One thing that may be new to people is learning how so size and center your design. Here are some quick pointers on how to make sure your design looks great and the way you want it to look!
Sizing
Sizing can be a tricky thing, but here’s a quick visual guide to common sizes we put our art at. The middle row has the most common sizes on a lot of art, but remember – all art is different, so size as you wish! If you have a ruler and any t-shirt handy, you can also use that to help size a graphic!
Sizing References (all models wearing a Men’s medium shirt)
*MOST COMMON SIZES*
Centering
Now that you’ve got your designs sized to what you wish, it’s important that you center your design properly. Some designs can be centered as easy as pressing the align button on the top toolbar in Photoshop or Illustrator:
***Make sure all elements centering are in a group or it will center individual elements instead of the whole design***
However, it can get a little tricky when you have a design with a lot of background information or a design with a lot of elements in it.
Let’s use Good Jorb! by Perry Beane as an example.
When you see something like this with a lot of little elements surrounded a design, you want to focus on the central graphic. In this cause, the best point of centering would be to center to the circle around the yeti. If you can eyeball this yourself, go for it, but here’s a quick tip on how you can an accurate centering.
Guidelines are your best friend. Make sure you have the ruler visible and simply click and drag from the ruler to create them. Do one guideline that hits the top of the object and another that hits the side.
Take a marquee tool that best fits your central object – in this case elliptical marquee tool – and create a selection. To do this quickly with your two guidelines, shift+click at the point where the two guidelines meet (marked with a red circle in image) and drag it to fit your graphic.
Create a new layer and fill this in with a color that is easy to see and won’t blend into your graphic. You can now use the align tool on this object to center it on the canvas.
You will see the circle re-align and center itself onto the canvas. Now, select all of your design work and move it to match the newly centered circle. Once you do this, feel free to delete the filled layer on top.
You should be left with a graphic that is nice and centered to the central graphic!
Having any trouble or have any extra questions? Let us know at artist.help@threadless.com!