trucker hats : buy cool designs or make your own customized

I make all my hats through cafepress. It's incredibly easy, and very fun. You can just buy one hat for yourself, or you can even open up your own online store for FREE. There's no set-up charge for the hats or the store. You can put any picture or word or saying or anything you can think of on your hat. (You can also make custom t-shirts, cd's, books... lots of great stuff at cafepress!)

Here's the 3 easy steps to having a custom trucker:

1. sign up for a free cafepress account
   
2. create & upload a picture for your hat
3. buy your hat, or start selling it online.

Here's the link to cafepress if you'd like to make your own:
Sign up here to make a hat for yourself
Sign up here if you want to open a shop to sell your hats
(example of a free basic store, example of a paid premium store)

Creating an image:

Tips on making your design:
(These are tips I've found helpful in setting up graphics for my trucker hats. For more information, visit cafepress' official "image workshop")

How to set up the graphic:

The graphic can be a maximum of 5" long by 2" tall. For best results, your picture should be 300 DPI or "dots per inch" Don't know what DPI is... that's ok, just make your graphic 1500 pixels by 600 pixels. You can make your graphic lower resolution, as low as 100 DPI (also known as 500 pixels by 200 pixels), but a lower resolution graphic will not look as good on your hat. Lower resolution means it will look chunky and pixelly on your trucker!

Here are acceptable resolution sizes for example:
1500 x 600 pixels ---> Best Quality!
1000 x 400 pixels ---> Good Quality
750 x 300 pixels ----> OK but not great
500 x 200 pixels ----> Lowest quality.

Helpful design hints:

*Because of the 5x2 printable area, long horizontal graphics (like the one above) look better than square or vertical (tall) graphics.

*It's ok to make your graphic smaller in proportion than 5x2 (like 5x1 or 4x2)

*Always make your graphic for your trucker hat an even number of inches tall. If you have a very long skinny custom slogan, and it comes out 5 inches wide but less than an inch tall, add enough "white space" to the top & bottom to make it a full inch.

*Never try to upload a graphic that is less than 200 pixels either direction. Cafepress's engine can't take graphics smaller than that.

What do you use to make your graphics? Well, if you absolutely HAVE to (and your design is simple, just text and shapes and no shading) you can use MS Paint. What you SHOULD use is a better art program, like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or Corel.

Browse the trucker hats I've made & sell
Shop for hats on cafepress

Here are some great hats by myself and other people: