In this video I want to share with you a very simple t-shirt design technique. I'm calling it
the circle technique. You'll see it all over the place. You'll see it in t-shirt shops and Target,
Walmart, on RedBubble, on Teepublic and on Merch by Amazon. A lot of these places have t-shirts
designed like this and that's because it's a very simple one to do. I'll show you how to
do it in Affinity Designer but you can follow along in any app that you choose. Let's go!!
Thanks for joining me on this video. My name is Juna with Detour Shirts. I've been designing
and selling t-shirts online since 2005 and I want to help you to learn how to create a good
t-shirt design. I know a lot of you have started selling t-shirts online but have no clue on how
to design a t-shirt you want to get into the business but have never designed a t-shirt before
this is for you also those that have designed t-shirts before i can still learn something on
this i'm going to do this in affinity designer and tell you the do's and don'ts on when to use
this circle technique you don't want to use it on every single design that you have you want
to space it out i've used it before you i'm going to show you examples of other people using it on
merch by amazon and redbubble and and t public and things like that you'll see the slight difference
and you'll see how it works so i'm going to show you how to do this in affinity designer
you can follow along on any app you have you could do this in canva or illustrator or whatever app
you have available that you like to be using i'm sure all of those can do it it's going to be very
simple to do i'm just going to show you some of the techniques that i do in affinity designer and
follow along so let's get into affinity designer right now so here we are in affinity designer
before i start showing you how to do it let me show you some examples of what i've seen on merch
by amazon on redbubble and on t public and you can see this as well in different stores you'll see it
and this is what i'm talking about you have a design in the middle kind of in a circle sometimes
they have a little literal circle here a circle shape but sometimes it just fills that shape
and the text is around it so you don't always have to put a circle in there this one doesn't
but you have text on the top kind of in an arc pattern like around a circle text on the
bottom in an art pattern kind of the whole thing being a circle right and a graphic in the middle
sometimes the graphic in the middle is actually text so think of this as a graphic in a circle
so you got text on the top text on the bottom a graphic in the middle sometimes the graphic has
text like i said sometimes the graphic breaks the circle you can see right here this one's breaking
the circle which is really nice sometimes there's no circle sometimes there's like a
x in the middle you know that fills the circle sometimes it's a vintage sunset sometimes the
circle is actually the thing around it around the graphics and the text is in the circle so
lots of different ways to do this one thing to note though is that it's not a lot of text
so you can see this one has one two three four words this one has one two three four five words
uh four to six words probably this one has three so somewhere in that range right not
a lot of words so keep that in mind when doing it the fonts can be whatever kind of font you
want you're going to want wider fonts for shorter words and thinner fonts or more condensed fonts
for longer words or if you have more words so as you can see this one has three on the top so it's
very condensed this one only has two so you can see it's a very wide so think of that when you're
picking your fonts and other than that color and whatever you can see it works on white it works on
black and anything so so let's take a let's make a template first let's grab this artboard i'm going
to hold down option and drag i've already made it 4500 by 5400 you can see here if yours isn't
do it in here i'm just in the transform palette 4500 5400 and you can make as many artboards as
you want so you can just do this hold down option click and shift click on artboard
and drag it so i'm going to take these out here just so we can use this as the artboard
and we're going to start with a circle so just go to here circle ellipse tool hold down shift to
make sure that it's a circle and we'll just do it right there okay and you should have guides turned
on so it can tell you the center of it if not you know you can click on one of these and then click
center all right and the circle can be any color we're not necessarily going to use that circle
it's just there to hold the shape so in your layers palette you should have your artboard right
here with your circle i'm going to hit command j like that so you'll see a second ellipse after
hitting command j it's just a copy i'm going to go to my text right here artistic text tool and
click on here remember when it changes to that t right there with the squiggly line click on
it and then just type word one word two we're going to just use this as placeholder so word
w-o-r-d i want to make sure that i can see it let's make it black you can do whatever color
but this is just placeholders right word one word two we're not putting in the words yet
we're just using this as a template move these triangles here
and here where's the other one there and then center this so double click on it
you can see right here we're doing this center aligned right center line and
let's move it up a little bit so we move the baseline just so it doesn't touch the circle
so you can go up or down so this is down this is up whatever you want i'm going to
do 28 it doesn't really matter it just you don't want it to touch the circle that's all
all right and the next one you want to do is you copy this now now that you have word one
word two let's do j again and this time let's go to text but let's move these triangles
so it's all the way on the other side here like that and you'll see yours do word one word two on
the bottom but that's upside down we don't want it to read upside down we want it right side up
so double click on this move this right here this right here it will reverse the text path
so click on it you can see now it's the right way but we're going to have to move the baseline so
let's move the baseline and you can kind of eyeball it like that right so let's do this word
three and four again it can be whatever you want all right so this you're going to save
as a template if you want to use this again you're going to just be able to type your words here you
can use whatever font you want i'm just using in this example i'll probably change it but this is
nexa russ sans right now all right so now we have to find a graphic so let's go to the internet
you can use vexos you can use canva i'm going to use vectezy just find a quick graphic that we can
use that we're going to put in this circle to give ourselves something to talk about with these words
right we can't put words without having something in the circle first let's go find a graphic to put
in the circle so here i am in victi right here and i've already searched for mountain bike you can do
whatever you want do fishing do gaming do whatever it is right you can see there's so many different
ones here and of course you don't have to use vectisi as well just go over to your favorite
