Hey, it’s Michael from Printful!
With the Design Maker, you can customize hundreds of products from Printful’s Product catalog
and push them to your store.
From t-shirts to mugs, to posters to caps.
The Design Maker allows you to create products from different customization techniques: DTG
printing, embroidery, all-over printing, sublimation, and direct-to-film.
The Design Maker allows you to create products from different customization techniques: DTG
printing, embroidery, all-over printing, and sublimation.
Additionally, you can make your brand stand out with one-of-a-kind mockup images for your
products.
Now, let’s go through the basic features of our Design Maker.
From the Printful Dashboard, go to Product templates.
Click Create your first product template if it’s your first time designing a product,
or Create more product templates.
For this tutorial, I’ll choose a t-shirt model from the Product Catalog.
Start by naming your product template design here.
You’ll see two customization options for this shirt—DTG printing and embroidery.
Each technique has different file requirements.
If you’re designing using the embroidery technique for the first time, check out our
Embroidery designs tutorial in the Video tutorials section here or on our YouTube channel.
Find a link to the video in the description below.
We’ll choose DTG printing for this example.
Here you can choose what colors you want to create designs for and then get right into
designing!
You can upload your design elements here, create text-based designs, add clipart, or
mix them together.
You can also try out our Quick Designs tool.
Quick Designs are pre-made design compositions that you can freely customize as you see fit.
Once you choose a Quick Design like this, it works like a group of layers that can be
resized, repositioned, and customized individually.
If you need some more visual resources, you can also use our Premium Images tool to search
for stock images, vector graphics, and pattern designs that you could add to your creations.
Using these graphics costs $1 for every visual you use in a placement.
Note that these files can only be used within Printful to create new product designs – you
won’t be able to access or download the full-size print file anywhere if you use this
tool.
Let’s create a design for our product.
For this shirt, you can add a design to the front and the back of the T-shirt, both sleeves,
or add an outside label.
Once you’ve chosen where you want the design to go, click Uploads.
From here, you can upload image files from your desktop, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
Every design file you upload will be stored here, in your File library.
Alternatively, you can choose from our list of ready-to-use sample graphics for your designs.
Find the Sample files here.
For this tutorial, I’ll select this design from my File library.
Now you can easily resize, reposition, and rotate your design, but be careful to keep
it in the print area.
Pay attention to the print quality warning as you resize your design—the Design Maker
will warn you if the resolution of your uploaded image is too small.
If your image is too small, your printed product will look blurry or pixelated.
In this case, you should upload a larger image.
Click Text.
Choose one of the text presets from the menu, or type in some text and adjust the font,
color, size, and other variables.
Note that you can choose one of our pre-made graphics to fill in the text color.
Just click on Color, Graphics, choose the graphic you want, and adjust the scale on
the slider here.
You can also add clipart to your designs.
Click Clipart, choose from one of the groups, click and adjust it to where you want it to
be, over the print area.
Once you’re done with your design, click Save the product template.
Now you can push your new design to your store by clicking Add to store or edit your design
by clicking Edit.
Open the dropdown menu to order the product here.
You can create and download mockups of your new product by clicking Download mockups.
For this tutorial, we’ll create a Basic mockup, but you can also create custom mockups
here.
Check out our Custom Mockup Maker tutorial on our YouTube channel.
Find a link to the video in the description below.
Here you can check the boxes of the kind of mockups you want.
Select the mockup format and click Generate mockups to download.
Different Printful products have different design options in the Design Maker, as well
as specific guidelines for certain techniques.
You can find detailed guidelines for formatting your designs for each product by clicking
on the link under the Product tab in the Design Maker, or in our product and pricing page.
For other products, like the All-Over Print Yoga Leggings, you can choose the print area
background color under the Fill tab.
You also have the option to fill the print area with graphics, patterns, and Premium
Images.
Click the box here to choose if you want to apply the color or designs to all print placements,
or just the one you are working on.
Another tool available for our all-over print products is the Pattern Tool.
Choose an element you want to add to your design.
For example, I’ll choose this clipart.
Now, in the top menu here, click on Pattern and choose the type of pattern you want to
use.
You can adjust the spacing between elements using the slider in the side menu here.
You can also resize and rotate the elements like this.
Click the undo or redo buttons if you need to revert changes in your design.
Here you can choose the color of both your clipart—and the whole pattern.
You can also switch from Design view to 3D or Mockup views.
Use this feature to see how your designs look on your chosen product.
You can duplicate your clipart to other placements under Layers, by clicking here and choosing
where you want the duplicate to go.
You can use this technique to create patterns with clipart, as well as your uploaded designs
or Printful sample files.
Don’t forget to click Save product template so you don’t lose your design progress.
And that’s all!
You’ve successfully created your first design with Printful’s Design Maker!
Do you want to customize more products?
Explore Printful’s Product Catalog and find hundreds of items you can customize with our
Design Maker.
I’ll leave a link in the description below.
For more tips on designing, check out our YouTube channel.
Don’t forget to subscribe!
What’s your favorite feature of our Design Maker?
Comment down below and have fun designing!