How to Custom Design Embroidered Tee Shirts

Designing your own custom embroidery for T-shirts is easy with the right type of software and an understanding of how embroidery works. Simple and easy lettering or logos without extensive details are greatly beautified by embroidery.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Photoshop (or other design program)

1. Determine what part of the T-shirt will be embroidered. Choices are usually a breast pocket or a full back design.

2. Choose a color combination that will highlight the logo or words. If the shirt is dark, lighter threads should be used to help the logo stand out against the dark background. Dark thread should be used with light shirts.

3. Open Photoshop (or whatever software program you are using) and create a new file according to the final size of the embroidered logo. Choose a transparent background as the T-shirt color will be the background.

4. Choose a font style and color, then type the words to be embroidered. Create any other visual parts of the logo, such as a picture or mascot, with simple, well-defined lines.

5. Save the file as a high-resolution (300 dpi) ".jpeg" or ".gif" and send to the embroidery company for a final proof.

6. If you have not chosen a company to work with, ask local organizations like school sports teams for a referral of someone that does good work. Ask the company to do a proof shirt for you. They should do this, perhaps at cost, but it will give you the best indication as to how artwork translates to the type of material selected.

Tips & Warnings

• Simplicity and contrasting colors are key to well designed embroidered T-shirts. Many embroidery shops will ask for a "vector file" (files that store the lines and colors of an image) emailed to them or placed on disk for the highest resolution of the logo as possible. If drawing the logo by hand, coordinate with your local embroiderer as to what they require, but remember that simple shows up best with embroidery. Other programs that can create vector files are Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw.