Design Advice

Create designs faster

The process for creating a design is:

Have an idea.
Sketch it.
Draw it properly.
Clean up the lines. Polish.
Add text if needed.
Export to a PNG file. Sometimes you need a few variants.
Submit to your online store.
Add tags and a description.
Share on social media.

That’s a lot of different kinds of tasks. And it always takes a moment to switch from one task to the next one. Instead of making one design and then another one, it’s more efficient to batch similar tasks together.

First, I note down ideas. At the moment I have 9 ideas for designs that I want to create for my new store. Today, I’ve made initial sketches for all of them. Then I will draw them all. After that, export all the designs to PNG files. And submit to my store.

I know from experience that this way is faster. When I focus on just one design, I end up making only that single design during a day. But, when I work on groups of designs, I can make 3 to 5 designs a day.

How funny are you?

Overall, funny t-shirts sell better. It’s not only my experience. Just recently I watched Michael Essek’s videos where he shares advice on designing and selling and marketing and he said pretty much the same thing. He said about 90% of his t-shirts are funny.

It’s difficult to think of a funny design on the spot. At least for me. So whenever I hear someone says something funny I note it down on my phone or my reMarkable, and then I put it on a t-shirt. It’s one of my habits — collecting snippets that I can later combine, rearrange, and use.

Transparency problem with DTG printing

I made this design:

"Dark Woods" by Justyna Dorsz — Dark Woods

Unfortunately, when printed on apparel it looks like this:

Most of the design is not printed, only very bright places are visible. This design is painted with white color only, so in darker places those white pixels are nearly completely transparent.

The method that is used to print designs on apparel is called Direct-To-Garment and most DTG printers don’t deal well with low opacity pixels.

If you want your design to look good on apparel, you need to adjust it so that most pixels have higher opacity. Threadless notified me about this issue, and this is how they adjusted my design:

Now, when printed on apparel, the design should be much more visible.

Increase sales of black and white designs

This is a simple trick to have a few more sales. Maybe you know it, but frankly, this trick hasn’t occurred to me until after a few years of designing t-shirts. I’m going to write it down here, in case there’s someone else who hasn’t thought of it.

Some people really don’t want to buy dark t-shirts. And some people won’t buy light t-shirts. Let’s accommodate both those groups.

I made a lot of cat designs. This is one of them:

"Existing" - cat design - by Justyna Dorsz — “Existing”

When I made this design I checked if it looked good when colors were reversed:

It did look fine. Turns out this design works well both as a white design on a black t-shirt and as a black design on a white t-shirt. So now both versions are for sale in my shop.

If you have a white design and you sell it on a black t-shirt, then invert the colors and check if it looks good too.

However, don’t just submit every design in two color options, it doesn’t always work. For example, this one looks good on dark but wouldn’t make sense on a white t-shirt:

"Saturn the Cat" - by Justyna Dorsz — “Saturn the Cat”

This is a terrible idea

How skilled a designer do you have to be to make a drawing and sell it on a t-shirt?

Have a look at this ridiculous design that I made a few weeks ago:

The idea is key. I thought about a sly cat and drew the simplest version that I could think of:

I used only one color.
The cat doesn’t even have whiskers, but it’s still clear that it’s a cat.
Actually, it’s not even the whole cat, just the head!

Now for the text — this is always the difficult part. I try to choose something that adds a story to the design. Here, the cat hears an idea and likes it very much, even though it’s going to end up in trouble.

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