Cafepress - Tips for Making T-Shirt Designs that Sell

Possibly one of the biggest things you can do to increase the speed and the quality of your t-shirt and other product designs. I'm not saying that you can't use MSPaint or PaintBrush to make quality designs, but they are just very limited programs. The bigger imaging programs are packed with much more power and can help you make better designs faster.

They come bundled with all kinds of neat add-ons and tools to help you such as:

• Brushes
• Gradients
• Filters
• Blending
• Shapes
• Layering
• Color Adjustments
• Brightness/Contrast
• Special Effects
• Textures
• Vector Imaging
• And So Much More!

However, there is plenty of great imaging software that's out there. You should go explore online and learn about different imaging software. Some are geared towards different styles of image editing and operate very differently to create different types of graphics. Some are better at vector graphics, some are better at photo editing, etc.

You should find one that you think suits the type of designs you want to create. Read some user reviews and look at some screenshots before you decide on a program. A lot of these companies will even offer trial demos to download so you can test out the program before you buy it.

Of course, if you can get a copy of any good image editing software for free from a friend or by some other means then go for it.

If you don't really care about your t-shirt designs, then why should anyone else?

If your design takes people too much brainpower to figure out, then maybe you should scrap it. It may sound somewhat mean, but I cannot stress this enough. Try to put some thought and effort into your ideas. Make sure they hit the mark, there are already too many nonsensical and misunderstood designs on Cafepress as it is.

You want your shirt to identify with your customers immediately. Especially since most of your customers will spend five to ten seconds on average looking at your shirt while shopping.

Market what you know, get inspiration from things that you and your friends enjoy. Your passion for things that interest you is usually reflected in your designs. Stay in your safe zone and don't try and market to genres and demographics that you are unfamiliar with. It's so much easier to be creative when you are using your own interests.

Well thought out and cleverly designed shirts are proven time and time again to have higher sales. Try explaining your ideas to other people and see if they get it and how well they understand them. Maybe see if they have any thoughts on how to make it better. Critique is always good, even when it's bad. After all, your customers are, in fact, other people.

Brainstorming is key. Keep a list of all your design ideas and improve ones that need it, and scrap the ones that aren't quite worthy. In the end, you'll be happier with a t-shirt that you know was a great idea as opposed to one that only seemed like a good idea at the time.

A very large portion of the t-shirts on Cafepress have nothing but words on them. And, of the ones that do have images or designs on them, a large portion of them have words or letters on them as well.

Either way, if you are one of the many t-shirt designers who uses words and letters on their shirts, adding more fonts to your computer can be an easy and free way to greatly increase the quality and appeal of these designs.

But, don't take my word for it, just consult the following two images.





See? Doesn't the bottom one look more unique and "shirt-like"? Almost as if it were a font made for vintage shirt design. And the best part is, I downloaded this font for free.

The font at the top is good old Comic Sans MS. It should look familiar to you as it is one of the most common fonts found on Cafepress and all of the internet, and has been packaged with Windows since 1992. A great font, just not one that is aesthetically pleasing for most t-shirt designs.

Remember, there's nothing wrong with a shirt that has just a word or a phrase or even a single letter on it, they can sell just as well as any other shirt. Just make sure that the font you choose looks professional and is appropriate for your t-shirt idea/design.

Here are some great places to find free fonts.

• 1001 Free Fonts
• Urban Fonts
• TypeNow.net
• 2200 Free Fonts
• Abstract Fonts
• Creamundo.com

Be careful though, don't go overboard and pick and crazy or intensely busy fonts. You want to make sure that your fonts are very clear and readable.

And fonts are a cinch to install on your computer! All you have to do is drag the font file (usually a TTF file) into the Fonts folder that's in your Windows Control Panel. That's it! You've just installed a font.

If your design already has an audience, then you've already made your shirt easier to promote. The best way to do this is by using an image or a phrase relating to popular movies, politics, social commentary, news, music, organizations, etc.

