In this video, I'm gonna try and level up one of your designs. I'm gonna level up this one right
here and hopefully use some design principles and things that I've learned throughout the years
to make it a design that stands out and hopefully get more sales. Let's go!!
Thanks for joining me on this video. My name is Juna with Detour Shirts. In this video I wanted
to show you how I would level up a t-shirt design. I'm going to take this t-shirt design right here,
from RedBubble and use some design principles and things I've learned throughout the years to try
and level it up, to try and make it better and make it stand out. We need to make it something
for the audience using all those principles. The reason why I want to make these videos is so that
you can learn some of the things that I know and you can see it in practice and use it on your own
designs. Try to level up your own designs with some of these principles and ideas that i use.
So let's get into Affinity Designer. I'm going to show you exactly how I would do it
and my hope is that you can learn from it and use some of these same things yourself.
So here I am in Affinity Designer. Now, you don't have to use Affinity Designer. That's
just what I use. You can use Illustrator. You can use Canva. You can use whatever you want.
Just look at the things that I'm doing and try and replicate that in the application that you're
using. But first what we need to do is kind of do a diagnosis on this t-shirt right here. so
let's look at it i i kind of like it it's a nice design some of the pros is it's big and
bold right it catches your eye and they're trying to be different in this one because there's a lot
of them that don't have these words really big so it kind of stands out the cons i think that i want
to work on that i try to try to change about this is we're not thinking about the audience here so
just a boy who loves school buses who is this for this is probably for someone a boy who's younger
maybe kindergarten to first second grade that age range four to ten probably like that
um and so this doesn't look like something a boy would wear right and the next thing is what's the
focus you said you right here just a boy is pretty small the school bus is really small the words
that are big is who loves school buses and is that something that we want to stand out i think
the school bus is actually the thing that you want to stand out on a boys t-shirt
they love school buses so that school bus should be the bigger thing not the words here and that's
just what i think so that's what i'm gonna try and do today i'm gonna change the focus
and try and make sure that this t-shirt that i'm designing is for a five to ten year old boy that
loves school buses right because that's what it says right here so the first thing i'm gonna do
is look for a school bus design i don't have this one right here or else i would use it
i'll show you where i'm going to get it i'm going to go to a place called creative market
and download a pack let me show you where i get that so here i am on creative market just
creativemarket.com and i did a search for school bus right here and you're going to
want to get into the headspace of that boy that five to ten year old boy that i'm talking about
and see what kind of things do you think he would like what kind of school buses would he
want on his t-shirt um i mean this would do well i'm going to scroll down here there's some nice
ones here there's lots of options right you can't do full photos but there's some nice ones here
i'm gonna pick this one right here i think this one is like um feels like kid friendly something
that they would like this one also is kind of nice right here you can see the colors and stuff
whatever one you pick just make sure that it's something that a boy would want to wear so you
can see here i like this style right here and the nice thing about these packs is i could probably
use some of these other things for other designs so i'm getting a good deal i'm gonna buy it here
10 and download it this is going to come in as different things uh i'm sure there's a illustrator
design file i'm going to use that and it's going to be a vector so i'm going to be able to move and
change colors and things like that so i am back in affinity designer i have my school bus here
from creative market so the focus is on the school bus like i said it's going to be the biggest thing
for my graphic and i want it pretty big and you can see it's a tall rectangle already so that's
a nice shape i'm just gonna have to find a way to put the words around it to continue to make
it a tall rectangle the first thing i'm gonna do is to find a good font so so there's a couple of
ways that i could do this i could do playful for boy we know this is for a boy right so you can do
some playful fonts like this one where it's kind of hand drawn but big and thick maybe different
colors as well another thing is i could play on the academic side because it's a school bus
so right here this is kind of a academic athletic kind of font right here so i'm going to use this
one either way it's great but just remember your audience again so use a font that works with your
audience and this is for everything in this case our audience is a boy who who's in school
right so or loves school buses so i'm going to use this one right here this one is a superstar
and i've used it before so you can check my other other videos but this is a nice
slab serif font so the next thing we're going to do is put it together so right here just a boy
who loves school buses right this uh school bus is still big i
i'm still got this tall rectangle let me zoom out just a little bit so you can see tall rectangle
everything's even now i could stop right here and that would be fine but i want to fill in
this space and i don't want to use too many graphics but i can use some color this is where
vintage sunset things come in and lines and colors and things like that so let me show you one idea
that you could do i'm just taking some vintage sunset colors and laying it down right here right
these are five right here you can use any color you want but you can see now that it's filling
that tall rectangle space that's kind of what we're looking for trying to fill that space
use the right fonts the bus again is still the biggest thing and it's highlighted with
these different colors so it makes it stand out and it can be vintage sunset colors it can be
you know use boy colors maybe the primary colors red yellow and blue and some green in there
anything you want i think that would really help to make it kind of stand out the next thing you
might want to do is do it on a black t-shirt because black t-shirts typically sell better
i'm going to get into that a little bit later but let's show you what it would look like on a black
so i'm just reversing all the colors though black to white so that it shows up on black you can see
that's one way you could go another way you could go is reverse these lines so instead of horizontal
make them vertical and this is the start of it so let me show you uh idea right here so if you took
this and just laid it laid your rectangle up like this you could lift it like that and you can see
like this could look like one piece so i just came in here
