In this video, I'm going to show you how you can level up your t-shirt designs.
I'm going to take a design from a redbubble shop. This one right here
and make some changes and let you know how you can make some changes to make your designs just a
little bit better and stand out and give yourself a better chance of making some sales. 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 my channel is all about helping you to design
and sell t-shirts online so if that's something you want to learn how to do don't forget to hit
that subscribe button right there to see all my videos so in this video i wanted to do something
a little bit different i get a lot of dms asking me to look at their shops on redbubble or on merch
by amazon or things like that and a lot of times people are asking me about their designs and how
how good their designs are what i could do to change that so i wanted to show you live here on
a video what i would do to take a design like this one right here on redbubble so this is actually a
person that dm'd me on instagram and i got their permission to use this design on this video so
that i'm not just taking any random person stuff on on redbubble i'm actually um using this with
permission so i'm gonna show you step by step on the things i would do to change it and the reasons
why i would change it to make this design just a little bit better just stand out a little bit more
and i know there's lots of different ways you can do this so i'm not saying in this video
that this is the only way you can do it there's lots of different ways that you can upgrade a
design or change a design and this is also not a guarantee that this design will sell it's just
going to incorporate some of the design principles that i've learned throughout the years for good
t-shirt design and i'll explain it on the video on the different steps so lots to see in this video
you're going to want to stay till the end to see all the different steps and see the final product
see the final thing on this so make sure to stay all the way to the end for that so i'm going to be
using affinity designer to make these changes so let's get into affinity designer right now
so here we are on affinity designer here's the original design from redbubble take a look at
this so it actually says so i zoomed in here with the watermark so you can see why yes actually i
can drive a stick so this is one of those trends from halloween and you can see kind of okay this
is this is um something there's some pros to this one i'm gonna pull it over here so you can see
um it's not just text right it's not just text so they actually did some arcs right here and
they made it interesting with the curved text and they did use some graphics which is pretty
cool so it's not just a text-based design graphic plus text designs do a lot better in my opinion
and then they're using only two fonts a lot of times when people come in and do graphic design
or t-shirt design for the first time they use lots of different fonts and you can see this person
actually knows how to design to graphic design um because there's two fonts here and there's
some graphics that they use so there's a graphic of a broom here and the graphic here
one thing that you'll see if i zoom in here this person actually does some graphic design or uses
some graphic design stuff because you can see a shadow right here too under the letter so
there's this color right here and then this other black and then there's like a gray here
so there's some there's some cool stuff right there and then this this broom right here over
the stick with a outline of black right so um it is a cool graphic design but for t-shirt design
i think you have to think about other things just besides this so i would say this is kind
of a medium graphic designer that's doing this stuff they know their graphic design stuff they
can obviously knows how to do some shadow drop shadows and putting text and and graphics together
right so i'm going to show you some other things some other tricks that you can do to kind of level
it up so even one more level from this instead of just text i'm going to show you some things
that you can actually improve on in this so let's get started i'm going to move this down i put it
all on this here so the first thing i want to talk about is color so you can see right away
here the color is actually dark on a black t-shirt so if i go in here it's really hard to read right
so take a look at this back here again when when it's right here you can read it but it doesn't
stand out so imagine all the thumbnails together on redbubble for this trend um people are not
going to pull their eye towards here because it's kind of hard to read i mean you got this
this color right here which draws your eye right it's this the contrast between the black
and this orange here but the actual text the thing that you have to read is actually harder to read
so this is what we're going to do we're going to just color it white for now so you can see
the contrast between this and this night and day right literally because you can see this real
clear even if we backed up a little bit this one actually stands out so first thing i'm going to do
is just change the color you can see just changing the color will give it just that little pop a
little bit more pop and this is actually better in my opinion than this one right here and all
we did was change the color and i took away that drop shadow we don't need it so i'm gonna zoom in
here you can see no drop shadow is just white text i left this is a different font than this one but
i i left the distress texture right here that this one had but it's still white right so even
with that the distress texture kind of pops out too over the black so that's what i did on this
one just a pop of color if you want to have your design stand out make sure to look for that make
sure you have the right contrast that people can actually read it from far away right so that's
step number one is color so step number two let's move along here and i want to talk about emphasis
so when you're picking a phrase you got to think about the phrase here so this phrase says why yes
actually i can drive a stick so that's the joke right here the emphasis is stick and in this
design in the in the first design we had the stick which is the broom which i don't think we actually
need because we get the joke right here that the the witch is on the broom here so we don't need
another broom right here that says stick so i'm going to take that out but i wanted to highlight
this word you can see this one's kind of thin this font right here i'm going to use a thicker
font and kind of drive that emphasis toward a stick right because that's the joke the joke is
yes actually i can drive a stick is the punch line right so i made a stick a lot bigger and you may
be wondering what these fonts are so i put it here for you this one right here is brawls type phrase
ruff i think i mentioned that before in a former video and this is thirsty rough a stick right here
and then i drew this right there that line just to emphasize it even more i underlined it right
so not only is it big in a different font but i underlined it to make it stand out even more so
emphasis when you're looking at the phrase you want to give the emphasis to the thing that
should have the emphasis right and in this case it is a stick so you can see i'm i'm actually
making it a little taller too because the the words a little bigger but it's still that tall
rectangle right so you want to still make it that tall rectangle if it becomes way too tall then
it's not going to fit on your shirt but if it's just a little taller than it is wider that's fine
