on dark blue
It's pretty pointless to put a design on your shirt if noone's going to be able to see the design.
Useful Tidbits about Light Colored vs Dark Colored Shirts
- Very light colored shirts tend to cost less than darker shirts. However, white shirts are almost always the cheapest price.
- Printing on dark shirts with screen printing will usually be a tad more expensive than printing on white shirts. Dark shirts usually go through a process called flash which puts an ink underlay on the shirt so that the design's true colors may display brightly. Flash adds a little extra to the cost of each shirt.
- Colors well inevitably come out slightly better on lighter colored shirts. Designs on lighter colored shirts tend to be a bit more sharp and crisp.
There is usually no price difference between design colors.
Black is the same price as green which is the same price as white which is the same price as red etc.
Don't pick many colors
If your design is being screen printed, make sure you use as few colors as possible. The more colors you pick, the greater the cost of each shirt will be.
If you're not sure if your shirt is being screen printed or not, check out the economics of printing. Basically, if youre ordering about 12 or more shirts and you're using 3 or fewer colors per deign each shirt, its probably being screen printed.
One color designs look excellent. You will be surprised.
If the custom shirt website you plan on ordering shirts from offers a design page with a way to set your image color to a solid color, try it out. One color designs tend to look better than you'd expect them to, especially on shirts.
Custom shirt website help centers will usually have some more custom t-shirt design tips that you may find useful.