Now, you have to be careful about this, you don't want to use any copywritten images or names on your shirt. If you are referencing something copywritten, then don't use the name. Using quotes or recognizable words from within the copywritten work itself is usually a good way to do this.

Take this popular t-shirt design for example.



If you recognized this shirt and the movie it's referencing, then it worked. If you didn't, then they weren't marketing to you anyway. Speaker City was the company that Vince Vaughn's character owned in the popular movie Old School. Popular movie equals popular shirt, write it down.

Quotes are good too, and they don't have to be from movies either. Take the famous "don't taze me bro!" incident from the 2004 election year. After which, there was an influx designers selling t-shirts sporting "don't taze me bro!" on them in response to the growing popularity.

Using holidays and other big national/international events and issues can be great ways to sell your designs. Highly controversial issues such as war and election time are another great utilization of this strategy to sell t-shirt designs. If you come up with a clever way to voice your own opinion, chances are that someone who shares that opinion just might buy your shirt.

There is one problem with these types of shirts however. As with any trend, their popularity fades over time. Some of which do it faster than others. Especially shirts geared towards one-time events like elections. Holidays seem to be the only exception to this problem, unfortunately they are usually limited to seasonal sales.

Working on a good t-shirt can take a while, hours or days even. The worst thing you could do is put all of that time and energy into making a shirt and then find out that there are a million shirts just like it on Cafepress, and what's worse, some are better than yours.

This can be seriously frustrating for any Cafepress shop owner. The easiest way to avoid this is to run a few keyword searches for your t-shirt ideas in the Cafepress Marketplace before you begin designing them. If there are several pages of professional, high quality designs with the same general idea, it might just be worth it to scrap the idea. Unless of course you're confident can do it much better.

Pages upon pages of very similar design ideas can be frustrating for both customers and shopkeepers alike. The more people selling similar shirt designs to yours, the less your chance for profit. It's best to pick a design idea that return only a very small number of pages in a keyword search. Four or less is usually a good number. This will increase the chance of a customer finding your shirt exponentially.

On the flip side, this might not matter depending on how you promote your t-shirt designs. Designs promoted on a popular and relevant website will obviously get more sales than shirts limited to the Cafepress and the search engines alone.

Customers like shirts that are clear, concise, and to the point. Don't clutter it up with too many complex images and unnecessary colors. Just take a look at some of the more professional-looking and popular shirts for examples if need be.

Try reducing the amount of colors that your shirt uses. There can never be too little colors, but there most definitely can be too many colors. Some t-shirts even look better with single color designs. Most image editors have several different ways of achieving this so you can adjust it to your liking.

Use simple, easily recognizable images and shapes. Silhouettes work great for t-shirt designs and can be easily made from any image. Try to make sure that there isn't a lot of extra clutter in your image that doesn't need to be there. If there is, cut it out. This is especially necessary when using photos.

Don't use extremely intense fonts. Sometimes it's tempting to use those all those wild and crazy fonts that you get online, but try to resist. Fonts with cool and unique effects are excellent, just don't go overboard. If your customer can't read the shirt, you've just defeated the purpose. Good fonts are generally heavy-type, thick bold fonts. Try to steer clear of the lighter (thinner) fonts, cursive fonts, and messy fonts that add in a lot of junk that isn't letters. These fonts tend to be more illegible on t-shirts.

Don't think that just because your shirt is simple that it's boring. Just take a look at some of the biggest sellers on Cafepress. Many of them are just simple shirt with an easily understood message.

On the reverse, don't think that making a good simple shirt is easy. Simple only refers to a designs's lack of clutter, not the ease of creation. A lot of time and thought go into these shirt designs, and there is usually more to it then just dropping text on an image and then putting it on a t-shirt, even with the t-shirts that are just text. There are a lot of stylistic and artistic decisions that have to be made to really bring a design to life.

Your customer's only impression to gather is how your shirt looks on Cafepress. They display your design on their products in the same way, whether you have a premium or a basic shop.

