Over the course of years I created numerous t-shirt designs and sold them on various websites. In this article I’ll go through how to design, upload and advertise your t-shirts.

Different Options

There are many websites that provide you the possibility to make your own t-shirts. Some have more advantages than others. One of the most popular websites is CafePress.com. Apart from the many different t-shirt styles available, you can also add the design on mugs, buttons, magnets and even underwear! Another popular website is Zazzle.com. How these websites work is they set a base price for each product and if you want to earn money from selling products, you add your markup to the base price. That is what you’ll be earning.

Obviously, if you set the price markup high, you will sell less products, but make more profit! It’s up to you! The quality of the t-shirts is really good, I’ve ordered from both of these companies before, and the t-shirts are still in very good shape even after years of use.

T-shirt Design

This won’t be a step by step guide on how to design your t-shirt, but a summary of the process. In order to design a good quality t-shirt, you need high quality images.

Create a new PhotoShop document of at least 2500pixels x 2500pixels @ 300 ppi. Preferably the background of the design should be transparent, to avoid ugly corners on the t-shirt; it makes the design look more professional. To do that, when you’re finished with the design, save it as .PNG format.

Last year, I wanted to create a Snoopy t-shirt design, but every image I found was too small. So, I opened up Photoshop and created my own high quality Snoopy Illustration!

A trick you can use to create big resolution images from smaller ones is to scale-up the small image and use it as a reference as you draw on it the higher quality illustration. In the image below you can see the low resolution design in the background; design which was used as a reference to draw the final illustration.

Add your t-shirt design

Create an account on your favourite website, and select a product to create. Different website have different processes so make sure you are familiar with the steps (head over to “help” if you are lost).

Upload your t-shirt design scale it, resize it and place it however you like. Add some text and then finish. You can then add it to your cart and order the t-shirt you made.

Sell your t-shirts

If you want to sell your t-shirts, I’d suggest you open up a store (free or paid) which enables you to apply the design you created to more products. You can even set a price markup in order to profit from your designs.

I’d suggest you add around 5% price markup. It’s a percentage that doesn’t add to the cost too much, allowing your customers to order many t-shirts.

It is important that you customise your shops as much as possible. The customisation allows you to add a shop header, a logo and a description. The paid store option, available on CafePress.com completely eliminates their logo and design, making the store look like it’s your own.

Don’t forget to add a sensible description to your image design and products so that people searching for a design can find you easily.

Try to make your designs unique, funny and you can also include popular subjects (like Twilight) to make your design a hit!

Conclusion

I used to occupy much time with designing t-shirts in the past. I managed to make around $30 (at 5% which is about 25-30 t-shirts) but I stopped. Here are some t-shirt designs I made:

Java T-shirt and Java Code

Don’t Scare Me PROgrammer and Don’t Scare Me WEBdesigner

Add your comment below if you have any questions regarding the t-shirt design process! You can also subscribe to this blog if you found it useful!

Source Files are unavailable for this tutorial! No Source Files