In this video I'm gonna do it again, I'm gonna try and level up one of your
t-shirt designs. I'm excited for this one because this time it's an 80s design. 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 so I got a little bit of experience in designing
t-shirts and that's why I want to help you level up your design. So today I'm gonna do that. I'm
gonna take a design from one of my followers. I got permission to do this and I'm gonna level
it up and show you some techniques that I would do things that i think would make it a better
t-shirt, a better selling t-shirt and stand out from the crowd. So I'm going to do that with this
one. This time it's an 80s design so i'm super excited for that because i grew up in the 80s
i was a teenager in the 80s and watched a lot of 80s stuff so i'm kind of familiar with that
niche that topic that the that whole genre so i can put a lot of experience in that as well
my first t-shirt design was actually made in the 80s when i was a teenager so pretty cool
throwback for that i'm going to show you how to do this level up in affinity designer if you don't
have affinity designer try and follow along in illustrator canva or procreate or whatever you
you're using use some of these techniques they don't have to be done in a affinity designer
and they may be done a little bit different in the other programs but i think you can
follow along and figure it out so without any further ado let's get into affinity designer
right now so here we are in affinity designer and this is the t-shirt that i'm gonna level up it's
actually a really good t-shirt so it's gonna be tough for me to do this one there are some really
good things about it they're using vintage colors which is the 80s colors you can see right there
some of the pinks and the you know kind of neon bright colors are the colors that are in the 80s
that were popular in the 80s uh they're using some 80 graphics right with the vintage sunset and the
tree those things were popular as well and i think it's scalable at least for the 80s you could say
1981 1982 1983 and so on and kind of change things up and this actually looks like a t-shirt design a
lot of the level ups that i've done before are kind of misplaced and and didn't look like a
t-shirt design it wasn't in the tall rectangle and this one is it's in a tall rectangle so
a pretty good t-shirt so a few things that i'm going to try and fix is the contrast i i noticed
you can do a little more contrast on here it's a black t-shirt but there's hardly any white so i'm
going to put some white in there so that it pops i'm going to update the text you can see here it's
1982 and says 39 years of being awesome while it's now uh 2022 and that's actually 40 years so you
might want to take that out i'm going to take that out and use something else i'm going to update it
so you can use it every year so you don't want to be caught with 39 and the year you were born
here because that's going to change every year so if you're born in 82 this year you're going to be
40 next year you're 41 and so you're not going to buy this this is only good for 2021 right and next
thing i'm going to do is try and make it easier to read so this word edition right here even though
it's really nice graphic it doesn't really show up that well on t-shirts it's great on magazines and
things like that but i don't know if the first of all i don't know if it can print that well on that
that metallic look and just a lot of lots of colors going on so when you want to do t-shirts
you want to kind of limit the colors down so i'm going to show you how to do kind of the same way
but just with a few colors so let's get into it the first thing i have here is this circle it's
just a magenta circle if you click on the color you can see it's full magenta i'm going to try and
just use cyan magenta and yellow and white i think those colors will be really easy they'll stand
out they're very bright for the 80s and you know i'm going to try and use some of those i may mix
magenta and cyan to kind of make a purple and things like that that's another color that we're
going to use but first let's do a vintage sunset so let me show you how easy it is to do a vintage
sunset here i'm going to use the rectangle tool right here and then draw a rectangle i first
want it around this high and not as thick so we can see the thickness if we go to
this right here and you can see it's 20 pixels high i'm gonna do just 10 for now just thin one
and then i'm gonna bring this down hold option and shift and drag it down
you know maybe right about there but make this one a little thicker so i can make this on 20.
see that how it gets bigger and bigger and i'm gonna drag this down a little further
down and make this one 25 and drag this down make this 30. you get the idea maybe one more
and i'll make this 40. yeah that looks good and then you kind of want to make let's see i'm just
gonna eyeball it here but that the space gets smaller and smaller so as you go down
you see that space this space needs to be smaller than that space right there
and this face smaller than that space things like that and then let's just cut this whole thing off
like that uh actually you know what let's play around with this
something like that yeah vintage sunset perfect okay so let's grab all of these
including that one and group them and let's go to our layers here's our sun and this is our
so we grab this and this and move it to the top so we can see it and then we're going to group
these together right there so when we have this group let's just hit erase on here boom so now
if i go here to the artboard and i take out the background you can see it totally knocked it out
right so we have this right here so that's how you do the vintage sunset real easy so the next step
i'm gonna do is add a gradient to here so i started off with the magenta but i'm gonna make it
go from magenta to kind of a purple so the thing i'm gonna use is this right here this is the fill
tool so click on that and go from here to here and make sure this top one right here is magenta it is
and this bottom one here let's do magenta but then start adding some cyan and look at that
isn't that cool that looks like a vintage sunset already just that so going from
pink to kind of a purple pink right here okay so the next thing i'm gonna do is add some palm trees
and luckily i have palm trees in my assets panel um you can go find your own palm trees
draw palm trees get palm trees just to make it simple i'm gonna go here and drag it and that's
the nice thing about your assets if you have it you can just drag it right there and do that now
i want to knock this out as well so if i'm going to go here to my layers panel let's bring this
to the top it is and this right here if i just drag this trees into my group let's open the
group here and drag the trees into it because this group is erased now if i go to the artboard
and take off the background you can see it's also erased so that's a nice trick right there
you can just put it into the group that's already erased so the next thing we're going to do is text
i'm really excited about this one because i wanted to use this text and this is the cobra kai tex if
you haven't seen that video i'll put the video on the top here the font that i found for this
