Four Easy T-Shirt Designs that Sell.

hey everybody how's it going my name is Tony Ivania also known as Odyssey Rock I'm a t-shirt designer a graphic artist and a professional comic book colorist and today I want to talk to you about four t-shirt designs that always sell before we get started let's talk about leading tracking and kerning leading refers to the space between each line of text tracking is the overall letter spacing and kerning as the space between individual letter forms these three things can be the difference between a really good plain text design and a really mediocre plain text design in this first design I'm using Helvetica 95 black with the left paragraph alignment I like to use a heavy sans-serif typeface in this type of design because it really helps the design stand out when customers are scrolling through dozens and dozens of thumbnails first thing I'm gonna do is adjust the letting I really want to get rid of the space between lines and I'm also gonna bring in the tracking so the letters are as close together as possible without touching once we have those about where we want them we're gonna go in and start adjusting the kerning it's important to know that when you're dealing with kerning it's not so much a science as it is an art you don't need to measure between each letter and figure out like how much space there is exactly because we know but you really need to do is see what looks visually pleasing the way it was explained to me is the negative space between letters you want to imagine that as a pitcher and you want each pitcher to be able to hold roughly the same amount of liquid so two letter forms such as lowercase B and lowercase L may be closer together than lowercase L and lowercase a or it could be the opposite what you really need to do is just go in there and start playing with the kerning and see see where it takes you one of the most popular uses of this layout is in those designs that have all the ampersands it'll be a list it'll be a bunch of things that are like maybe characters from a TV show or a book things that go together names of friends ingredients in a hamburger or whatever they're awesome simple fun and a great way to round up your line shop I probably made more from these simple quick designs and I have on designs that I spent hours and hours on it's ridiculous people really really like them I'm playing with the colors in this example but you can do pretty much anything you want with these type of designs white text on the black or colored shirt looks awesome I hear a lot of people saying that text designs don't sell and I just don't find that to be true as long as you're putting out something that people like and the design looks nice they'll buy it for sure this next design is probably the one that I use the most out of anything I find that it works well in any situation whether you're dealing with plain text or something with an image you're gonna grab the ellipse tool make it any shape you want it doesn't really matter then you're gonna grab the scissors tool and you're gonna cut the anchor point at the left side and the anchor point at the right side then with your direct selection tool you're just gonna move that down and delete it I want the remaining part of the ellipse to have a stroke instead of being filled in the way it is so once I do that I'm gonna take the type on the path tool click on the center anchor point and make sure that my paragraph is centered now you'll notice everything's off to the right side so what I need to do is grab this little line with the box and move it to the leftmost Anchor Point I could do that the direct selection tool and then I can resize my type I can Kern it out I can do all the things that I need to do now once I have that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a line of text beneath that just a straight line across and that's gonna anchor our design and any other text graphics or anything else is gonna go between those two lines what I want to do with this bottom line the text is make sure that it's centered and then I'm just getting to visually align it left to right with that line of text that's on the top on the curve this is gonna be a standard athletic type of design so what I'm gonna do here is take a rounded corner rectangle tool and just make a rectangle right in the middle and then I'm gonna take my type tool and type out XXXL and then I'm gonna make sure my type is white once I do that I'm gonna Center it right in the box and I think this looks great how it is but you can add a little bit more to it so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add the year 2019 so 20 is gonna be on the left side in nineteen in the right side once I have everything in place what I'm gonna do is just start moving some of the elements around resizing things move some stuff up move some stuff down you know anything I can do to make the design look a little more unified and visually pleasing if I want I can even add a line of text underneath everything that is maybe a punch line if it's a joke shirt or just some extra information just depends on what you're doing really I'm gonna go ahead and make this line the same width as the rest of the design and I think that that looks best at least for my taste you can see from the following examples they really get a lot of mileage out of this design type of layout sometimes it's just text sometimes I like to use graphics sometimes I'll change the shape of the top line attack so it's a little more curved sometimes a little bit less curved there's so many different ways that you can go with this and it's really awesome if you do like a Google search and just look up t-shirt designs I'm sure you'll find a lot to follow the same exact model now for the next design I want to show you something again that's just plain text and really simple but if you're creative you can get a lot of different uses out of it the typeface I'm using for this next design is impact you can use pretty much anything you want it could be something heavy something thin I like a narrow typeface for this type of design because it gives you a little bit more room to work in my opinion the real trick with this type of design is figuring out which word you want to be big in which word you want to be small and a lot of that is just done through trial and error sometimes you might picture it in your head exactly how it's gonna go and that's pretty awesome but you know most of the time like any other kind of design you're just kind of playing around with things this type of design really works well for workout clothing at least in my experience that's where I've had the most success with it it's big its bold it take can take up most of the shirt and you can add motivational sayings and spur ational quotes other kind of workout slogans and people really like it I think people like to go to the gym and kind of show off you know and speaking of slogans now might be a good time since this is a pretty simple design there's not really a whole lot to say about the process it's a good idea to keep a notebook or the Notes app on your phone or something like that with ideas write down things you overhear people saying you might say something funny to your friend and thinking that might make a good t-shirt and that's where a lot of my best ideas came from is just remembering something that I heard or I've said or anything like that if you don't have a lot of experience writing your own slogans it's very tempting I know to just go and see what sayings are already out there and do your own version of it in a layout so you take the exact text and just have a different layout that you maybe think looks better but I find that if you can write your own slogans and practice it you're gonna get better at it and better at it and you'll kind of realize what sells what people react to and just like anything else it's gonna take time I know a lot of us want to make money right now we need to make money right now but the important thing is that we build something that's ours and believe me when you come up with something original it's so much better than always having to worry about getting your designs taken down or DMCA aid I can't tell you how many times over the years I've heard people complaining that their design got DMCA aid or taken down or whatever because they weren't making original content when you're making original content there's nobody to take your design down and it really isn't as hard as it seems it just takes some work if you really work at it you're gonna get better at it it's gonna get easier and pretty soon these ideas will just be flying back to this design that I'm working on right here sometimes I just like to do it with plain text one color like this I've been trying to other things with it sometimes I'll outline it and fill the inside with art various things like you can see in these examples as far as t-shirt designs go this one's pretty foolproof and there's not really much more to say about it so let's move on to the next one our fourth and final design we're gonna start with an object that I already had drawn and that's gonna go on the left and to the right of that we're gonna have two lines of text you can have three lines of text four lines of text it really doesn't matter the important thing with this one is one line of text is the set up and the second line in the text is the punch line and that's it and we just basically you want to get all your your design in there get everything lined up again it helps if all of the lines of text are the same left to right that they are I guess basically just to fight is what you'd call it and then you can start playing with your colors or whatever and it's very simple it's very effective it works really well and this is another one I've had a lot of success with in fact I know a lot of other t-shirt artists who have a lot of success with the same type of layout too like again the main thing here is you want to just come up with something that's appealing and something that people like so you lay your design out and you just make your adjustments and you know you get everything done in a couple of minutes and then you can start selling it you can see some of my examples that I've done and that's about it it's really simple and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial I plan on doing more stay tuned for the next one and thank you for watching

Channel: odysseyroc

Views: 45,298

Keywords: tshirt design, tutorial, adobe illustrator, merch by amazon, etsy, print on demand, hustle, t-shirts, how to design, graphic art, graphic design

Id: Imc9Bg5WcSs

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019