ungrouped these and just colored these by itself holding down shift coloring these two things i
can make it look like one color right and i can do the same thing for the other one so if i did this
and came up here and maybe made a different color or whatever right and i'll just use those lines
all the way down so that works really well for that real easy way to do it and again
i'm sticking to that tall rectangle and adding some color in the background so let me show you
how that would look like if i finished it right there i tilted the the bus a little bit
and i added some grunge filter that distress filter just to give it more of a different look
right so there you go that's my design that i'm going to do just a boy who loves school bus is
really easy right but it stands out the thing that you want to do is actually look at the competition
and see if yours stands out if everybody's doing it this way then do something else i looked at
the competition earlier and most people aren't doing this they're doing the vintage sunset or
they're not doing any colors at all so this is really different and the font and everything so
that's one design principle that you want to do is look at the competition make sure that
it's for the right audience first of all that this is something that a boy would want to wear right
and then make sure that when you're up against the other people in that page let's say you appear on
page one you want to make sure that your stands out so the next thing i'm gonna do is load this
up on redbubble and i'm sure gonna show you several different things on redbubble that i
would do personally to make it stand out just a little bit more so here i am on redbubble i
uploaded my design here of course you can do your title and tags we're not going to get into
that this is more about just the graphics so we're going to go in here and one thing you're
going to want to do because this is a boy shirt make sure to enable kids clothes a lot of people
forget to do that it's not checked by default so you're going to have to check in here and click
on kids clothes to make sure that you know this is for a boy so they want to buy a boys t-shirt
and just apply changes there and the next thing you want to do is come down here you could put
it on any product that you want to make sense make sure that you come in here and i'm gonna say
classic t-shirt and the reason why for the black one for classic t-shirt is
if you do the kids t-shirt which is down here kids clothes they actually only do it on white
so you're going to have to change your design and that's something that you may want to do anyway so
let me show you what it would look like um reverse like we had before with black text
instead of white text so here we are on redbubble again with the black text instead and so this
is black on white or i have a white t-shirt so you can see i have the i go in here and i still
enabled the kids shirt kids clothes but one nice thing about having black text is that you can make
it a sticker as well so let me save this go down here and you can see my sticker and magnets now it
works with the white outline and this is something that you could enable so let's go down here
and you can see my default product now for this one is a sticker because that's going to stand
out with all the black t-shirts out there when you do a search for it it's going to stand out
because it's a sticker now and it's white if you did the kids clothes it actually defaults to
like a kids onesie so that's too young for the kid that loves school buses i wish they had a picture
of a you know a younger kid the age range that we want a boy specifically in this case but they
don't so i'm going to use a sticker so one more thing that you want to do is make sure that your
design if it was put in here if it would stand out so this is just a boy who loves school buses
on redbubble you can see a lot of black t-shirts a lot of color and stuff like that so what i would
do to stand out here is to flip it like i did with the white background the black text and my sticker
it's going to stand out way above all of these and i'll show you exactly
i'll put it together and i'll show you how it stands out so we're back in affinity designer one
last time just to show you the before and after so this was the first thing that we started with
this is what it looks like now you can see the focus again is on the school bus and loves school
bus right and the colors so that stands out that's the main focus instead of these big words right
here i think it's just a little bit better let me show you um you know this is what we did for black
on white let me show you again the difference so these two but if you did a kids shirt you can see
that stands out better on a white but this isn't what redbubble shows it actually shows the onesie
so i decided to do a sticker instead right here so let's see how that would look on the search page
so here it is my black t-shirt on the search page you can see it kind of stands out just a
little bit nobody has these colorful lines in the background right and the school bus
is a different way and my fonts different so i think it stands out but let's take a look at this
now a sticker now maybe they don't want a sticker and you know you gotta weigh that as well
so if you're trying to sell t-shirts and people are looking for t-shirts
they may click on here thinking that there could be t-shirts in this style
and you know that could be a way to sell it but maybe they just want a sticker too
so it it does stand out here the white color everything else is black so think about that
when you're designing your stuff hopefully these principles that i'm showing you will help you
in your other designs of course you're still going to have to do the research on what things
people are actually looking for this is just assuming that people are looking for this one
and make sure your stuff stands out for the audience again uh i designed this for a boy
that loves school buses right so i kind of did it in that way with the colors and stuff now i could
have used brighter colors as well to make it even stand out more for a boy and i think that probably
would help a little bit more too so so think about all those things that i talked about in this video
to make your designs and hopefully you'll get more sales on redbubble and other print-on-demand sites
so that is it for this video this level up video i'm gonna try and do it at least
a few times a month so that you can see different ways that i
level up and get some ideas as you create your designs for print-on-demand if this video was
really helpful for you make sure to give it a thumbs up it really helps in the algorithm and
if you're not subscribed to this channel already make sure to hit that subscribe button right there
before i leave i have a question of the day and the question of the day is this
do you have a design that you want to level up let me know that in the comments i would love to help
you level up your design and show you some of the principles i would use to to do that thanks again
for watching and if you want to see more level up tutorials and design videos take a look at these
right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye