How to Make a 60s Retro Style T-Shirt Design | Design Tutorial

Printing t-shirts on demand is a growing trend, especially with the modern possibilities that allow for custom print designs. Of course, there are certain styles that people want to see more than others, and retro is undoubtedly one of the most popular.

In particular, the ’60s style is in very high demand. But with all those colors and wild illustrations, it might seem like a very difficult style to pull off. Luckily, Kittl provides you with all the tools you’ll need for the job. This tutorial will show you how to create a ’60s retro-style t-shirt design in Kittl step-by-step, from inserting the right illustrations and matching your colors to exporting the design for print.

If you want to follow along with this tutorial, sign-up for free to get Kittl and we’ll get started.

1. Set Up Your T-Shirt Artboard

For our retro t-shirt design, we’ll use one of the artboard presets. When you open Kittl and start a new project, you’ll see the gear icon in the top right. Click on it to bring up the “Settings” menu. From that menu, we’ll select the “Poster Small” canvas size and change its orientation to vertical. You can change the orientation by selecting one of the two icons at the top right of the “Settings” menu.

To finish the setup, we’ll change the background color. The option will be available in the right sidebar under “Background Settings.” For this project, we’ll choose a pale yellowish color.

2. Find Some '60s Illustrations

Now that we have a brand-new background, we’ll start the design with some stylish retro illustrations. To find those illustrations, go to the left sidebar, choose “Elements,” and select the “Illustrations” tab. Then, scroll almost to the bottom of the list, where you’ll find the “Flower Power” section. This is the section we’ll use in the project.

For the centerpiece of the design, we chose a great-looking pair of sunglasses with smiley faces. We inserted the glasses and scaled them up to take up a significant amount of space at the center of our canvas.

Next, we took a rainbow and positioned it above the sunglasses. Once we got the rainbow in place, we sent it to the background by right-clicking and selecting “To Back.”

The next element we wanted to insert is the “Peace” sign, which is so iconic for the ’60s style. To find the right one, we went to the “Add Elements” menu and entered “Peace” in the search box. Once we found the peace sign we wanted, we sized it down and positioned it at the center of the image.

Finally, we went back to the “Flower Power” section and took several mushroom designs. We placed them symmetrically on top of the rainbow and, again, used the “To Back” option to place the mushroom stems behind the rainbow. We wrapped the imagery with some additional floral elements from the same section.

3. Create and Place the Retro Text

With the central image done, it’s time to insert some text into the design. To do that, choose the “Text” tool from the left sidebar. For this project, we went with the HT Modern Hand Serif font. 

The text in our graphic is “Hello Sunshine.” We wanted to create a curvature to the text, so we used certain tools from the “Transformation” menu in the right sidebar. We started with the word “Hello” and used the Circle tool. Then, we toggled the “Direction Inverted” option below the transformation options, tweaked the text size and color, and dragged it to match the graphic.

4. Choose a Fitting Font

When it comes to the second word of our slogan – “Sunshine” – we wanted to go with a unique font that blended in nicely with the ’60s aesthetic. For that purpose, we chose the Sunship font – ideal for the word we wanted to type. 

The font selection made all the difference in this case. We could’ve left the font more neutral as we did with the word “Hello,” but the Sunship font really made the graphic stand out. However, that’s not the end of our font tweaking.

5. Make Use of Glyphs

For this retro ’60s design to be a success, it’s really important to make the graphic as symmetrical as possible. Right now, the word “Sunshine” is getting in the way of that symmetry, but we can fix it by using a glyph from our selected font.

To insert glyphs while editing the text, you can go to the “Text Settings” menu in the right sidebar, go down to the “Text Settings” section, and select the stylized “A+” icon. This will bring up the glyph menu.

For this project, we used the search bar in the menu to find glyphs for the letter “E.” We found just the perfect one with a curved tail that made the text design complete. Then, we went and replaced the letter “N” with another stylistic glyph to add some more visual flow to the text.

6. Add Elements to Fill the Space

With the text and central image in place, it’s time to get some more elements into our design to fill the empty space. This is an important part of the design because we want the retro ’60s graphic to look very busy and lively.

To add more elements, we’ll return to the “Add Elements” menu in the left sidebar, go to “Illustrations” and then to “Flower Power.” We chose more floral elements, as well as some waves, and placed them around the initial design. We kept the entire graphic as symmetric as possible by duplicating and flipping the elements.

We wrapped the elements up by adding some star illustrations. We found the right shapes simply by searching for “Star” in the “Add Elements” menu.

7. Ensure the Colors Match

Getting some psychedelic colors in the graphic is another staple of the retro ’60s style. That’s why we went back to each individual element and made sure their colors really popped. We also made sure that the colors matched nicely. 

When matching colors, the important bit is to use similar colors in the “background” elements and make some braver choices for the elements you want to emphasize. In this case, we have the rainbow, mushrooms, and flowers on the side in different colors than the yellows that dominate the graphic.

8. Decorate Your Text in Style

We wanted to emphasize the “Sunshine” text even more by adding a stylish decoration. Text decorations are available in the right sidebar, under “Effects” and “Decoration.” 

We chose the Fading Color Cut decoration with 2% weight and 25% distance. Then, we changed the color of the effect to orange to really bring the sunshine association home. We also gave the lettering a Line Shadow, made the shadow yellow, and increased its offset to 28.

9. Export the Design

Finally, to export the design, you can go to the “Download Options.” This menu is in the same row as the “Settings” cog – it’s the third one from the left, represented by a downward-facing arrow above a pill shape.

When you click on the “Download Options,” you can change the DPI, use the “Remove Background” option for a transparent image, and choose between two print-friendly formats: PDF and SVG.

Retro t-shirt template in Kittl