If that preview doesn't look as good as it possibly can, then you're in trouble. Chances are if it doesn't look good here, it won't look good when it's packaged and mailed to your customers. And if they don't like the way it looks, they have a few weeks to return it for a refund. Cafepress even stresses that the product designs will look exactly like they do in preview mode, so it's best to make sure they are as compatible with Cafepress as possible.

Make sure that the designs you upload are fairly big and make wise use of the space you're provided. Don't use tiny graphics or words. Cafepress t-shirt designs can be up to 2000x2000 pixels for a reason. If you go ahead and work with all of your t-shirt designs at this canvas size then you will be able to ensure maximum quality and position them exactly how you want. Also that your t-shirt designs are conveyed clearly to your customers on the Cafepress product page without flaw.

A lot of mistakes are made on Cafepress that affect the quality of your products. Here are some of the more common ones.

• The Infamous Black Box - This is by far one of the worst and most common mistakes made on Cafepress. Sometimes people don't realize that images for dark shirts need to be different than light shirts. With white shirts, transparent space can be determined by the white areas in the image. But with black shirts, black areas will NOT be transparent, they will be sprayed in dark black ink that will turn out darker than your shirt. To make empty space on a dark t-shirt, you must make those areas transparent in your image editor. This is where the more professional image editors really come in handy. Cafepress provides a good tutorial on making transparent images here.


• Tiny Blurry Text - If you can't read the words on the shirt, then people will have to get uncomfortably close to someone to read it. Unless that's the gimmick your shirt is going for, then it's generally not a good idea. When someone buys a shirt off of Cafepress they are usually thinking, "Hey! I've got something to say!". And if no one can read what they are trying to say, then what's the real point of owning the shirt? The clearer the better.

• The "Framing" Effect - One of the biggest reasons you don't want to just plaster a photo onto Cafepress is that it looks like just that, a photo glued to a t-shirt. This, as some people refuse to admit, is not a good t-shirt. They look boxy, and do not sell very well. Try cutting the image into a circle, or removing unnecessary parts from it. Maybe even adding more to it so that it doesn't have square edges. A good rule of thumb is that if you can see more than two edges of the design, you shouldn't put it on a t-shirt. Boxy isn't completely bad though, sometimes it is appropriate when you are going in an artistic, parody, or unique direction. A few examples of this is making posters, street signs, parody advertisements, etc.


• Busy is Bad - Look at the shirt in the above image again, it's hard to tell what it's about. Especially since the dark text is running into a dark background. You should try to keep tabs on how many images, colors, and text you use in your image, and make sure they don't all run together and become unclear. Try to come up with a color scheme and tone for your t-shirt. Make sure every letter of your text stands out, try outlining it or using alternate colors. Your customers will thank you for it.

Most of all, don't be afraid to put a little time into your designs. There's a pretty good chance that your design won't sell tomorrow, or a week out, or even a month out. So then why rush it? If there is one thing buyers can spot, it's quality.

Anytime you think one of your designs is done, stop and think of ways to make it better. Experiment with new techniques and constantly be learning more. Try tweaking the colors or positions of images/text. See if you can find a font that fits the design better. Add some gradients, textures, or other effects and see how it looks. And always make sure you save copies of each different version of the design that you like when you do this. Then you can pick and choose the best one in the end.

Even old designs should be updated and revamped occasionally. If you have a old design that isn't selling, see if you can spruce it up by applying any new techniques you might have picked up since its creation. You just might turn a garbage shirt into a goldmine shirt.

Here are a few simple tips that you can use to fix up and improve the quality of your designs.

• Make sure that all your lines and edges are smooth and well defined.


• See that all your colors fit well together and are uniform throughout the image.


• Make everything as clear as possible (seems to be a recurring theme huh?).


• Try to remove any graininess or noise from the image.


• Determine if your design is properly positioned exactly where you want it to be.


• Adjust the contrast, brightness, and saturation to make the image more vibrant or flat to your liking.


• Make sure that the colors you are utilizing are appealing, and not too saturated or too dull. Make sure they fit in with the look and the tone of your design.

Remember, if you wouldn't buy your shirt, then what makes you think someone else would?