Create Cool Text-Only T-Shirts on Zazzle

Zazzle has chosen an okay font as the default, but it's plain-vanilla and everyone uses it, so it's doubly boring. Don't ever use the default font! Use the drop-down font menu and scroll through their list of three-hundred-odd fonts until you find one that you like (or, more likely, one you hate less than all the others. Font selection can be exhausting!)

Because Zazzle gives you a mock-up of your work as you create it, you can slap some text onto a shirt and adjust its size and font until it looks right to you. And this is what you should do. Don't over-analyze, just try stuff!

In the Kiss Me photo above, the T-shirt is aimed at anime fangirls, so I used a font called "Ryan"because the letters look like they were drawn with a brush, giving it that "drawn by someone who mostly uses Kanji" oriental look.

Other choices are script fonts for girly messages, bold, blocky fonts for masculine messages, and so on.

The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"T-shirt uses contrasting font styles to take a playful jab at the continuing existence of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Black is stark but highly visible and works on all light-colored T-shirts. But it's sorta dull. So the use of other dark colors can make your shirts look more interesting and classy, and can reinforce your message, too.

In spite of its fancy font, the "Recovering Vegetarian" T-shirt looked too dull with black text. It's much better with a little color.

Zazzle has multiple styles of T-shirts, and you can see how your shirt will look in each style, and usually on several models per style.

I swear that the default model for the "Basic T-shirt" must be nine feet tall, because artwork always looks smaller on him than it does on the real shirt. After getting a shirt with artwork that was way too big, I started checking my designs on more than one model to see if they worked over a range of people. This can save you some grief.

Everyone wearing one of your shirts is a walking billboard for your work. If someone asks, "Where did you get that shirt?" you don't want your customer to look like a doofus. So put the URL of you Web site or T-shirt shop on every shirt! It's a good idea all around, and it's also a "take pride in your work" think. Artists sign their work. In this digital age, we sign with a URL.

At Zazzle, font size 2 is big enough for this if you use a robust font like Charter.

Well, that's all the advice I have today. To get more info, see my blog at blog.ArtsyAndroid.com, and to see more examples, take a look at my T-shirt shop at Zazzle, http://www.zazzle.com/artsyandroid*. And may your T-shirts all be beautiful and witty!