Text only shirts, and why most of them look cheap
A shirt with nothing but words is the hardest kind to get right. Practical rules on typeface, line breaks, size and spacing that make the difference.
A design made only of words has nowhere to hide. There is no illustration drawing the eye, so every decision about the type is the design, and the difference between one that looks bought and one that looks made in a hurry is usually four or five small things.
Pick a face with a job
Display faces exist to be large. Body faces exist to be small and read in paragraphs. Setting three words in a body face at chest size looks like a document, because that is what the face is for. Setting a paragraph in a heavy display face is unreadable for the opposite reason.
Break the lines yourself
Let a phrase wrap on its own and it breaks wherever it runs out of room, which is almost never where the sense breaks. Decide the line breaks by meaning, then size each line to the space it has.
- Two or three lines is usually the limit on a chest
- The most important line should be the biggest, not the first
- Ragged line lengths look accidental. Either centre them or make them deliberately different
Size relative to the body, not the file
The print area on an adult chest is around twelve inches across. Type that fills eleven of those inches looks confident. Type that fills four looks like it was placed at the wrong scale and nobody noticed. When in doubt, go larger.
Anything that reaches the edge of the print area is cropped there, because the file sent to the printer is exactly that rectangle. Leave a little air.
Spacing is where the money shows
Tight lines read as one block and look designed. Loose lines float. Large type nearly always needs its line spacing reduced from the default, because defaults are set for paragraphs of small text.
Two colours, at most
One ink colour is safe and looks intentional. Two can work when one is clearly the accent. Three starts to look like a ransom note unless the whole thing is built around it.