- Hey everyone. So yesterday I was
tracking my biggest print on demand store sales throughout the day and by the end of the day I'd sold around $3,700 worth of merch and so I was curious, I wanted to know how much of that was just in T-shirt sales alone. And so I checked it out and I discovered that about 57% of my sales
were just in T-shirts. So of course that's around $2,100. And so this just confirms something that I've talked about
on this channel before and that is that T-shirt are easily my top selling
print on demand item, plus this is a bit more subjective but I personally think that
they're really fun to design and sell as well. And so this inspired me to
create an in-depth tutorial video showing the tips and the
tricks and the processes that I use to design top
selling T-shirts in Canva. Although I'm sure some of you watching are probably thinking, "Well, gee, Sarah haven't you shown how to use Canva to
design T-shirts before?" And the answer is that I have kind of, you see as a YouTuber, you'll inevitably get tons
of comments from people leaving their opinions on your videos and one of the most consistent comments that I've gotten in the past
is that my videos are too long. And so usually in past tutorials where I'm using Canva to
create T-shirt designs I've sped up the clips or cut stuff out and I haven't explained which
buttons I'm pressing and why which of course inevitably ends
up disappointing the people that did want the longer
tutorial video and so this is the tutorial for
those of you out there that didn't want me to skip over anything. Plus I'm also gonna share
some extra tips and tricks which I haven't seen anybody
else talk about on YouTube. Yay, but of course to
show you how to design a top selling design in Canva we need to find a top selling
design to create first. And so what I did for this video was I went over to Redbubble when I went through the men's T-shirts and I sort them by best selling. And I looked over the top
100 best selling designs and I picked a fun one for
us to make our own version of it's called not fast, not furious. It's super cute and so I thought would make our own version of this T-shirt for this tutorial video, but instead of making it sloth themed, we're gonna make it snail themed. All right, so now that we know what T-shirt we're gonna recreate let's go ahead and open
up Canva and get started. So step one, we need to
prepare our design Canvas. All right so to get started
just jump on over to Canva if you've already got an
account already, that's great and you can just go ahead and log in but if you don't have an account then you will need to go and create one. When you create a Canva account you'll see that there are two options you can either get a free account or you can get a pro account that costs 13 US dollars a month. But here's the thing I
strongly strongly recommend that you get a pro
account, not a free account because the pro accounts have
lots of elements and features that are gonna make it way easier and better for designing T-shirt. But of course Canva does
have a very generous 30 day free trial to their pro account so if you'd like to get a
free pro account for Canva you can just go ahead and click on my link in the video description below. But yes once you're logged
in, you can get started. So just go ahead and click
on the create design button and then click on the custom size button. And now you can enter in the measurements of your T-shirt printing area. And I probably should explain what that is so the T-shirt printing area
is the area of the T-shirt that your T-shirt printing company can print your design onto. Different print shops and
different print on demand apps do have your own different
printing area size so you'll want to go to your chosen one and find out what size
their printing area is. For most print on
demand, websites and apps you'll find that information either on the product page information tab or inside of the FAQ. Each one is of course different, but here are some of the
most commonly used ones relevant to my subscribers. So for Printful their unisex
Bella Canvas 3001 T-shirt has a printing area size
of 12 inches by 16 inches. And what's digital over on Printify which is my favorite print
online provider on Printify for T-shirt has a printing area for their Unisex Bella Canvas 3001 T-shirt of 4,500 pixels by 5,100 pixels. And over on Redbubble for
their Standard Unisex T-shirt their printing area is
12 inches by 16 inches. And so, as you can see different
print on demand websites and apps are gonna give you
their different measurements and different ways for summits and pixels for summits and inches and
so luckily within Canva when you're adding in your custom slides, you can select it to
be either from pixels, millimeters, centimeters or in inches. And so then once you've
created your Canvas you want to go in and change
the background color for it. So just click on the blank canvas and then a little color box will show up. You then click that and then you click the
background color that you want. Now for this you want to
select a background color that matches with your
primary T-shirt color that you want to design for. And so for most people, as I've
said before on this channel you probably want to primarily
sell onto black T-shirts. And so you wanna select
a black background color and that's because as I've
talked about on this channel in the T-shirt industry,
black T-shirt are easily the most popular color with customers. I know that for me, my sales more than 50% of
them are for black T-shirts so much so that if I create a design that doesn't print well
onto a black T-shirt and so I release it not on black, I'll inevitably get an email
from a customer being like, "Love the design but when
are you going to release the black T-shirt version?" And so, unless you have
a really good reason to not select black as
your primary T-shirt color I highly recommend that you create your design
optimized for a black T-shirt. So step two, add and edit
free pictures and graphics. So Canva has a ton of
different free pictures and graphics inside of its app. Just click on the elements
button in the left side menu and then you can do a search
for whatever graphic you want. You can filter the results to
show you photos or graphics but most T-shirts are
going to be using graphics and not photos. Canva also has animated
graphics and standard graphics but obviously you can't exactly
print an animated graphic on to a T-shirt so something
else that you can also do is you can filter the results so that you only see static graphics. And something that's
also important to note is that one of the perks
of having a pro account instead of a free account is that pro accounts get
access to more graphics. There are some graphics in the app that are available for
