Design

I almost deleted my best selling design

When you work on something for a long time it’s difficult to say how good it is.

This is a design I made 3 years ago and it’s titled “Get your own pizza, human!”

"Get your own pizza, human" - design by Justyna Dorsz — “Get your own pizza, human!”

It took me a while to make this design. It has a lot of details and colors, and the cat is more complicated than I usually draw. I could not get the cat’s butt shape just right. And I kept changing his fur color until I finally settled on blue.

“No one’s going to like it,” I thought. I was sure no one would buy it and that people would complain about the blue color and wrong cat anatomy. But I had spent over 5 hours on this design so I didn’t want to just delete it. I was too attached. And there was one thing that I liked about this design — the cat’s serious expression, not angry or scared, just serious as if the pizza was the most important thing in the world.

So I published it. It’s in my top 10 best selling designs of all time. Shows what I know about what people like. Now when I look at this design I really like it and the blue fur too.

I wanted to share with you this little story because we often forget that we are our worsts critics and we judge our art too harshly.

Let other people make their own mind about your designs. Publish them and see what happens. You might be as surprised as I was.

Put it on a t-shirt

There’s a funny design I once saw that I now spent 15 minutes searching for. Here it is:

It makes me think about how I approach designing for t-shirts.

Some of the designs I made are just funny things people said that I simply wrote down or happened to remember. And then I put them on t-shirts.

A few years back I was renting an apartment with my brother. I ordered pizza at noon and knocked on his door to tell him. He woke up and said “wake me when it arrives” and went back to sleep.

A while later when I was designing t-shirts I vaguely remembered that. I drew a sleeping dog and experimented with different texts and finally shortened it to this:

"Wake me when pizza" - sleeping dog design. — “Wake me when pizza” by me

Now I write down everything that catches my attention or is even remotely funny – you never know what might come in useful.

Learn from the best

I just stumbled on a 6 years old thread on the Threadless forum: Top 20 best selling designs. And if you scroll down the thread, you will see another slightly newer list of designs.

This one caught my eye:

It makes me want to paint something colorful too.

But what surprised me most is that they all are so different. So many various themes: games, animals, retro, movies. That’s a good thing because it means that every designer can find their own niche.

Another thing that I noticed is that only two designs are with cats and I always thought that designs with cats sell best. So I checked the most popular designs right now and among the 48 designs on the first page, just two have cats and one of them is mine! I thought there would be 10 cat designs at least but I was wrong.

This is the first cat one:

Death and a Black Cat — “Death Rides a Black Cat” by Obinsun

And here is the second one. This is a cat about to jump.

I like browsing through designs and get inspired. For example, this dinosaur design has been popular 6 years ago and is still popular now:

T-Rex — “Technicolour Rex” by electric_method

That’s pretty amazing — to make a design that people love and buy for years.

My most popular design ever

Today I wanted to show you the most popular design that I ever made. Here it is:

I don’t know how many designs I’ve made in my life – a few hundred probably. This remains my best selling one.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s really quite simple. My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that they too could design something and sell on a t-shirt. But as you can see it’s absolutely possible.

The important thing is to just have an idea.

Minimal designs

Every day is Hug Your Dog Day — Hug your dog today. And tomorrow.

This text is not about dogs.

When I first started drawing things and selling them on t-shirts and such, I spent way too much time endlessly improving my complicated designs. And then after maybe a week of work I would have one finished design and I would submit it to various websites. And it would disappear, no one would like it, buy it, no one would pay any attention. Then I would repeat the whole process: make a design for days, obsessing over tiny details and colors, submit, and most often than not, get no response and no interest.

Even after being in this business for years, I still can’t predict what people will like. That’s why it’s so important to not get too attached to any artwork, but keep making them, preferably fast, keep submitting, and some of those designs will get printed, often the ones you least expect.

Among my 10 most popular designs, 4 are designs that I thought no one would like. But I said to myself: “OK, you worked on it for hours, you might just as well publish it.”

So remember — quantity trumps quality. Draw a lot and publish everything, you never know what will be popular.

Everything is better when a cat says it

T-shirt designs are sort of like cartoons. Everything is more inspiring when said by animals.

Before I created this blog I’ve read a lot of articles that tried to motivate me to — start now! I still procrastinated but I am glad I did finally start writing.

If you have a project that is on your to-do list, don’t wait, act now.

How to name your store

When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.

I named the store: Fox Shiver.

Here is the first fox that I painted:

After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.

It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.

When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.

One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs:

Guess what’s the name of Nathan W. Pyle’s store on Threadless.

Here’s another artist that I like: Martina Scott and her store.

You don’t need a perfect name for your store, you need to make art and share it.

We are so tiny

This is a very fun representation of how small our planet is compared to other known objects in space. You can move left and right, and I dare you not to be amazed:

As an artist, I am often asked how I find ideas for what to draw. The answer is that I draw what I love. I very much like reading about space and looking at the night sky, so that’s why I painted this:

Space is one of the two main things that I draw. The other is, of course, cats.

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.

Design

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