In this video I'm gonna take a design that's already on RedBubble. This one right here and I'm
gonna change it and level it up and hopefully make it better so that i can get more 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 learn how to design and sell t-shirts online. If that's
something you want to learn how to do, don't forget to hit that subscribe button right there.
So in this video, I wanted to take a design that's already on RedBubble (you've seen it
right here) and I'm gonna level it up. I talked to the person who made this, his name is Patrick
and he does a lot of cruise t-shirts. I wanted to help him out and show him what he could do
to level up his design to make it so that people would want to buy it. Now this isn't a guarantee
that people will buy it but I think by doing some design principles, some of those t-shirt design
principles that I've learned over the years, I can help people like Patrick and new designers
to make the designs just a little bit better for t-shirts. I think a lot of new designers
know graphic design and can put things together but t-shirt design is just a
little bit different and you have to follow some basic rules. So in this video I'm going
to point out what's good and bad about this particular design and what you can change,
what you can do to level this thing up. I'm going to use some clip art
and Affinity Designer to put it all together. So let's get into Affinity Designer right now.
So here I am in Affinity Designer. Now you don't have to use affinity designer you can use canva
or illustrator or whatever you want i'm just using affinity designer because that's what i use
to design t-shirts first we're going to talk about the design
that's on here so you can see he used this cruise mode on that's what we're going to stick with i'm
not going to change the words on that and then some of the graphics that he used were sunglasses
a cruise ship palm trees uh sunset and the power button right here for you know on and off power
button so i'm gonna try and stick to those kind of elements and make my design around that i'm
not going to totally change everything on here i mean it is going to look totally different
but i'm going to try and use some of the elements that he's talking about so i'm
going to do this so these are some of the things that i want to fix so this is my plan to fix it
there i think there's way too many colors and colors that don't match at least on a black
t-shirt i i can count a whole bunch right here and you got a full color picture of the cruise
ship and a photo and all these and this this blue here is kind of like bursting out with um a blur
and stuff like that so i'm gonna try and keep it more simple uh as far as colors go and then the
cruise mode is on it's kind of disconnected you got cruise mode on up at the top here and then you
got this power button which may not um give that feeling of cruise mode on and off kind of thing
i'm going to change that to kind of a slider is what we're used to i'll show you how to do that
and then there's just a lot going on and it's not tied together you know you got a lot of elements
here but they're not working all together that's that's the problem i see here and it just doesn't
look like a t-shirt design it looks more like a graphic design where you're maybe doing for a
magazine or a book or something like that a t-shirt design is just a little easier to read
a little easier on the eyes kind of thing so i'm going to show you some examples on how i
do that so that's what i'm going to try and fix here the first thing we need is some artwork and
i'm going to show you where i'm going to get my artwork from and why i picked it there's
lots of places to get artwork i'm just going to pick one of these and use that to make my design
so here i am on creative market this is one of the places that you could go to get some graphics
you could do canva you could do creative fabrica you could do vexels you could do whatever etsy
probably has some as well i like creative market um they have a lot of clip arts kind
of stuff that i like um and i've gotten graphics from other places too but i just typed in crews
here and did a search and look at this one this one looks like it would be perfect because it has
quotes and everything and they look like t-shirt designs right so
if you're new to designing t-shirts go and get some bundles that look like t-shirt designs
you know it doesn't cost that much i'm gonna spend nine dollars here and get these we can
look at some of these designs look they're nice the the thing about t-shirt designs
you can see that they're easy to read they're in kind of a tall square a tall rectangle to fit the
t-shirt right and we're going to use some elements like these they have the palm trees they have the
um ship right here the cruise ship to have some nice text some nice doodle kind of stuff you know
if i want to put drinks on it i can and the nice thing about this bundle is i got a whole bunch of
things here i could make something about the beach or i could use the sunglasses or something look at
this this says cruise hair don't care i could do something like that another thing you want to do
though is take elements from these you don't want to just take this directly and put it on a t-shirt
you're going to want to use this word cruise in something and maybe the eyeglasses from something
so this is a really nice thing to just get a lot of clip art and a lot of ideas and some nice
custom fonts you know for these special words that we're doing i could take this c shell again or use
the word c in something else so you can see how they're laid out they're laid out in a great way
to do on t-shirts so people who are new to t-shirt design go get some bundles right away don't spend
too much on it but or look at examples of what t-shirts look like and save those so that you
have examples of what t-shirt designs look like and kind of get used to designing that way so now
that we have these i'm going to download these and then i'm going to bring them into affinity
designer and show you what i can do with them so we're back into affinity designer and i got a
couple of things that i got from that bundle um i got this one right here you've probably seen this
and this one so i'm going to use the word cruise from here so you can see it's a nice handwritten
cruise and i'm going to use some elements from this one let me just zoom in so you can see
right here the palm trees right like he had on the t-shirt and the ship the cruise ship and i like
this font right here i have a font that's similar so i'm going to make mode in that one and that
and you can see i've got this doodles right here so i brought it in and i put it all together and
i got this cruise mode you can see using elements there the last thing that you need is this on and
off switch so cruise mode on instead of the power button i have like this slider right and you may
be wondering how do i make this slider it's really easy it's just a round rectangle and a circle and
some text but if you have assets you can go to your assets panel and look at ios look at controls
and here's a slider right here right it's a smaller slider so if you click on this and
grab these two and just make it bigger so you can fit the word on on there there's your slider so
real easy to do with the assets panel and affinity designer so and i like how this laid out so one of
the tips that you you need to know is to make it a tall rectangle so tall rectangle let's do this
um i'm going to put maybe a smaller stroke so you can see what i'm talking about
see the shape see that shape of the design i'm kind of containing it to this tall rectangle right
right there and it's one of the other things that you might want to do you might have seen this in
one of my videos is kind of layer it so cruise top line you got the graphics second line mode
the third line and on on the fourth line there so they're all kind of contained in their own
