design a t shirt how-to guide

How to design a T-shirt guide from T-niverse.com!

How to design a T-shirt, clock, tote bag, mug or other gift item, made easy with our step-by-step instructions. Creating custom gifts online is a fun and versatile hobby. You can use custom T-shirts to:

Create one-of-a-kind gift items for yourself or others
Preserve your child's artwork for the future
Make extra income selling your designs
Make more money by helping your friends and family to do the same

This is part four of the series. If you are arriving here in the middle of the series, then see the Custom T-shirts contents list here.

Part Four: Add and modify products in CafePress

A CafePress Shop is a place where you showcase products with your artwork on them. (Prefer to use Zazzle? We show you how to open a Zazzle Gallery here.)

We left the last instalment having added a White T-shirt and some other products with our design on them to our Storefront. This time, we'll work on making those designs (and others) as good as possible, to improve our chances of a sale when somebody views them.

There's a vast array of products available to put your designs onto. Here's the Product Selection screen:

You'll soon learn that not all designs are a good fit for all products. Let's face it, how could they be, with so much variety of size and shape? Luckily, CafePress provides free templates for you to download. Once you see the templates, you'll realise that a mug template at 5x2" is nothing at all like a clock template, which is a 9" circle, or a T-shirt, which is basically any rectangle or square, the bigger the better.

The CafePress system software will help you design a T-shirt to be a perfect fit, if you are smart enough to be using their templates from the outset. But if your chosen artwork or photo is not the correct size to begin with, CafePress attempts to resize the picture to make your image fit every product. It does a remarkably good job considering how different many of the products are.

However, you may find that you need to go back to your own PC's graphics software to rework your design, otherwise some items just won't look right. Here's an example. To the T-shirt with Jasper's art on it, I've added a large mug, large framed print and a greeting card:

The mug and card look okay, but the framed print is horizontal (landscape) format -- Jasper's artwork is a vertical (portrait) format. Fixing this is easy. You just click on the EDIT button below the appropriate product, which takes you to this screen titled Preview Your Product:

We're now in the Product Designer section. Get used to this page: you'll see it every time you modify the design of a T-shirt or other gift item. In this case, where there's a choice, you can alter the aspect (horizontal or vertical) and also the size of the image. You can sometimes play with the positioning, depending on what it is you're designing. (Mugs are one example of this, allowing for a left-handed mug, right-handed mug or center positioned design if you prefer it.)

Back to the framed print. At the bottom right of this screen, we see Product Orientation. There are two radio buttons, HORIZONTAL and VERTICAL. Click on the radio button marked VERTICAL to change the aspect. You'll be able to see a preview of how this changes the image on the final product on the left side of the screen:

Notice that the image size has changed. In horizontal format, the maximum size was 10", due to the edge of the frame restricting the image of Jasper's art, but with the correct vertical format, Jasper's newly created framed art can thrive in full 14" glory!

Image sizing is allowed to be altered on every product on CafePress. Sometimes you'll need to resize images so they fit properly, if they were not designed to fit the correct template, or so you have a border around the image if that's what you prefer.

Other times, you might design a T-shirt which suits having a smaller image, or want a pocket image (over the top left of the breast, as often found on in polo or golf shirts. Resizing an image is done with the simple drop-down menu at center right:

We'll leave ours at the maximum 14" for now. At the bottom right is a green button marked NEXT. (The BACK button cancels your changes and returns you to the products page.) We like our changes, so we'll move to the NEXT screen -- the Final Product Design page:

Here you can see how your item (in this case, a framed print) will look in the shop. Also, if you desire, you can make changes to the name, description and markup of the item. Useful if you design a T-shirt and want higher or lower markups for different objects. Finally click SAVE AND FINISH and your changes will be saved. You will be returned to the Products page for your shop.

Next time, we'll show you how to buy your products from your own CafePress Shop.

If you have ideas or suggestions for this series, we'd love to hear your views and comments. Please contact us.

< Part Three: create a Tee shirt    |    Part Five: buying your own products > 

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