both free and pro members and then there are graphics
that are pro account only. If it's a pro account only
graphic you'll be able to tell because it will have the pro
crown graphic next to it. All the other images
that don't have this icon are free graphics that are
available for free accounts. And something else that I haven't seen anybody
really talk about on YouTube is that if you find a picture
or a graphic that you like by a creator then you can
find out more information about that picture, just hover your mouse over
the graphic that you like and you'll see a little
three dot button icon. Well, you can click that button to get more information about the image and the creator and you can
even click on the creator's name to find more pictures and
graphics inside of Canva that they created. Free pictures have generally
been sourced by Canva from public domain websites
but the pro images have not. So I personally reached out to
the Canva pro licensing team to confirm that you can use their pro elements for
commercial purposes. And in their email to
me, they confirm that the photos, the graphics, the
illustrations, the stickers, the fonts and the videos
that are included in the app for pro users are allowed to
be used for commercial purposes including being printed onto T-shirts. The one exception that
they shared with me is that you need to combine
different elements together. You can't just sell one element by itself. So for example, if I came to Canva and I found cute picture of a rainbow and then I went and
posted it onto a T-shirt and tried to sell it,
that would be illegal. But if I went ahead and added some text to that cute rainbow picture, and then printed that onto
a T-shirt and sold it, that would be legal. And the reason for that of course is because I combined
multiple elements together. I combined a picture with text. And so if you want to use pro elements, make sure that you use
at least two together that you combine pictures or pictures with text or things like that. But back to my actual T-shirt example here now as I said I'm gonna
be taking a popular design adding my own twist onto it,
to turn into something new. And this is actually a method that I talk about in my
free print, on demand ebook where I share how I and others
earn passive income every day with print on demand. And if you'd like to get
a free copy of my ebook you'll finally to download
it in the video description but yes, back to my T-shirt design. So as I said earlier what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
take this sloth niche T-shirt and instead I'm gonna twist it and turn it into a different niche this time around the snail niche. So I just clicked on elements and then did a search for snail pictures and then again, I filtered
the results to show graphics and to only show static graphics. And as I browsed through unsurprisingly there were tons of snail
pictures to pick from especially because I was
working with a pro account, not a free account. And I actually ended up
choosing a pro image. And there is also something
cool about this graphic that I need to mention. This is an example of an image where you can change the colors of it. And so how do you do that? Well, what you just do
is you click on an image and if you can edit the colors, the color boxes for it will show up in the top left corner of the app. So I could go ahead and turn the snail into
a pink snail if I wanted. And this can actually be really handy when you're creating T-shirt design. So you think about it, right? You might be scrolling through the app and you see a black image but you're designing for a black T-shirt. So you don't wanna print black onto black. Well, you should still
check out the image anyway because you might be able
to edit the colors for it and turn it into a white image. However, this does not work for all of the graphics inside of Canva. So for example, if I go ahead and click on this snail image here, well, the color boxes for it don't show up because it's not an editable image. And here's the thing, right? If you're a beginner and
you want to make sure that you're picking graphics which are gonna print nicely onto T-shirts then I strongly strongly recommend that you stick to images that
you can edit the colors for. And the reason for that
is because those images are what you call SVG graphics in other words say are
scalable vector graphics which is exactly the
reason why you're able to edit the colors in the first place. Unlike traditional
images which are created by essentially filling in lots
of little dots with colors, to create an image when
they're all put together SVG images are created
with mathematical formulas and mathematical formulas
can change in scale. So for example, let's take
a photo of my dog Starbucks but when I take that photo, the way that it's created
is that it's essentially just filling in lots of
little dots with colors. Well, if I were to take that photo and then blow it up onto
a ginormous billboard chances are it would probably
look pretty pixelated. And why is that? Well it's
because that billboard was way bigger than my original photo was. And so that billboard has way more dots on it than my photo did and so to be able to fill all those dots I've had to stretch out my photo across it and now it looks terrible. Whereas if I took that
snail image and I blew it up and printed it onto a
billboard, it would look great. And that's because it's an SVG as I increase the size of my snail picture the mathematical formula just change and it scales up as I
change the snail size. And I've just gotta clarify something. It doesn't mean that you can't print non
SVG files onto T-shirts. If those pictures and
graphics that weren't SVGs were uploaded in really
high quality to start with then they can still look great. However, the truth is is
that while you can find out that information on what quality
a picture was uploaded in Canva, doesn't make it easy. And so for beginners, the
easiest thing to do is just to stick with scalable graphics. Anyway jargon over back
to my tutorial video. And so after finding my
cute little snail dude I thought he looked a little bit lonely. So I decided to find him
a cute grassy background. And so I went ahead and
found one that I liked. And of course I made shorter click on the graphic to see
that I could edit the colors which meant that it was an SVG graphic. Now you also may have
noticed something funny when I added the grass
graphic to the Canvas even though it's supposed
to be a background image it ended up going on top of the snail, which was not my intention. Luckily though, that's very easy to fix. I just went ahead and
clicked on the graphic and then clicked the position button and then clicked the backwards button to move it behind my snail. And with that, I went ahead
