Three Steps to Designing a Tee-Shirt

A number of technologies exist today, from inkjet transfers to online designers, which make designing and printing your own t-shirts easy and affordable. But ease of production doesn't guarantee a good design. The following are three design components to consider when creating a design for a t-shirt: Contrast, Size, and Balance.

Contrast is the difference in *brightness* between colors. You want to have contrast between your ink colors and your shirt. For example, bright yellow, a perfectly good color, is not good for text on a white shirt because white and yellow are similar in brightness. It's very difficult to read yellow letters on a white background. Dark colored inks, likewise, do not show up well on dark colored shirts. Navy blue ink, for example, won't show up on a black shirt (or a burgundy shirt, or forest green, etc...).

Another area where you need to consider contrast is the graphic itself. A graphic (or multicolored font) that is made up of a group of similar colors, such as dark blue, deep purple, and black, will be hard to distinguish; the lines and colors will visually blur together. Contrast between light and dark colors will make your graphics easy to recognize.

Size does matter when it comes to shirt design. Bigger is usually better for both text and graphic elements. Your design needs to be able to be read from around six to eight feet away. Keep your text relatively simple, or at least have a major few words that are large and easily seen. People don't have the time or inclination to read a paragraph of text on a shirt. You have about 3 seconds to get your message across before the shirt has passed by. While smaller text can be used, remember to save it for information that is less important than your main idea since it will be less easily seen.

Balance refers to the overall distribution of text and images on your shirt. A layout is described as being "heavy" where there is a lot of imagery or thick, full, font styles. As the word implies, when there is an area that is heavy (or light), there needs to be a similar area on the other side. Balance can be focused either left/right or top/bottom. As a design element, balance is an area where there is the most leeway for "breaking the rules". Many times an off-balance, asymmetric design can be very energetic. But for a classic, clean design remember to keep your elements balanced.

If you are conscious of Contrast, Size, and Balance when designing your t-shirt, you will be well on your way to a result that will be visually pleasing to both you and your audience.

The Human Love Affair with Jewelry

Man's love for ornaments goes back to the earliest days of human civilization. Starting from the ancient Egyptian rule to the medieval days of Chinese empire, and ranging as far back in the ancient era when the indigenous populace solely occupied America, we have sufficient proof to showcase how men and women wore all forms of ornaments. In fact, some recent findings even suggest that ornamental beads were being produced as far back as 100K years ago.

Incidentally, jewelry was never meant for beautifying one's body in the earlier times, and was intended more for practical uses, such as pinning clothes together or family wealth storage. In the contemporary world however, it's manly used now for decorating bodies. We can find, as a result, two different categories of ornaments getting evolved with time as we trace back its history. Obviously these two different forms were meant for men and women respectively. Men preferred adorning themselves with the sturdier jewelry items, such as heavier gold chains and wider rings that could have expensive stones studded inside them, to display their wealth and power, while women chose wearing sleek nose rings, earrings, bracelets etc, to enhance their feminine outlook.

Many historical societies had set norms for wearing ornaments. This often made it very hard for commoners even to dream of buying, leave aside wearing precious metals. There are no such restrictions in today's world however, as people could buy whatever they wished for and had the capacity to purchase it. It should still sound natural to imagine that only the rich might wear the most precious jewelry items even today, since no law on earth has made it possible to bring down the gap of rich and poor until this date.

Varying trends based on one's religious and political identities, socio-economic realities, and differing cultural ethos could still be traced out in today's jewelry fashions, hence the divisions remain in some or the other ways. Many of today's young generation might find navel piercing a way of bold defiance. Similarly, you might see a completely new class of jewelry lovers who will buy ornaments just for its aesthetic value and not for the rare materials involved.

Many well known ornaments like gold chains, bracelets, earrings etc, could be seen in all time zones if you looked across the world. However, some products like gold chains and rings are equally popular in men and women buyers both. The difference could often be seen in the overall sizes they come with and the rare metals involved in manufacturing those items, which has already been spoken about in this write-up earlier. Some very popular gold chain types could be named as Box, Byzantine, Curb, Figaro, Mesh, Omega etc. Each of these normally has a distinct way of getting manufactured. For example, Curb comes with a series of interlocked, oblong and beveled rings, while Figaro, which has a similar pattern that of Curb, will normally have a ring twice as long as others after a gap of every three links.

The market for jewelry items continues to grow all out, and remains one of the most lucrative ones around the globe. Some very big ornament makers could be seen operating internationally, including those based in the USA. One could buy items from these companies by going to their official websites, and entering the required information, which hardly takes making a few mouse-clicks at any given moment. Several dozen websites from the USA and elsewhere could be seen competing for your orders in this manner, leading out into a cost reduction for you to your surprise.