Designing for children's sizes rather than shrinking an adult one
A child's shirt is not a small adult shirt, and a design scaled down to fit one usually looks wrong. What changes, and what to change with it.
The obvious approach to a children's shirt is to take the adult design and make it smaller. It fits, and it looks like a shrunken adult shirt, because the proportions of the garment changed and the proportions of the design did not.
The print area does not scale evenly
A child's chest is narrower but not proportionally shorter, so the printable area is a different shape from the adult one rather than the same shape at a smaller size. A layout tuned to a wide adult rectangle becomes cramped sideways and empty vertically.
Detail disappears faster than size
- Type set at half the size is less than half as readable
- Thin lines that survive on an adult chest break up at child scale
- Three lines of text is usually one too many
Simplify rather than shrink
The version that works is usually the adult design with something removed. Drop the smallest line, enlarge what remains, and let it fill the space. A child's shirt with one bold word looks confident. The same shirt with a shrunken three line lockup looks like a mistake.
Group orders can carry both: children get their own sizes in the same order as the adults, on the same design.
A name is worth more here
Children wear a shirt with their own name on it more than they wear the same shirt without it. It stops being an event shirt and becomes theirs, and it also settles every argument about whose is whose.
Children read their own name first
A child who can read will find their own name before they look at anything else on the shirt. That makes the name the strongest element by default, and a design that fights it by putting something bigger above it usually loses.
Comfort decides whether it is worn twice
A large solid block of ink across the whole front is stiffer than the fabric around it, and children notice that far more than adults do. Designs with some open space in them stay softer, and a shirt that is comfortable is a shirt that gets worn again.