so i think we're still fine here we still got the same integrity that we had before with the
curved text right here but this time i made this straight i can drive a stick instead of curved
just so that these two kind of work together and i still think it works like this so after adding
color i added emphasis and you can see just going from this step what we had before to this step
makes it stand out too because i i also used a stick right here to stand out make that word stand
out a little bit better than this one it's bigger it's bolder it's easier to read right so emphasis
don't forget about where to put your emphasis on your t-shirt it should have one on the t-shirt it
doesn't have to be everything on the t-shirt or everything on the design but there should be some
kind of emphasis something that stands out on your design so the next thing i wanted to talk about is
the graphic so this graphic is okay you can see it does match what we're trying to talk about and why
yes actually i can drive a stick but there's two things that i want to improve about this graphic
first it's really small the witch in this case is the main thing that's what we're talking about
why yes actually i drive a stick who's driving a stick a witch is driving a stick i'm the witch
i'm wearing the t-shirt right so it should be bigger than this the witch in this case is kind
of small in the graphics so it kind of gets hidden you can see the pumpkins is actually the star in
this graphic not the witch right secondly the witch here is an ugly witch or a wicked witch
now when you say why yes actually i drive a stick what you're thinking about is maybe uh
you think of more of hermione than wicked witch of the west right so you want someone
that's a cool witch a sassy witch some kind of witch like that and so this graphic doesn't match
because if i'm looking at myself and i'm thinking and i'm buying this shirt you have to get into the
thought of the customer who's going to buy this do i want to say that i'm a wicked witch do i want to
say that i'm an ugly witch or do i want to say that i'm a cool witch or i'm a sassy witch like
a uh hermione witch right so young sassy um cool witch and that's what i got here so let me show
you where i got this design from this graphic from so you can go anywhere online to go find a graphic
i'm here on creative fabrica but you could go to vexos you could go you know so many different
places creative market probably has something i'm going to just type in here witch on broom
broom just like that and you can see there's lots of different witches on brooms but we want to look
for one that we can use that's maybe a young sassy witch or something like that let's see the scroll
down so let's go down here and here right here i'm gonna use this one it's only a dollar so i
can just pay a dollar added to my cart and download it and you can see it is let's see
eps png perfect it's a vector file great and i can use that and you can see i'm going to zoom in here
just you can see just a nice this is not a wicked witch right this is more of a young witch
so i think this will work i don't need this lantern here so i'm going to take that out
in the vector but you can see nice broom here nice big vector thing so i'm going to use this
i'm going to take it put it on affinity designer and you'll see this is the exact one that i used
so all right so you can see right here this is the design i'm using if i zoom in here you
can see the face a lot nicer than this wicked witch face right this is just a nice soft face
i'm just showing that you know i'm a young witch i can drive stick right and then i'm just using the
bats these are the same bats from right here in this one and i took away the pumpkins you can see
it's coming together and it's a lot bigger than this switch right here now it's the star it's the
star graphic it's the main graphic because that's what this is talking about i can drive a stick yes
right here one other thing i'm gonna change is i'm gonna make it and we could do it just like this
but i'm going to make a little change to make this stand out a little better so i'm going to still
take the same circle that same oval right here and but i'm just going to use it as an outline
and i'm going to take the outline of the witch here and put it in orange instead so i'm going to
make this the graphic so you can see how this kind of pops now right so i put the moon behind here
because i like the contrast between the orange and the white and the bats i made orange again and so
this i think will actually stand out and because i have this orange i can color this orange let's
move out like that or you know you could take the the circle the oval out entirely and maybe
add some stars and stuff like that so lots of different ways you can do this but the reason why
i took it out of the oval is so that i can make it stand out even more so this is what we're talking
about right why yes actually i can drive stick who the witch and so the witch needs to be bigger and
so people can relate to that so we got the two things here emphasis on a stick and also emphasis
on the graphic right so let me show you what it ended up looking like on a t-shirt
the before and after so before this is it remember kind of hard to read the graphics a little small
uh stick isn't standing out right but we had that broom right here and here's the after
so you this is what i would do again this isn't a perfect design but you can see some
of the principles that i'm using here to add emphasis to have contrast to emphasize what
the thing is actually is and also to relate to the customer so the customer probably is a
a young woman who can re relate to a witch right so in that case maybe a young sassy witch
or something like that or but definitely not a old hag witch right not a wicked witch so we wanted to
do that so they can relate to this yeah i know how to drive a stick i think it's really funny
and so i put that on here and so i like the way this turned out i think this again if i'm seeing
both of these together it's always a competition on redbubble you're going to have you know
all these different ones so you want to give the person who's buying the user or the the buyer
a reason to stop and look at your stuff over this one so people might um just scroll by this
one and hopefully they give this one a second look because it's standing out with the white
they can read it you know maybe they can relate to it and think it's funny so give yourself a
better chance of making a sale by just putting those little touches those little extra things
thinking about those little things there color emphasis and and the graphic a strong graphic
that can relate to the customer and i think that will give you a better chance of making a sale on
redbubble so that is it for this video thanks so much for watching hopefully this video brought you
a lot of value and if it did make sure to give it a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed already
make sure to hit that subscribe button so you can see all my videos i wanted to finish this
video with a question of the day and the question of the day is this what are some things that you
would have changed on this design let me know in the comments i know there's some other things
that other people would make some other decisions i'm only one person and this these are the things
i would change but i'm sure there are some other things that you might change in the design let me
know in the comments what you would do i'd love to hear your take on it and if you want to see other
videos like this on what to do for designing t-shirts and different trends click on these
videos right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye