How to Make an Original Design (The Basics)
Hi, I am Morgan Johnsen, one of Ink to the People’s in-house-illustrators! I am going to give you some advice on how to make your own awesome t-shirt designs by explaining the basic process.
So you want to create your own original idea for a t-shirt. Where do you start?
First you need to identify what you want to make a shirt for. Do you want it to have a witty saying? Are you raising money for a cause or an event? Maybe you are seeking support for an upcoming project?
Once you have identified the purpose for the t-shirt you can begin creating your design. You will first need to consider the location of the design. This will help you when you start to create it. If you want a design to fit on the left chest, a large design won’t look very good. Sometimes larger designs will contain more detail that would be hard to see to the viewer if printed as a left chest.
Start creating your design by making several quick sketches on a piece of paper. These don’t have to be pretty so don’t worry about making them perfect just yet. Spend as little time on each sketch as possible and create as many as you can related to your topic. For this Project, I created a Pride t-shirt to raise funds for the Wisconsin Humane Society and MADACC. Take a look at my quick sketches relating to dogs, cats, and pride flags!
After you have made a bunch of sketches, pick out your top 3–5 favorites. Important tip: You should also ask your friends and family which ideas they like best. Sometimes people will like ideas that you thought they wouldn’t! Begin sketching those out in more detail and add some variations to each one. Maybe you use a different font, a different color, or change the positioning of something. See what difference the little changes make. I tried my designs out using different pride flag colors, moving around the paw prints, changing the layout of the text and more. This helps to nail down your design.
After you have finished your refinement sketches it is time to move into the digital realm. Open your design software of your choice and you can either freehand the design or trace over your sketches. It may help to do another round of refinements because the designs will look a lot different in digital than they do on paper. Try some more layouts, put the text in a different spot, use a different color or pattern. Also consider shapes. Is the design going to be fitting into a square or maybe a circle? This will keep the image more unified instead of scattered across the page. Trying a bunch of different ideas will lead you to the best design idea for your t-shirt. At this step in my design I explored more with different opacities of colors and the layout of the flags. I also tried putting text in a paw print shape and using different fonts. It’s ok if an iteration doesn’t look the best. That’s why you are making multiple, to get the bad designs out first and get into a creative flow so that you can think of much cooler ideas!
At some point during the design process you might have a new idea that you like better than the ones you have been working on. That’s ok and is actually what the process is for! You can start over on paper if you would like. For my design I continued my process in Illustrator but created a sketch with the paintbrush tool, then I began to make the design over it.
Once you have a design (or designs) that you really like it is time to test what color shirts to put them on. Remember that inks won’t be very visible if printed on the same color t-shirt. (i.e. a black ink won’t be visible on a black shirt). Try copying your design onto several different color backgrounds to see which shirt colors are the best to print it on.
Your design is ready to go! Upload it at inktothepeople.com, tell your story and start your campaign!
Helpful tips:
- Keep placement in mind to guide your design
- Sketch a lot and sketch fast
- Get others opinions on your sketches
- Try different things, don’t get stuck on one design
- Keep color in mind, inks don’t print well on same colored fabric
- Be open to new ideas