horizontal line right so that's another tip to do just to make it late laying it out the right way
just real easy layout right um one of the things to note when you bring in these is they're all
together see all those dots so in order to get this cruise out here i can't just click on it
and take out the word cruise because they're all connected but what you could do and this took me
just a little while to do is you can double click on these and then select all the points that are
not cruise and delete them so i can come in here take these out take these out and some of them
you might have to get in a little closer to take them out so let me get in a little closer here
boom i know this can be a little tedious but you know sometimes you buy these
bundle packs and they're not separated in layers hey for you guys that do these
bundle packs make them separated in layers but there you go crews so i just took crews
right there and i did the same thing with this one and took everything out you can
see this one's all connected so i kind of had to separate them and they're separated here now
uh in this so you can see those so now that's laid out i like the layout of that now i'm gonna take
it a level up again and add some color so um this is great on a white t-shirt you know basic black
on white and if you're doing traditional screen printing this is great because it's just one
color and it works and for a sticker too this is great for a sticker on redbubble you know
just black on white real nice but if you want to do it on a black shirt which most people buy
black shirts or dark shirts we're gonna have to do some changes so let me show you what i did here
so here it is just changing everything from white or that was black to white you can see
it works well on a black t-shirt i you can add some color some simple color i would suggest
you know if you're new to color and you don't know what colors to choose just choose one color
so i'm just using white and light blue why light blue because the ocean crews you know light blue
and so you can see i'm kind of separating the colors right white light blue white
light blue so real easy to do and then this makes the word stand out to cruise mode
is iron white those are the important ones you want them to stand out first and the the
secondary thing the graphics is secondary push that to the back right with the color so because
it's not as bright it kind of gets pushed back to the background even though it's on the same level
in your design visually it's kind of getting pushed back right the next thing you want to
do is on here on his he had like a gradient right or a vintage sunset and i'm going to
teach you how to do that with a gradient so you might have seen my quick tips in affinity designer
what this is is just a gradient so if i selected all of these right here and this one you're gonna
see that i have a gradient on there and i pick this see that gradient so you can do that too it's
just going from that color to white to that light blue right there so that's an easy way to add some
color just pick two colors three colors and make it a gradient i think that turned out pretty good
as far as color and you can experiment with color maybe just do a blue to white if you're scared and
not know what color you could go crazy and do some you know this color to blue to white and have fun
with that now you may be thinking well he had a vintage sunset in the background with the lines
and everything now you could do that it's going to take a lot more but here i did it there's that
vintage sunset right here that he had in his uh if you don't know how to do the gradient or do this
outline i have a couple of quick tips that i just made i'll put the link in the description they're
really quick uh less than three minute videos how to do that so you can see this outline here
and there now again i'm using color um you're gonna you're gonna have to find a
nice vintage color palette to get these i'm just doing kind of a light yellow orange to red to blue
kind of one white blue on the bottom because the ocean and you know vintage sunset at the top so
that's why i've chose those colors you're gonna have to think of those kinds of things when you
add colors to here so nice fun color version of it and it works great on black and things like that
so i still kept the elements that he had in there the only thing i'm missing is a sunglasses now
i don't have sunglasses but you could have put these things behind a sunglasses or something
like that i didn't do that i thought sometimes you don't have to put every single graphic on
there just because you have more graphics doesn't mean it makes it better right so that's another
tip right there use just enough graphics to get the message across the words are what's important
and the graphics should tie to the words now you can see this is kind of all together let's
look at them together i have a before and after let's just move down here so here's my before and
after you can see cruise mode on we still say cruise mode on instead of the power button we
got that slider we got from the ios right here these controls and we still kept the
cruise ship and the palm trees cruise ship and palm trees which we got from clip art
and we got so much clipart we can do some more cruise if you're doing
uh cruise themed t-shirts now you have all those t-shirt designs all those graphics that
you can use for other cruise inspired t-shirts right you can make some other cruise puns and
cruise t-shirts and you can see this one's just the blue one but we had that color one back there
that would show you how to use more colors i kind of like this one this is really simple to do i
think um this one's gonna gonna take just a little bit more graphic design knowledge how to do this
so i i kind of just left it at this one this can be real simple for a beginner designer just to do
you know the different levels one two three white light blue white light blue just real
easy like that and i think this stands out a lot a little better when people are walking by
and they see your t-shirt they'll definitely be able to read this quicker than this and kind of
get the idea of what cruise mode on means here kind of gets lost and you have to be able to
convey the message in three seconds because people are walking by right and so this conveys it a lot
better and it has that shape right that tall rectangle where this one kind of gets lost and
has some white space here and we don't know what what this is so hopefully this is a great level up
and something that you can easily do in affinity designer with some clip art from creative market
i think a beginner designer can do something like this and hopefully this level up will get you more
eyeballs on your shirt your shirt will stand out now from other people other beginner designers
and hopefully get more sales on redbubble amazon merch and t public and other places like that so
my hope is that these tips that i'm sharing with you will help you level up your design and that
you can get more sales on print on demand this year and years to come so that is it for this
video i hope this video was really helpful for you if it was 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
and before i leave i wanted to leave with a question of the day and the question of the day is
this do you have a t-shirt design that you want to level up let me know that in the comments i would
love to help you i help patrick on this one but i think there's a lot of new designers out there
that kind of know what to do but maybe just need a little bit of help let me know about your shop
or if you want something for me to look at of course i can't look at all of them but i may
pick yours to do the next level up so that would be fun and thanks again for watching this video
and if you want to see more level up t-shirt design videos click on these videos right here
and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye