Hey everyone, welcome back to another video.
In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you
10 T-shirt design tips for print on demand.
I've been selling print on demand T-shirts
for almost a decade now.
I've learned a lot about designing T-shirts
that actually sell.
Now, when it comes to print on demand,
there's a couple very important things
that you have to get right in order to be successful
at print on demand.
First part of that is finding low competition niches
that people are not overly saturated into.
If you haven't already seen my other videos
on how to do that, I will put a link to one down
in the description that you can watch after this video.
With that being said, the other important thing
that you really need in print on demand is good designs.
You could have the absolute best niches,
but if you don't have good designs,
no one's going to buy them.
So sit back, relax, this is going to be a quick,
but very valuable video
that's going to give you some really good pointers
for designing print on demand shirts.
The absolute first tip, which is the foundation
for all of this, is to make sure that you're using
a T-shirt design tool.
This is a tool that I really like,
it's called placeit.net,
this is the one that I've personally been using for years,
you can literally type in any niche,
and then all you have to do is come over to the side,
and sort it by T-shirt designs,
and for any niche, you're going to find designs
that are pre-made for that niche.
Now, all of these, you can just come in,
you can change the font, the graphics,
anything you wanna change here,
and then you have pre-made templates.
Now, the very important thing
that a lot of people overlook, or they just don't know of
when they're using a t-shirt design tool
is that the tool needs to be copyright-free,
and commercially usable.
Both of those are crucial for print on demand.
Now, if you're using tools like Canva,
or using other tools that are T-shirt design tools,
they're not all copyright-free or commercially usable.
What that means is you may go through
and find a great template, and you start to customize it,
but the fonts or the graphics are protected by other people.
So once you create that design
and upload it to a print on demand website,
it can actually be taken down for copyright
or trademark infringement,
and if that happens too many times on your account,
your entire print on demand account gets banned.
Placeit.net is my personal recommendation,
and since I've been using them for so long,
they gave me a discount code that I can share with you guys.
I'll put that link in the description
if you wanna check it out.
The second tip for you is
don't copy other people's phrases or designs.
I watch new people come into print on demand all the time,
and they just look for what are the bestselling designs,
and they go basically copy those designs.
One, this is going to lead to your designs
getting taken down,
because you're duplicating other people's designs,
and two, if you know what you're doing,
it's so easy to come up with your own phrases and designs.
Literally, to show you how easy this is,
if you go to a website called ChatGPT,
this is an artificial intelligence tool
that is 100% free to use.
You can literally go down here and say,
"Write me 10 copyright free T-shirt slogans
about hiking or camping"
or anything else that you wanna go into,
and it's literally going to go to work,
and it's going to write you 10 slogans that you can use.
Then you can literally take these slogans,
you can go back over to placeit,
you can find related designs for that niche,
and you can literally just start customizing them
with those phrases.
Like I said, it's just as easy to copy someone
as it is to come up with your own
original designs and phrases,
if you just know what you're doing.
The third tip that I have for you is
if you are using a T-shirt design tool
that's not specifically Placeit,
but any T-shirt design tool out there,
make sure that you are customizing your templates.
So when you come into any of these design tools,
you're going to see all of these templates.
What you don't wanna do is just come into the template,
take the background out,
and then literally just download that as is.
If you do this, although technically it is
commercially usable and copyright free,
this design that you have downloaded may be an exact design
that someone else has already downloaded,
and uploaded to a print on demand website.
If someone has uploaded the exact same design before you,
and you're coming in after the fact
and uploading that design,
yours is going to be taken down as a duplicate.
So when you open up a T-shirt design template,
just change the template.
This could be just changing the text that it says here,
changing the font that the text is written in,
changing the colors, changing the graphic,
all of these things are easy changes
in a T-shirt design tool,
but by doing that, it makes the design uniquely yours.
The next tip I have for you
is to consider using text-only T-shirt designs.
Now over the years, some of my best selling T-shirt designs
have literally been text only.
They don't even have a graphic on.
So when you're coming into whatever T-shirt design tool
you're using, you can go to T-shirt designs,
and you can literally sort them by text only.
Over on the left side, scroll down,
and you're going to look for one of two things.
Either you can look for quote T-shirts,
or you can scroll even further down,
and you can look for typography.
Both of those are going to mean the same thing,
and they're just going to be text only designs
with no graphics.
The fifth tip that I have for you
is to use built-in background removers.
When you are creating a design on a T-shirt design template,
or Photoshop, or something like that,
make sure that you are removing the background
before you download that design.
For instance here, if we use this design,
you can see that this has a black background.
Now I could download it as is,
but the design is going to have this full,
rectangular black background,
that will get printed on the print on demand T-shirt.
I could use a tool after the fact
to try to remove this black background,
but it's not going to give you clean edges.
Simply go to the background color,
and go to the checkerboard,
now, when you download this design,
the design literally has no background,
and the more you zoom in here,
you can see that there is no black on the background,
everything is perfect.
Now, if you do find yourself in a position,
where you need to remove the background from something
after the fact, don't worry, there's still tools to do this,
Placeit themselves has a really good one,
just Google Placeit background remover,
it'll bring you to this page,
and basically you can just take your design,
your mockup, your photo, and upload it,
just give it a second here to load,
and it'll take the background out for you,
and then you can download that right here.
Now, keep in mind here,
having a good background remover tool
does come in clutch sometimes.
So if you have a mockup or a photo
that you need to remove the background from,
you can use a tool like this,
then you can put that on anything
with the transparent background.
If you go all the way to the bottom of Placeit,
you'll find other resources that they have to offer
totally free to use,
otherwise, you can just use the link
that's down in the description to Placeit,
and that'll take you to all of these tools, as well.
The next tip I have for you is
when you're using a T-shirt design tool,
look to see if they have logo templates
instead of T-shirt design templates.
So what this looks like on Placeit
is if you go to logos instead of designs,
and find T-shirt designs, just click on logos,
and now you have a whole another subset of designs
that you can use on your T-shirts
that not many other T-shirt design sellers know about.
They may be sticking just to the pool
of T-shirt design templates,
and not even know that you can use all of these, as well.
All right, the seventh tip for you is to never color clash.
This is extremely important
when you're putting your listing together.
So let me show you what I mean by this.
When you're creating a design,
and it either has white or it has black,
something like that,
what you don't wanna do is offer that design
on the same color shirt on a listing.
To show you what that would look like on that listing,
if you were to change the background to the same color here,
the entire design basically disappears.
So when you're creating your listing,
make sure that you're not offering the same color T-shirt
as the color of your design.
Moving on to the eighth tip,
this is that when it comes to T-shirt designs,
sometimes simplicity is just far better than complexity.
As I was saying before,
some of my bestselling designs have been text only,
and those text only designs have been just a couple words,
two or three words of text, nothing fancy here,
but they just sell so well.
This is a combination of finding a really good sub-niche,
and then just offering a good, impactful shirt
that's just text.
Now, the reason that I tell you this is
because if you're having a hard time coming up
with a graphic design for something,
maybe just try text only.
The ninth T-shirt design tip I have for you
is to always evoke emotion or feeling with your designs.
As you get further along in print on demand,
you will find that the ones that start selling the best
are the ones that really mean something to someone.
They're impactful, they have meaning to them,
they evoke an emotion when someone sees that design.
So one of the best ways to do that
is to make your designs personal,
make it personal to someone who is having that experience.
To give you a real example of this,
if you look at some of these designs for camping,
some of these are specific locations,
like Jackson Hole or North Cascades.
The people who buy these shirts,
or they get gifted these shirts
might be people who go to camp there
or to hike there every year.
It's something that's personal to them,
and that's what's going to make this design sell
over just a general camping shirt.
And the last tip I have for you
is to get specific with your designs.
Back in the day, you used to be able to create a T-shirt
about a general niche.
Nowadays in print on demand,
you have to get into these sub-niches that are more specific
in order to have your shirt show up,
the bigger general niches are simply just filled up.
The good news, though, is that there are literally
tens of thousands of these sub-niches still available,
you just need to know how to find them.
So a perfect example of this
is instead of creating T-shirt designs for teachers,
create T-shirt designs for engineering teachers,
or English teachers, or camp teachers,
all of these have low competition.
Now, as I was saying in the beginning of this video,
the two important things are having good designs,
and having good sub-niches.
So hopefully this video helps you with the designs.
If you need to know how to find these sub-niches,
I will link a video down below
that shows you how to do all of this,
and break the bigger niches down
into the profitable, low competition sub-niches.
Also, just as a reminder,
I'm going to put the discount code to placeit.net
down in the description, as well,
so if you did wanna check that out,
that'll be down there with this link.
All right, guys, that's it for this one.
If you have any questions, let me know down in the comments,
otherwise, I'll see you all in the next video.