This is just a little bit of advice if you're designing your artwork yourself. We hope to add to it as time goes on. If you have anything helpful to add, email us & let us know!

Make sure you check out these pages, too:

Art requirements
Button templates

A couple of money-saving tips:

-Start designing based on what you can afford. This may seems obvious, but the fewer colors you use in your design, the less you're going to pay for each shirt. You're going charge the same amount for the shirts either way, so the less you spend, the more you make. For this reason, before you have a design, you should calculate your budget, the cost for different numbers of colors on shirts, and your potential profit margin. Once you've done this, you can create (or have someone else create) a design using the number of colors you can afford. (Way easier than getting the design together, only to find out that after printing costs, you're going to make about 25 cents profit per shirt.)

Two things to remember that will help you design a shirt that will cost you less:
     -Using fewer color of inks costs less.
     -Printing darks inks on lighter garments is less expensive than printing light inks on dark garments.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there's no direct correlation between the number of colors used and the quality of the design. For example, a well-conceived design using dark brown ink on a light tan shirt may look better than a bad design using four colors on a black shirt. The quality of the design is what attracts people, whether it costs a lot or a little to make.

The Easiest Design Possible: Fonts as Art

If you don't have an idea for art, but you know you want your band's name on some shirts, the best place to start is a free font site. The fonts are usually categorized by style, then listed alphabetically. When you find a few you like, download them, type out your band name, and see which one you like best. If you do this in a graphics program, you can keep changing your background color (i.e., shirt color) and text color until you find a combination you like.

You can find these sites by doing a search for "free fonts." Or you can start with one of these:
dafont.com 
simplythebest.com 
betterfonts.com 

Note: Make sure that you only use fonts that are free for commercial use. Most called "freeware" are, but check their info (usually the ReadMe file) anyway.

Good Graphics Freeware!

For a feature-filled free alternative to Photoshop, try the GIMP! www.gimp.org
To download: www.gimp.org/downloads

For vector graphics, there's Inkscape, another free, open source application. Also a lot of features, including tracing of bitmaps (raster graphics). www.inkscape.org
Download: www.inkscape.org/download

A little about the two main types of computer graphic types- raster and vector::
short version- http://web.coehs.siu.edu/WED/Wallace/vector_vs.htm
long version- http://www.signindustry.com/computers/articles/2004-11-30-DASvector_v_raster.php3