﻿If you’re out of ideas for all-over print designs, we have just the video for you.
Printful graphics specialist Ilja will teach you how to design
all-over print products. Hey, Ilja! Let’s hear his tips on creating trendy,
best-selling all-over print design patterns, picking the right colors,
and the best tools for designing AOP products! The basics of designing all-over print products
With all-over printing, the entire garment is your canvas. This technique gives you the opportunity
to design just about anything you like. But this freedom of creative expression can be
a double-edged sword. How do you decide what to put on the product? What colors and design
elements should you choose from nearly endless possibilities? To help you make the designing
process quick and easy, we asked Ilja to share the basics of good all-over print designs.
Let’s hear what he has to say! When you create designs, one of the
key things to keep in mind is what appeals to your target audience.
Here are a few questions you should answer before you start:
Who is your target audience? What type of products do they want?
Where and when are they going to use or wear them?
For this video, I’ll imagine that I own a clothing brand that produces trendy streetwear for people
aged 18–24. And my main bread and butter are limited edition trendy statement pieces that
let my customers stand out. As to where and when they’re going to wear it—I’ll say that
they’d wear this clothing to go out. Knowing who you’re designing for and what
they need will help you come up with a more specific idea. And once you have an idea,
picking the right colors, shapes, and placement for design elements will be much easier.
Now that we’ve learned the basics, let’s figure out what it takes to
come up with a design idea. How to come up with an idea
for an all-over print design I have a few suggestions where
you can search for inspiration. First, you can go to the online platform
that’s the most popular among your customers, for example, Instagram or TikTok. Take a
look at what people are wearing and talking about. Some of the tags you can check out are
#ootd, #outfitinspo, and #styleideas. My audience consists of people aged 18–24,
and one of the top platforms for people in this age group is TikTok. So I browsed through some of
the tags I previously recommended and noticed the heat map trend, which people were trying
to recreate on their own clothing. This trend is quite bold and eye-catching,
so I have a hunch that my audience might really enjoy it too. Keep in mind that you
can never guarantee that a design will succeed, no matter how great it looks
and how much work you’ve put into it. But that’s the amazing thing about
print-on-demand. You can experiment with designs and easily remove them
from your store if people aren’t interested, without worrying about any unsold stock.
To develop my design idea, I’ll create a mood board. I start by browsing the internet for the
keyword heat map clothing to see what comes up and add any clothes that catch my eye to
my mood board. The easiest way of creating a mood board is to gather all of the images in a Google
Doc. If you want to, you can also gather them on a blank page in your design software.
Here’s the mood board I created for my idea. I put together several images as
a reference for what I want to create. One of the challenges of designing is deciding
which direction to take. The more I learn about my customer’s tastes, the harder it
becomes to settle on just one or two ideas. So the solution is to create a mood board with
a single style that I can focus on. Sometimes you’ll get ideas for several different pieces from
one mood board, so make sure you jot them down. That’ll give you a chance to create a collection.
If creating a collection is something you’d like to try out, check out How to sell all-over-print
products video. I’ll link it at the end of this video so you can keep learning.
I’ll design a heat map sweatshirt and a matching pair of wide-leg pants.
The best tool for designing all-over print products
If you’re still growing your design skills and want easy-to-use, free software,
I suggest you try the Printful Design Maker. It has all of the necessary tools to create a design
from scratch. One of my favorite features of the Design Maker is that you can see how your design
will look right away by just clicking on the mockup section. And if anything needs adjusting,
I can fix it in a matter of seconds. Once you’re ready to create more advanced designs,
there are a lot of different apps you can try out. I personally use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe
Photoshop, but if you want more budget-friendly software, we have a video covering the top 3 free
Adobe Illustrator alternatives. It’s linked in the description. No matter which of these apps
you prefer, remember to use the file guidelines. You can find them underneath every product.
Avoid these design mistakes Let’s take a look at the most
common design mistakes made when designing an all-over print product.
Not using full-bleed images Make sure to create and upload designs that
fully cover the entire print area. For example, if you upload artwork that doesn’t really reach the
sides of the print area, all of this will just be bare fabric on the finished product.
If you want your design to only cover a specific part of the product, for example, you want to put
a photo on a white tee, make sure to export your files with a transparent background in PNG format.
If you’re designing outside of Printful’s Design Maker, you should use print file templates. Here’s
where you can find them. Putting graphics or text
outside the safe print area Let’s talk about why it’s important
to keep any important design elements within the safe print area. For example, when you’re
designing an AOP t-shirt, whether using Printful’s Design Maker or other design software, it matches
the largest shirt size for that t-shirt model. For this shirt, it'll be 2XL. Now, when someone orders
a small size of your shirt, the size S shirt overlay is put on top of the actual print file,
then proportionally scaled up and positioned to fit the 2XL design file. Everything that doesn’t
cover the small-sized overlay is cut off. Keep in mind that, if you need specific design
elements visible in all sizes, place them inside the safe print area.
Creating Wraparound designs It might be tempting to create designs that
wrap around the entire garment. But I suggest you avoid the type of designs where any lines or
elements connect at the seams. Our AOP products are hand-sewn from multiple fabric panels,
so, even if a design looks great while you’re putting it together in the Design Maker, we can’t
guarantee that the finished product will look the way you expected when it’s fulfilled.
Choosing the wrong color profile Last but not least, to ensure your design
looks the same in real life as it does on screen, create your print file in the sRGB color profile.
Before you add the product to your store, you should order a product sample to see how
it looks. That will help avoid any unexpected surprises and complaints from customers.
Thank you for sharing your best tips and tricks with us, Ilja! I hope all of you
watching found them just as useful as I did. If you still have any questions, let me know!
Now that you know how to design a best-selling product, make sure to also learn how to sell
all-over print products. See you in the next video, bye!