and I added my graphics. Yay, next up, it's time for step three add text and add text effects. So can Canva has a huge range of fonts included in its database. So many that it can almost
be a bit overwhelming for new T-shirt designers. So begin a friendly way
to sort through them all is to click on the text button and then click on the add a title button and then go ahead and open
up the font dropdown menu and type in the type of font
that you're looking for. So for example, if you wanted retro fonts you could type in retro
and then it'll show you all of the different retro themed fonts included in the Canva database. Just like pictures Canva
also has some fonts included in it's database
that are only for pro members and so if you have a pro account you will have more fonts to choose from. And also just to clarify again, when I reached out to
the Canva licensing team, the email that they sent
back to me said that pro fonts are allowed to be
used for commercial purposes. Yay, so what I recommend
that you do as a new designer and said you just spend
some time clicking through and experimenting with different fonts and you don't rush it. I went ahead and
experimented and picked one that I already admittedly
like Bobby Jones soft. So time to actually add in my slogan. Well, if you remember my slogan was split into
two different lines. The top line was not fast and then the bottom line was not furious. So to create continuity
between my two lines of text and ensure the fonts and
stuff remained the same what I did was I created my
first line of text, not fast. And then I right clicked it, copied it and then pasted in a new copy and of course changed the
text to be not furious. And then I dragged that
second line of text to be below the picture and made sure my first line
of text was above the picture. And if you want to resize
your text boxes like I did you got two ways you can do it. One is you can just drag
your text box out or in to increase the size or decrease the size. Or of course you can just
type your font size number into the font size box. Canva also has some builtin rulers that you might have
noticed I've been using throughout this tutorial,
there're showing up because you can see that
there's a big line there which shows me if my
elements are centered. And there are also rulers
on the side of the Canva so that you can ensure that things are spaced out
as you want them to be. And so once I'd gone
ahead and added my text it was time to add a cool effect to it. To add in text effects it's really simple. You just click on the text
box that you want to edit and then you click the effects button. And now you can choose from Canvas very wide range of effects. And when you click on an effect, you'll see that there
are different sliders that you can use to either
make the effects stronger or perhaps like change the
direction of the effect. Something that I should note
is that some of the effects use transparency and
transparency does not print well. So I recommend that you don't
use any transparent effects in a design that you're
printing onto a T-shirt. While Hammer does have a bunch of cool different text effects. Probably the one that T-shirt designers are going to use the most is the ability to make your text rounded. And so to do that, you just go ahead and
click on the shape button and then you use the sliders or you type in the angle that
you want your text to be. This was not in Canva for a long time and it was highly requested and so it's a pretty recent
feature that Canva added in. So for the first line I wanted it to curve
upwards like a rainbow. So I set it to be curved
at a 45 degree angle. And then for the bottom line of text I wanted it curved in
the opposite direction. So I set it to be a minus 45 degree angle. Admittedly though the design
looked a little bit unbalanced and that's because the phrase
not fast is a lot shorter than not furious and so
it looked a bit weird how the different lines
were not the same length. So a good way to help balance this if you're designing T-shirts is to click on the phrase that is shorter and then click on the spacing button and then change the
spacing between the letters so that it's spaced out a little bit more so that you can extend the
length of that shorter line. And it's actually something that top selling Redbubble design did. If you take a look at it you'll see that the spacing between the
letters on the top line is slightly stretched out more
compared to the bottom line to help balance it out. And the reason why I did this is 'cause I've tested this a lot and I have found that T-shirt designs that fill as much of the
printing space as possible and are as big as possible,
convert more and sell more. And so unless I've got a
very good stylistic reason why I want my design to be smaller I try to make it fill as much
the printing area as possible. And so now my design was
ready to be converted into a print ready file yay. All right so I'm sorry for
the jargon for a moment but here is the deal, right? Most print on demand providers are going to ask for
an sRGB PNG image file that is at least 150 DPI but ideally as close
to 300 DPI as possible which means then that
instead of saving our file as a scalable SVG graphic we're unfortunately gonna
have to save it as a PNG file which is luckily very
easy to do within Canva although the thing about Canva is that it saves PNG files in low
resolution, not high resolution. So we're gonna have to tweak
our safe settings a little bit. So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna click share and then we're gonna click download and then we're gonna tick the box to make our background transparent. And this is important because if we didn't tick that little box make our background transparent, the big black box behind our design would print onto the T-shirt. But by clicking the button to make our background transparent it's now going to print
without that black box. Yeah, this is also a
pro account only feature which is another reason why I suggest that you get a pro account. In addition to that we're also going to increase
the image size by three by just sliding the image size, slide a button over way to the right, now this is going to
make a very large file so it may take a little while to save. So just please be patient. And the reason why we're gonna do this is because I'm not gonna
explain it in depth because it's all jargony and boring but basically by giving our print provider a much larger file than the printing size they're gonna reduce that
file down to the printing size which is gonna effectively
increase our dots per inch. And so now as you can see, when I went ahead and uploaded
my design to print for the DPI was over 300. Yay, did my video help you? If it did, please
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