place that you find graphics or draw a graphic that's fine too but you can see some of these are
already in circles and of course you could use that real easy i'm gonna do one that's
not in a circle just so you can see the difference but you could easily put these in a circle right
some of these are already in a circle that's kind of a circle shape already these are nice
or nice circle this one is a triangle so let's try something different it's not a circle but i'm
going to try and put it in a circle so i'm going to click on this i'm going to download it here and
then we'll bring it into affinity designer nice simple shape of course you can use whatever you
want you can see lots of different places here that you can use for mountain biking or whatever
your thing is so it will still work so let's get into affinity designer now and i'll bring this in
all right so you can see here i brought the graphic in from vectesi
it isn't a circle so let's make it fit a circle if yours is already the circle just make sure
that it's the right size so let's drag it in here we're going to want to fill the space
i'm going to remove this triangle so because it's a vector from victi i can take these out let's see
all right so this could work here let's make sure we grab all of these we don't need the lorem ipsum
there let's get rid of that all right this is looking good here so you see we're just trying
to fit it into that shape here now it's missing something down here for a circle so one thing
you could do is you could actually leave the circle here for the circle shape or you could
have it kind of pop out of the circle let's try that so we have this yellow circle let's hold
down shift to make sure that it's still a perfect circle and we can move it around here you can see
now i'm going to take this and kind of make it break it break the sides here this is breaking
the side here another thing you could do is actually draw a circle so let's do that
let's try and draw you know just to kind of connect it so
so i'm going to group all of these here
and i'll turn off the yellow circle here hey that's looking good right it's kind of
in the circle so the next thing we're going to need to do is put some words so of course
you're going to have to do some research on this but find the right words to put in your
t-shirt you're going to do research and find out i'm just going to put in what i think here
i didn't do any research on here but i'm gonna just do four words cycling is
my therapy let's do that oh my there happy now you can see i could make this bigger
because i want the text to go out to here somewhere around here because i want to
make sure that it kind of goes around to give that effect right so let's go in here and make
this bigger i'm going to double click on here it's 80 right now let's see what 120 looks like
yeah that's kind of where we want it we don't want it to break the halfway mark but we definitely
want to break kind of the two o'clock area so just around here let's see if this one does the
same i'll do 120 as well yes now if you feel like these are kind of getting too far out
you can go in here and bring the letters closer together so hold down
option and your left arrow key and you can see that i'm bringing it a little closer
right here again just going in here and bringing it in just so the word's not too far and you can
do the opposite here if you want that further away you can do that same here with my therapy
and you can just hold it down as well i i like to
click click click but if you hold it down it does the same thing
hold down your left key left arrow key and option at the same time all right so after
looking at it you may want to fill in some space here i'm i think i could put
something right here and i'm going to put a heart here for you know i love bicycling
so not me personally but this this shirt uh i don't mind bicycling but i don't have a bicycle
so i'm gonna put a heart here and let's make sure that in color it's just black
and there you see how that fills the space that's looking good right
nice
so one thing i like to do is just maybe put some circles in here to fill in the space if you want
but you don't have to
you know you could do something like that or maybe just put it in
the middle just to kind of connect it make sure these two are the same
all right cycling is my therapy the next thing you might want to do
is make a white one and a black one so this one's once you're all done convert this to all black
just make sure everything is black here oh except those lines make sure you oops go back
so these lines that we drew
i'm going to convert them to
expand stroke there and that's only because i want to make sure that i can color everything uh
at the same time so once i expand stroke now everything is a object so i can come in here and
just you know change the color on everything if i wanted to make it all pink or black or whatever
that's good like that and let's go here for black i'm gonna put it right in the center
and then change my artboard to you know some other color and then make this all
white
like that and that would work on a dark t-shirt so now you have two
and that's how simple it is to do that technique of course you can do it with other designs you
can see here i'm not following exactly this i could have put a circle behind it i could have
left that circle right there i could have had it breaking out of it and everything so this is
just a real simple way to have a quick t-shirt design that's going to fit nicely in the shape
now you can play around with how big the text is you kind of want it to break this part right here
you can see here same thing so have fun with this this is a very simple technique that you
can use on anything play around with the different graphics and the different fonts
and see what it what it feels like just real easy to have everything centered and nice so hopefully
this video was really helpful for you so that is it for this video hopefully this video is super
helpful for you this is a very simple technique for t-shirt design but as you play with it more
and more and more you'll get used to it and you'll be able to add your own different touches to it
try different fonts try different things in a circle without the circle different colors
it's very versatile and it's very simple to use as a beginner but it's also something that someone
that has designed t-shirts for a long time can use as well it just always turns out really nice
and kind of locks everything in so you'll see it around everywhere now that you're looking for it
uh on red bubble t public and even out in the wild so look for those i would actually take
snapshots when you see those just so you can see how different people use it how different
artists use this style so if this video is really helpful for you make sure to give it a thumbs up
and if you're not subscribed to this channel already make sure to hit that subscribe button
right there the question of the day for this video is what subject will you use the circle
technique on let me know that in the comments we did one for mountain biking but you can see that
this will work for any topic out there any niche out there so let me know in the comment
which one you're gonna try for i'd love to hear it thanks again for watching
and if you want to see more videos on how to design t-shirts click on these videos right here
and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye