Make your t-shirts stand out

Whether you want to increase awareness, support brand loyalty, or just bring some joy to an event, T-shirts are a perfect choice. Of course, while T-shirts are the quintessential “startup swag” item, they can also be a powerful branding tool for any company. And with a little thought and intention from your design team, they can really make a splash with your customers.

Here at Printfection, we’re lucky to work with some top-notch customers who love to spin up creative T-shirt designs. To help get the creativity flowing, we wanted to share some of our favorite T-shirts and techniques. Take note of your favorites; then, share them with your design team.

Ready, Set, Inspiration!

VictorOps

VictorOps supports innovative DevOps teams—who love a great T-shirt—so they take this pretty seriously. For the below design, they made use of the available space, adding images to both the front and back of the shirt. We love the custom patch design on the bottom right. The imagery and text speak to their persona and brand, adding personality that fits both the brand and the wearer. We think this is a bit more fun to wear than just a company logo.

Zendesk

This T-shirt makes a bold statement that helps Zendesk stand out. We love how they used the entire T-shirt and a confetti-like design that subvertly represents all of their products. Each one of the smaller icons is for a different Zendesk product.  Zendesk is able to use this design on many other items as well! Zendesk makes software to help organizations build the best customer experiences and we love that their design reflects that.

Bebo

Bebo has two different shirts that made our list! They made great use of the entire shirt but went a step further and explored different orientations and locations. We love how their logo is rotated slightly and wraps around the shirt. These designs feel retail-ready and on-trend. They also score bonus points for aligning their graphics with their community of gamers while still maintaining top-notch brand placement.

 

X-Team

The X-Team shirt line is fantastic for several reasons. We love how they used their logo as a starting point for these creative designs and took it even further. Each one appeals to a different aspect of their culture and brand while still keeping their logo front and center. These shirts win bonus points for being completely representative of their brand without having to use their brand name.

HackerOne

The use of neon colors on both the front and back of HackerOne’s T-shirt makes it extra appealing. Who doesn’t need a bit more neon in their life?! We also love how they integrated a community concept into their design by incorporating many faces that make up the larger image and using the tagline “Together We Hit Harder”.

Trello

The iconic Trello dog makes for a really fun brand to play with. We love how they created a line of shirts by adjusting the inside design/pattern. This allows them to quickly and easily theme shirts for special events or campaigns just by changing the pattern inside the template.

SRAM

SRAM did a great job using the sleeve, back of the neck, and front of this T-shirt making it a full 360-degree design!  We love how they used sketches of the bike parts they manufacture. Not only do these make a great design, but by deemphasizing their logo, they also make the shirt really appealing to wear.

Pearson VUE

Pearson VUE teamed up with Zulu Six to create this design, taking advantage of several printing options to create a T-shirt that really stands out. The faded vintage feel was achieved by removing the underlay (base layer of white ink). Removing the underlay makes the ink a little more transparent, so the natural color and texture of the shirt shows through. They also limited the design to four colors to stay within budget. Getting such a detailed graphic with only four colors is quite impressive!

Statuspage

Your kids are going to love this one. Statuspage used glow in the dark ink. Even though being able to glow in the dark is just plain cool, these guys get bonus points because it aligns so well with their brand! Statuspage is a leading status and incident communication tool. They enable users to keep their customers out of the dark during downtime, just like this T-shirt!