it's called dead stock and i've been wanting to use it so i'll go here and type in 1980
two and you can see it's dead stock right here the demo um i have an outline on it and let's
just make it big right that just looks so 80s that cobra kai font so let's do that and i'm going to
do instead of doing 39 years i'm just going to say vintage so we can use vintage all the time
all right and then i'm going to scale it down like that and if it's if you need this
to come closer remember that trick you hold down option and left arrow to kind of move it closer
there you go and just to get some better contrast i'm gonna do this in white so let's do white yeah
see how that just stands out a lot better and to make this separated from the two i'm gonna put a
black outline around it so um the nice thing i can do is i'll just command j right here and you can
see here this one on the bottom is the one that i want the outline on so all to black outline here
and i want it to be a thicker size something like that like seven yeah same thing with this vintage
i'm gonna do command j and then vintage right here i'm gonna do a hundred percent
with a stroke of seven
right so they both have the same weight stroke and then you know i'm going to do one more thing
this one in the back i'm going to command j that again but i'm going to move it down so just click
down hold down shift and click down twice and to the right once there you go yeah i like that
so 1982 vintage 1982 perfect so the way we're going to knock this one out is the same thing
so we're going to take our vintage right here and put it in the group and we're going to take
this both 1982's and put it in the group now it's not in the group yet so let's open this up
and then put it in the group there at the top perfect so now that we have this those things
are knocked out as well let's check so you can check take out the background from the artboard
i get that knocked out perfect so the next thing we're going to do is add the word vintage here so
let's use the font veneer i love veneer right it works for 80s font so let's type in here vintage
oh we need to oh not vintage it was um what was the word limited edition so limited
and veneer let's uh get this to veneer it's in my favorites veneer clean and let's just do reg and
limited okay great so let's just make sure that it fits there i like to use guides so let's make
sure that it's yeah right there and then the same on this side you know probably be right there so
yeah that looks good okay so limited and then we're going to put a fill on this one
and it's going to be like we're gonna try and match this
but just a lot cleaner so this is what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do the fill right here
top to bottom and then on the top let's do that this color right here that's in the background so
let's click that one boom all right and then we're gonna go to this pink one right here at the top
kind of that full magenta boom but we want white in the middle so just click here
and do white right and move this as close as you can to that whoa right there and then this one's
going to go to white as well so white perfect so let's zoom in so you can see what i'm doing
we're moving the white and the pink really close together and then we can move it up too so let's
there like that it's perfect all right so that kind of gives you the idea of it but we're going
to put a white border around this one so same way let's do that so we're going to command j and this
limited one will put a white border around it and we don't want it that thick so let's go to stroke
there that cool so the last thing we're going to do is put the word addition on the bottom so
just like vintage we're going to copy it hold on option and drag it down and put addition
again if these are too close you can hold down option and hit right there sometimes it does that
and i'm going to put it so it's over it so make sure it's at the top and we're gonna do this with
a black outline as well so hit command j and do this and do your black outline so 100 black
and 7 like we did the last one cool so this one needs to knock out
that right there so what we can do is get all of these together
both limited and additions right here well just the bottom one here group these and i think if
you group these two together and this edition of just the black one let's just make sure that
this is erase right there and let's check it see how we did artboard turn off the color boom
there you go guys that's it so here's a good look at the before and after you can see
i wanted to fix the contrast and i did i got this yellow and white on here to kind of pop it out on
the black whereas this one kind of a little more muted i wanted to update the text so instead of
saying 39 years of being awesome i'm just saying vintage 1982 so i can use it every year it doesn't
matter i can use it in 2023 24 and still be great i don't have to take it down and then want to make
it easier to read so this edition right here had black and a lot of these colors which is a nice
uh idea on paper but on the black shirt it kind of got lost so i made it a little brighter here with
the light purple kind of pink here kind of almost the same idea but just i lessen the color so it's
easier to read so i think this is a lot easier to read and has contrast and i've still got that tall
shape you notice i made it just a little bit smaller i think on a t-shirt it it fits better on
the t-shirt in my opinion and we're still keeping some of the same things that we have here we had
the vintage sunset with the palm trees i kept the vintage sunset on the palm trees and so on so
i loved using this font the cobra kai font or dead stock font was really fun to do you have
to pay for that one this one's just a demo so if you wanna use that font you're gonna have
to go buy it again that link in that video shows you how you you can buy it so thanks so much for
watching this hopefully some of these techniques you can use in your t-shirt design you don't have
to make this t-shirt but you can make you know use this kind of 80s style with the vintage
sunset you know how to knock those things out you know how to do this kind of gradient on the
text and things like that and the outline you can use those techniques as well on your 80s t-shirt
or on any t-shirt that you want to do in the future hopefully this helps you get more sales
and gets more visibility so that is it for this video thanks so much for watching thanks so much
for staying all the way to then if this video was really helpful make sure to give it a thumbs up
if it gave you some value and it'll help you make good t-shirts and if you're not subscribed to this
channel already make sure to hit that subscribe button right there before i finish this video
i wanted to leave with a question of the day and the question of the day is this what other t-shirt
niche do you want me to design for this one was for the 80s uh is there another niche out there
that you're thinking about maybe a 90s maybe some other kind of vintage design let me know
in the comments if you want to see how to do those kinds of things i'll be happy to try and
do a video for those thanks again for watching and if you want to see more level up videos i'll put
them right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye