“Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!‚” Cereals are consumed primarily by kids, but make no mistake, it is big-boy business brought to you by Fortune 500 companies like General Mills, Post, Kellogs, Quaker, and Nabisco. As reported on www.PBSkids.org, which, by the way, has an online cereal box design contest, Americans eat so much cereal each year that a chain of empty boxes could stretch all the way to the moon and back.

Maybe you weren't inspired to become a graphic designer from your morning breakfast cereal boxes, but did you take advantage of that mail-in offer? Were you the first one in your house to bust open a new box just to dig for the free prize? Aside from those memorable mornings of trivia, cut out masks, comics, fantastic mail-in offers and random free prizes, I picked up a few graphics lessons that I think apply nicely to the decorated-apparel industry.

Expiration date
Some design principles are timeless and others timely. These two Trix cereal boxes at right from General Mills were designed more than 40 years apart, nevertheless some of the design principles remained largely unchanged. The static design principles are:
1. About 1/3 to 1/4 of the cover space is reserved to promote the brand name (Trix),
2. A unique or custom text effect,
3. The contrast between the backdrop of the red box and green text with a prominent white outline or contour, and
4. A product shot of the cereal or virtual sample.

Figure 1:  Positioning the text portion of our design in the top 1/3 portion of the garment, similar to the placement on the cereal box, will help promote the main point of the graphic and will emphasize the product shot (All images courtesy the author)

Inside the box
Taking these same four design principles, let's create a design for a T-shirt. Let's start with the orientation of the layout. If a T-shirt is our final destination or final substrate I will position the text portion of the design similar to the cereal box in the top 1/3 of the design area. Now, it‘s time to recreate a primetime graphic, substituting the word Grafix for Trix.

A few key elements to take notice of—first, the letter “R” in Trix is capitalized and the letter “I” is lower-case. You should also see that the letter “T” is leaning to the left or is slightly rotated, and finally, all of the letters are actually touching or overlapping. I can easily recreate a similar look using the Shape tool in CorelDRAW. (The Shape tool is the second tool down from the top in the toolbox.) It is an essential tool to master in CorelDRAW. One key feature of the Shape tool will allow me to edit the distance between letters, a term known as kerning.

I can also use the Shape tool to select an individual character such as the letter “X” When selected, the small individual character box will turn solid black (see Figure 2). When I double click on the individual character box, the Character Formatting Docker is activated. This is where I can increase the point size of the “G” and rotate the angle of the letter “X” (see Figure 3).

Figure 2

Figure 3

Next, I need to change the color of the text to green and add a white contour or outline (see Figure 4). I prefer contours over outlines, but it really depends on the final production process. When looking closely at the Trix text I can tell, by how close the letters are to each other, that if I use outlines it could create an unintended visible overlap. Another interesting point about the use of outlines that will affect the visual display of graphics is to know that an outline in CorelDRAW is split 50 percent to the inside of an object and 50 percent to the outside of an object. I can avoid the potential production problem and the overlap if I use a contour instead.

Notice the text effects on the newer box of Trix cereal. It has multiple layers, contours, in-lines and one of my favorite graphic techniques—Fountain Fills (see Figure 5). The term Fountain Fill is CorelDRAW terminology similar in meaning to the word gradient. Other synonyms often used to describe this term are halftone, fade, blend and tint.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Tasty samples
The final principle our cereal box teaches us is the product shot or virtual sample. In the same way a product shot of a tasty cereal can tempt your impulsivity to buy a box, a virtual sample is the quickest way to an emotional response and helping inspire a client to buy your product. The virtual sample provides proof to clients and prospects. It's the visual evidence and becomes the inspiration for what could be.

Combining these techniques in CorelDRAW helps set you apart from the competition. In fact, it can become your secret weapon to gaining more business more often. When you create a compelling graphic mocked up on a virtual sample, you are much more likely to earn the business. Many buyers are not as visual as perhaps you‘d like them to be, or they may only be accustomed to seeing their logo. But it is not enough to be in the “logos-on-stuff” business.

The product shot or virtual sample, in this case the graphics on the garment at right, helps inspire clients to buy your products more so than a simple logo.

Virtual samples tell your story graphically, set clearer expectations of design elements, colors and imprint locations... but most of all it really helps the client get it.