Let’s be real—designing is hard. It can take ages to come up with a concept and find the right tool,
learn how to use the tool, and then attempt to bring your idea to life.
We know your struggles and Printful’s Design Maker is there to help you out.
This time, I’ve invited one of the teammates involved in developing our Design Maker,
to give us a little bit of insight about the all-in-one app in this episode of Ask Printful.
Hi, I’m Elizabete from Printful. In this video, you’ll find out what Printful’s Design Maker is,
see some of its coolest features in action, and learn about improvements made to help you create
and sell custom apparel online. We have an expert joining us from Barcelona.
Hi.
Hola. How are you doing? So, yeah, I'm Vincent from Printful. I work in the design department
and I basically spend my time improving design features that aren't a Design Maker. And today,
I'm going to help you with the main questions that our users have.
Awesome. So to start with the first question, what is Printful's Design Maker?
Right. So the Design Maker is the tool we offer our customers in order for them
to create and preview the designs they have in their minds. They can
either start from scratch and create a design from our premade graphics and clipart, or they
can upload their own visuals on top of a product and preview how the product’s going to look.
All right. That actually sounds super advanced. What are the major improvements
to the tool that we've made over time? Because I know it's been such a long work in progress.
Right. So the Design Maker is always improving. We always add
new features to it and speak to our users about what they want. In 2021,
we updated the experience for mobile devices. Now you can design the same way as on desktop devices.
As for specific features, the text tool now has a lot of customization options. You can
make arches with text, change its color, add shadows, and things like that.
Then we have a vast clipart collection— these are premade designs that you can use in your designs.
Our designers and illustrators are always working to update that collection with new visuals.
You can use clipart and your own designs to create patterns for all-over print products.
In general, Design Maker offers a variety of tools to start designing from scratch
and go from zero to an actual design that you can reproduce on our products.
What’s your professional opinion on how to make designs that actually look good?
All right. So this is kind of a tricky question. When you think of beautiful things, you need
to keep in mind that people are going to find different things looking good. As an
online store owner, you need to find your audience
and know them well enough to recognize what they're looking for in a design.
To do that, you need to speak with them. You need to be part of the community.
There're tools online like Pinterest, Reddit communities, even Facebook groups that let
you know a bit about your audience and what you're going to want to look for.
So once you've settled on an aesthetic that you like, the audience that you have, and how to
mesh those two together, there’s a whole other part of the design that's so nebulous and
obscure to me. That is the design process, especially putting your designs and your art
on tangible products that are three-dimensional and are almost never going to be just flat.
How do we get the mockup images generated as close to real life as possible?
Right. So that's one of the points where as a designer you need to be looking into the details.
We've built Design Maker in a way that you can trust in terms of color representation.
This can be seen in the example of black t-shirts. We updated the Design Maker
in order for the colors to be exactly true to what you're going to get in a black T-shirt.
If you have transparencies, gradients, and little details with a lot of colors, it’s best you
do a bit of theoretical research on how those will get translated into printing. And if you're not
sure, you can always order a sample from us. It's a special price and you get some of them
each month. This way can make sure that what you're going to get, it's what you're expecting.
So, all of these things are useful for professional designers and people who
are just really good at that. We mention a lot that Design Maker has thousands of
free assets. How does the design team manage to create such an extensive asset library that's
also ahead of trends and remains timeless to help our less experienced designers?
First of all, we have a great team of designers and illustrators that are always updating our
clipart and quick designs. We follow trends in general.
But what's most important for us is what our users tell us what they need.
We do user interviews, we send out questionnaires, and from the responses,
we get the trends that we should follow so that our users have the designs that they want.
Our designers have a lot of brainstorming sessions, where they decide what they're
going to design and in what style. Only after that, the designers create the actual clipart.
Then we test the clipart on the actual products. We test how the clipart perform when they’re
printed in different sizes, colors, and on different materials. We pick
the clipart that work everywhere and add those to the Design Maker. This way the customer
can be sure that they're going to work on their products too.
When it comes to timelessness, I feel like that depends on the technique that we use.
We design our clipart to be simple enough so they're customizable.
You can change the color, you can add them together in a way that makes sense,
and you can use them in different compositions. The reusability of
clipart, I think, is what makes them timeless.
The fact that they're not made in one
specific style makes it possible to reuse them in the future.
OK, I guess I really didn't think about just how much testing has to go into it. Because
the size and the type of product really affect how the design is going to look.
What do we do to maintain a seamless user experience across desktop and mobile platforms?
We make sure that when we're designing something for the mobile experience,
we roll out beta testing for our users and follow up with interviews. We’re lucky to have
a lot of users that are interested in giving us feedback on the new features that we're building.
That gives us a lot of input into how we should design things that meet the users’
expectations and make a seamless experience.
With all these improvements that we're constantly doing to the Design Maker,
do we have an idea of what’s the future for the Design Maker?
I can tell you that the future plans include a lot of customization options. Our users will
be able to personalize their experience, a lot of their designs, and the products that they're
pushing to their stores. This might include custom mockups, specific clipart collections, and
quick designs for smaller niches. That's something that we want to develop,
and that's where, I think, is the future of the Design Maker.
That sounds like a very exciting future. I guess before we go, we need to make sure that
we've covered everything. So if our viewers have any questions or maybe they have some
requests for new features or new assets, where can they leave all of these things?
Yeah. So if you have any questions or even want to share your experience with other Printfulers,
we have the Printful Insiders Facebook group. There you can meet a lot of store owners,
who help each other. This is where we get most of our feedback. But if you
have a specific feature request, something you're missing on the Printful platform,
you can always go to the Printful Feature Request site, where you can vote for the ideas that other
users have or add your own. We review the requests from time to time and try to make them happen.
All right. That sounds very cool. I will leave both of those things in the description. And you
need to be a Printful user to access the feature page, but the Facebook group is available for
anyone. Thank you Vincent, for all of the valuable information you've shared with us.
Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I hope all the main questions from our users are now covered, and
they're free to go into Design Maker and actually start designing and fulfilling their products.
Let’s quickly sum things up. So, Printful’s Design Maker is free, has thousands of free assets,
helps you create custom designs for any product and production technique, whether it’s embroidery,
DTG, or sublimation printing, can generate product mockups for your store and has a dedicated team
working on new features, meaning that it’s being constantly updated to fit your needs.
Now all that’s left is to try it out for yourself. The first link in this video’s description will
take you to the app’s homepage where you can test all the features our Design Maker has to offer.
From there, you can order a unique custom product for yourself or sign up and start
selling with Printful. Once you’ve made the first step, why not go all the way?
One last thing. While our team is putting together the next Ask Printful episodes,
you can help us out by suggesting new topics for future episodes down in the comments. Deal?
Alright, I'll leave you to it then. Thanks for watching.