Before my internship here at Captiv8, I had never really designed t-shirts. However, I got a lot of practice. I designed t-shirts for Virginia Tech, Mary Helen Guest, Berkman and Shapiro Orthodontics, Chatsworth Avenue School, and for a bachelorette party. While designing these t-shirts, I noticed that I continued to make the same mistake over and over again – I kept making my designs too large! Juan explained to me that the printing area for t-shirts is usually ten inches wide by twelve inches long and that it was best for me to do my designs in an Illustrator document that size and paste it as a smart object in Photoshop on our mockup templates (using layer comps of course). Using smart objects is best because it eliminates having to save the illustrator file. Once you double click on the Vector Smart Object layer in your Photoshop file, it will open anywhere at anytime. I had dabbled with smart objects in my previous internship but I really got into it here at Captiv8. Not all t-shirt designs had to be taken into Photoshop to be mocked up on templates. This would only happen if the client provided us with specific shirts that they wanted and if the design was simple and straight-forward like the shirts for Chatsworth Avenue School.
I would say that my favorite t-shirt designs were the ones that I created for Mary Helen Guest. This was not the first time that they came to Captiv8 for shirt designs. In fact, as far as I know, every client that I did work for were all returning clients. I enjoyed doing Mary Helen Guest’s t-shirts because they wanted something fun, athletic, and that stood for school pride. After I finished my designs I sent them to Mary Helen Guest. I didn’t even realize but my job with them was not over. They approved my designs and since they only wanted to print in two colors, I had to change the colors I used according to their instructions. After that I made sure to outline all of strokes and create outlines for my typography. This way they will always have the fonts to work with and can scale the image to any size without losing the proportions.
Below are the final t-shirt Designs for Mary Helen Guest:
