If your cycling or triathlon club has given you the job with coming up with a design for your new kit and you have sat down with a blank piece of paper to come up with something original that will keep everyone at the club happy, then help is at hand – here are some ideas that you may wish to consider.
- Don’t start with a blank sheet of paper! Get some inspiration from somewhere else – it might be an old but much loved t-shirt, a painting you once saw in a gallery, a logo from a local coffee shop etc. Something you just like the look of – if you then don’t know how to transform this into a custom cycling jersey or tri-suit, then you can just send it to one of our designers and we will take your inspiration to come up with a few options for a design. We don’t charge extra for this service!
- Don’t design by committee. In most clubs there will need to be an agreement on what is the final design for the club kit and typically at the beginning of the process of choosing a design there will be an agreement on some basic principles. When it comes to design your own cycling jersey though, it almost never works out well if several people are involved in the development of the actual design; let one person take over and then take a final design back for comments.
- You don’t have to be a good designer to come up with a good design. We make hundreds of custom designs every year, so let us do the hard work. You just need to show us a few other designs from other clubs for example that you like the look of, send us the text and logos and perhaps an inspiration (see point 1) and let us do the rest. Or you can just send a basic pencil sketch with annotations and a few links for us to start work on – it is our job as a custom cycling clothing supplier produce a design and reiterate until you are happy.
- Think about how the cycling kit or tri-suit will look when worn. Some designs can look great in 2D, but not so good when you actually wear it. A lot of this is to do with working with the panels that make up a garment, rather than against them: the panels will tend to naturally divide the garment into side views, front/back views and to separate the trunk from the limbs, whereas on a 2D design they all get presented together. You can use the panels to chop up your design into distinct sections that should work well standing on their own as well as functioning as a whole.
- Text and logos need space to breathe. On those areas of the custom cycling or triathlon kit that you have logos or text, you really need to have a simple background both behind and surrounding them. In fact if you are going to have a lot of text/logos, you need to have a design that can support them. If you want to have some more intricate design elements, perhaps use them only on certain panels.
With Carvalho Custom, you will get to work directly with a graphic designer rather than going through an account manager so you can get design iterations produced in real time. Please contact us to get started on your custom kit design!
