Just like any other small business marketing efforts, you need to determine who your targeted audience is or will be when you decide to design or create a promotional t-shirt.

The following tips are a few points you might want to consider before you get started.

1)      Determine Your Target Audience and T-shirt Purpose. When deciding who your target audience is you will also want to determine where the t-shirt is going to be distributed, what the message is going to be and whether you are going to directly promote your logo or business in your t-shirt design.  Also when it comes to calculating your costs you might want to determine how many t-shirts you want printed in your initial run.  Most printers reduce the cost of the t-shirt based on how many t-shirts you want printed but you will need to evaluate or compare overall pricing between printers.

2)      Develop a Great Design.  If you have the design skills or someone on your staff does you can design your t-shirt directly on the websites of several popular t-shirt design manufacturers such as  CustomInk, Blue Cotton and Ooshirts that either give you the option to create your design using their provided templates and clip art or you can upload your own custom design.  Each website has their own set-up, procedures and pricing information for their products.

3)      Choose a Good Printer and Make sure Your Design is Printer Ready.  When screen printing your design on t-shirts and other apparel, you need to make sure that your t-shirt design is CMYK ready and that the graphics are vector graphics rather than bitmap images.  Your graphic designer or the t-shirt company’s rep  you are working with should be able to guide you on what images are acceptable in order to get the best results.  Making sure you address these design issues will assure that your t-shirt design will meet your expectations.

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The following Photoshop video tutorial covers some of these topics and provides the tips and design techniques you can use to design a t-shirt for your business or event.  The video covers an overview of logo design, and the t-shirt design placed on a photo-realistic t-shirt mockup.

If you are looking for a free resource for t-shirt templates, you might want to check out 50+ Free Awesome T-shirt Templates in order to find free tshirt vector or photo realistic mockups for your designs.  These tips can be used to promote your small business or event for branding purposes.  (The business mentioned in this video is a fictitious sporting goods retail shop in Orange County, California specializing in skateboarding and beach sportswear.)