﻿I’m Michael Essek. I’m a t-shirt designer from Manchester in the UK,
and I’ve been selling my designs on t-shirts using print-on-demand for almost ten years.
So, when you’re creating a collection, everything starts with the audience. Who is going to buy this
product? Who’s going to wear it? And where do these products fit in their lives?
So, a lot of designers will start with t-shirts. That’s an easy product to understand. But they’ll
stop there and won’t think about all the other products that can be adapted
and that you can adapt your designs for. So, whether that’s posters, mugs, stickers.
So, this collection is all around cryptids, which are mythical monsters. So, we’ve got Bigfoot,
the Loch Ness Monster, and Mothman. The idea behind this collection is to do cute
versions of these characters. So, the audience is anyone who’s into monsters;
I’m particularly thinking about kids like my kids who are quite interested
in monsters and mythology. So, that’s the target audience that we’ve got in mind.
So, when it comes to designs for product collections, there are no hard and fast rules.
Think about the thread that will unite your designs, and then think about how
you’re adapting those designs for the products rather than just repeating
the same design on every product. How can you adapt and change it to work as that product?
So, with these designs, we’ve got three characters and can do different things with those.
We can take their elements to focus on specific products or throw all the characters together to
make one nice design, which we’ve done with the “Support your local cryptid” design. But
then we’ve also been able to take elements out; for example, with the Mothman design,
we’ve not printed the whole character on the hat. We’ve got his eyes; we’ve got a happy face. So,
we’ve adapted the Mothman design to that particular product and made it work as a
cap instead of just using the same design and slapping it on various products.
So, what you want to have with any collection, with any series of designs,
is for someone to look at that collection and see that they’re all part of one unified whole.
And in this case, with my designs, we’ve done that in a few ways. We’ve used the
same font throughout the whole collection. We’ve kept quite a limited color palette. We’ve
kept a similar illustration style across all the designs and all the characters. There are only
two colors used on each of the main t-shirt designs. Because of that, you can look at
all three designs next to each other and see a similarity in the way they’re put together.
Hi, I’m Tom, the production supervisor at Printful in Birmingham, UK. I’m just
about to chat with Michael regarding how his files work in the production process.
We saw that you had a halo around the small details on the design, and I think that if it was
on another color t-shirt, it could have caused a few issues, like on a white t-shirt. We look to
push as much of a solid base as possible so that your colors are crisp when you do have designs.
As you saw on the black one with your Mothman design, it was white and red
and just sat nicely on the color. If we are not using our own original content,
if we’re using other content, then we try and avoid screengrabs
because of the dots per inch. But your files were original creations,
and all the lines were crisp. It was all clear. So that made for really, really good files.
Obviously, the main issue that we had was the main black backing. That can cause a few issues
due to the kind of aftercare, the level of ink that goes into the paper, and the kind
of care the operator needs to pay to the product because of the black ink. However, that’s part of
your design. It’s not something that we would discourage because the images do look really,
really nice on black ink. It’s just we just need to take a little bit more care
as an operator and make sure it works well. Yeah, it was really great to see the fulfillment
process up close and to see all the effort that goes in and the quality checking and
everything, whether it’s the file going in or whether it’s the final product coming out. The
embroidery, in particular, is much more intensive than I thought. It’s a very different process
from printing a design on a t-shirt, and that’s much more a lot of moving parts, very detailed,
and takes someone who knows what they’re doing to create a great embroidered product.
Thank you for watching. If you’d like to find out more about me and, in particular,
if you’d like more help coming up with original ideas and designs,
then check out my website www.michaelessek.com