I’m part of a group attempting to fundraise with the children in our village (Talybont on Usk) to develop the park into a bit of a skate/bmx/mtb park as well as renewing the play equipment for the younger ones. The lads have set their sights on a pump track and are hoping to design some t-shirts to sell in the village shop to raise a bit of money and awareness of their plans.

They’ve got some cracking ideas but we need to get them digital in order to send them off to get the t-shirts printed. Can anyone recommend a half decent computer program for getting this done, is there anything that will do the job that can be downloaded free?

Thanks in advance and hopefully you’ll soon be able to buy a t-shirt and support them next time you’re parked up to ride the Gap/other sneaky mountain top ridges in the area ;).

Not sure about t-shirts specifically but for custom business cards and the like Printers I’ve used ask for a PDF of a certain size and resolution that is most easily produced in Photoshop. Sometimes you might need to send them fonts. Find someone that knows how to use Photoshop and you should be OK.

Ms paint or paint.net will do the job. That’s what I use for ours.

You only have to provide an approximation of the design. the kit company will turn it into a proper design.

You don’t need anything special; just a scanner and a cheapo Photoshop Elements. As soon as they are scanned in, they’re digitised anyway. Most of the work is in coming up with the design in the first place – don’t get hung up on what the printer wants right now; that’s a whole different world and anyway, if they were any good they’d help out at the final stage.

All you need is pen, paper and a scanner really. All of my designs I did on paper and just used photoshop to colour them in – my printer could have put them onto a t-shirt as they were scanned in. It’s not rocket science; keep it as simple as possible.

Good luck with it!

Cheers all, just sent an email off to the print place ‘Designs 4 Ewe’ who are local and seem very helpful from their website. Perhaps I should start taking pre-orders!