Design usually involves constraints – logos need to fit a brand’s personality, web sites need to have a certain look and feel and print advertising needs to put across a certain message. But when you’re designing a t-shirt, the constraints usually go straight out the window. You’re often free to design it to your taste and specification, without being limited by colour palette, format or someone else’s creative direction. And in the last 5 years or so, web sites like Threadless.com have really helped to give the creative freedom back to the designer when making t-shirts – and this means there’s a lot of interesting, unique & creative t-shirt designs out there – featuring some awe-inspiring artwork.
There really are no rules when it comes to designing artwork for a t-shirt – you can make the design as minimalist or as complex as you like, you’re not limited to any colour palettes and if you can imagine it, you can design it. If you’re looking to get into t-shirt design, you could do well to get inspiration from sites like Threadless, and if you felt up to it you could stand to gain a lot from submitting your own designs. Even if your design doesn’t get selected to be a shirt, you’d still end up with a lot of useful and interesting feedback, which could help you enormously in the future.
We’ve brought together a collection of interesting and creative t-shirt designs that we think are brilliantly designed – we hope they help to inspire you for your next design project.
Have you found any examples of creative, quirky t-shirt designs that you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments.
