I will eat whatever you cook; I will sleep wherever you prepare my bed; and I will wear whatever you make for me! This is the kind of emotion the gift idea I am suggesting here is going to elicit in the recipient. This super gift provides you an opportunity to make your partner or loved one realize how much you care, and to what length you can go to make him feel special.


One of the best ways to make your partner feel special is to create something especially for him. What about designing a t-shirt with a personalized message printed in a cool looking font? Sounds good, isn’t it? This is the super gift idea I am suggesting here for your partner or loved one.

Perfect for Female and Male

This gift can be given to a person of either of the sexes. You can give it to your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife. You can even give this gift to you father, or mother. A possibility of giving this present to your best friend, son and daughter can’t also be rules out.

Gift for Every Occasion

Ideally, I will suggest giving a personilized t-shirt on the person’s birthday, but again it is not bound by the occasion.

Great Design with Simple Equipment

To make this super gift, you will need to have an eye for design, an ability to come up with a nice, clever line, one or more clip-art images, an ability to do some basic illustration, and on top of it, some free time to devote. This gift will not require any fancy equipment; all you will need is age old pen or pencil, ruler, sharpener, eraser, and paper. If you are comfortable working with illustration software like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw then you can consider using it as well.

First Step: Conceptualize the T-Shirt

The first real step in the process is to conceptualize the t-shirt you want to make, but the process starts with learning about the anatomy of a t-shirt. If the recipient of your gift is a man then there will not be much complicacy about the design, but if the intended user of the super gift is a woman than the measurements and cuts will require more careful consideration.

Once you are home with the anatomical details of a t-shirt; now it’s time now to come up with the design concept. You should have a clear idea about what you want to convey through the t-shirt, before looking for the design elements. The design concept will give you an inkling of what you want to show, what you want to say, and what means to use to do so. This knowledge will work as an anchor, when you search for an image, clipart, or when you carve your personal message in a sentence – use maximum five or six words for this as the space is limited.

Take the design elements, and put them on the appropriate places on the t-shirt and you are done. Getting your t-shirt printed will not be difficult as there are many web-based services that provide custom t-shirt printing services. Just upload your design and place an order. You can get your t-shirt printed in any color you like, and in any size you want.

Who Can Give this Gift?

As this gift is unisex in nature, this can be given by anyone. Your willingness to devote time to create this super gift is the only prerequisite for giving this super gift.

Other occasion

In my view, birthday is the most suited occasion for this gift idea to be given, but this is not the only occasion you can gift a custom made t-shirt to your loved one. You can even choose friendship day to give this cool gift to your best friend.

Fostering love: The idea behind the gift

From Bengali Aamee tuma ke bhalo baashi to Farsi Doset daram to German Ich liebe dich to Gujarati Hoo thunay prem karoo choo to French Je t’aime and Je t’adore to Dutch Ik hou van jou to Slovak Lu’bim to Yiddish Ikh hob dikh lib, each phrase speaks volume about your love. The idea is to create a custom t-shirt with a heart filled with I love you written in 1000 (or as many as you can, but at least 100) different languages. This give will give him/her more than one reason to believe how much you love him/her, and will remember it every time he/she stands in front of a mirror wearing the t-shirt you gifted.

Creating this super gift is not difficult, and it will be more fun than you think. To make this gift, you will need a pre-shrunk t-shirt, preferably white, a collection of I love you in different languages, a little bit of knowledge of illustration, and enthusiasm to see this work through.

Finding love: Research & explanation

Begin with researching the Internet for different ways to say I love you. Just typing “I love you in different languages” in Google will fetch you the result you are looking for. Use Microsoft Excel to make a list: in one column write the name of the language, and in the second column write the way I love you is written in that language. Keep this list handy.

In explaining this custom gift idea, I have used a plain white t-shirt, but you can take the creative liberty and experiment with color and design. You need to keep in mind that the text written on the t-shirt should contrast with the color of the t-shirt. For example: if you choose a black color t-shirt then you can consider writing the “I love yous” in florescent green, white or neon colors. If you want, you can play with the design as well. In making this gift, you are limited only by your imagination.

The next step in the process is to illustrate the design you want to put on the t-shirt.  You can either use pencil, eraser, sharpener, scale and paper to draw the design concept that you have in your mind or you can use illustration software like Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Draw to get the output.

Crafting Love: Creating the custom t-shirt Design

Begin with taking measurement of the chest-area of the t-shirt. For the measurement you can use a t-shirt of the recipient. Mark the measurement on a sheet of paper, in case you are using paper and pencil, or create a new page of the size you got from the measurement if you are using software to do the illustration work. This step should be followed by creating a wireframe that will be filled with the “I love yous”. You have two option, either to create a big heart with a 2.5-pixel border and fill the “I love yous” in it. The second option is to make any primary shape and write all the “I love yous” in it using black font. Make a second layer on top of it, and draw a heart with a 1.50-pixel border on it. Keep the fill part of the heart blank and paint the border with cherry-red color.

Now, select all the “I love yous” that falls within the boundary of the heart, and change its color to red. You can also delete one or two “I love yous” from the center of the heart, and write a personalized message to the recipient. If you want, you can use a different color to make this message prominent, or else you can write the message using same font and same color. This will maintain the subtlety of the message, which can also be very powerful.

Getting a custom t-shirt printed is not a big deal, nowadays. If you couldn’t find a good quality custom t-shirt in your locality then search the Internet, and you will get many options to choose from. There are online services that not only print custom design on a standard t-shirt, but they also give you an option to design t-shirt from scratch for printing.