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Canva T-shirt Design: Everything you need to know

    Canva T-shirt Design Tutorial
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    The custom t-shirt printing business is expected to reach 3.1 billion US dollars by 2025 and has been considered one of the booming businesses worldwide since 2016. Accordingly, many print-on-demand service providers have been recently established to serve this booming industry. Canva is one of the newly introduced online services which allows beginners and non-artists to create t-shirts designs using simple steps and in a non-complicated way. This article will show you how to use Canva to create a beautiful t-shirt design and earn money even if you don’t have graphic design skills. So, if you’ve ever thought about designing your clothing or branded merchandise and want something simple to start with, Canva is the perfect place to start.

    Why would you make your designs?

    Many reasons could encourage you to design your own t-shirt/clothing. As per recent statistics, Branded t-shirts are a very effective marketing strategy, and many people favor companies that provide them free branded t-shirts along with the main product. Another reason for choosing to design your t-shirt on Canva is to build morale among your team. Others prefer to give a t-shirt gift with their design to their beloved ones or close relatives. In all scenarios, designing your t-shirt is no longer a stressful experience like most people think. Nor is it an expensive process, especially if you decide to use an online platform similar to canva.com to make your t-shirt designs. The following paragraphs will take about the DIY approach of making your own Canva t-shirt designs. A video is also attached to make life easier for you.

    Why people choose Canva to make t-shirt designs:

    Whether you’re a seasoned designer or an outright novice, you’ll figure out that Canva is one of the most beneficial devices in your design tool kit. In the affordable globe of POD-based organizations, Canva can be your tool for swiftly constructing a stock of eye-catching designs.

    Because it’s cloud-based and receptive, Canva is frequently the fastest way to save a draft and develop a style principle on your phone, iPad, laptop computer, or Chromebook. With the Canva phone application, you can save fast tee concepts whenever and any place inspiration strikes, especially when a tool with great deals of memory or system resources isn’t helpful.

    Why do beginners prefer Canva for t-shirt designs?

    If you’re a newbie, you can use Canva’s collection of devices to create every little thing you require to begin a business company. That includes your first supply of tee productions, plus banners and also logos, and also even Pinterest and Instagram articles, all while saving both time and money.

    If you are familiar with Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, then you will discover that several of Canva’s standard features, as well as key-board faster ways, are comparable. Follow the steps in this article and watch one or two videos attached below, and you’ll probably understand all the Canva basics you need for tee layout in simply an hour or more.

    You’ll also save cash since you can evaluate Canva with a free account. Take your time, get comfortable with the user interface, and then upgrade to Pro to open the attributes we’ll be utilizing in this tutorial, such as downloading and installing with a clear history.

    Prepared to begin the tutorial? So let’s start with the following points:

    Choosing your Objectives

    You might want to create attention with your t-shirt design if you are making a design about a charity event, for example, and, accordingly, want people to ask about your campaign. In this case, you might want to use bold fonts and a clean design that quickly catches the eye.

    Or, designing a t-shirt to sell on your website or online store could be another objective; in this case, you will need to understand your audience and your targeting niche before making a design. If so, there are a couple of essential things to be considered to make the best t-shirt design using Canva:

    Your brand values: If you have a specific brand, you might need to align your design with your brand personality, which should be reflected in your words and graphic elements chosen on Canva

    Your target audience: The age and gender of your target people are also essential. Fonts and graphics for females are different from those used to target the male audience.

    Your slogan: If you are targeting a specific niche, like dog lovers, for example, it is vital to do some research online first to prepare some words to use for your design.

    In the following video, you can see how I created a t-shirt design targeting outdoor lovers and mountain hikers using Canva:

    Choosing the best color:

    To some extent, your existing brand name colors (if you have them) and also your target market will certainly guide the color scheme for your tees. However, there are a couple of various other factors to consider to remember when selecting your color combination.

    First of all, you do not always have to match your whole brand name color combination palette in your product– and in many cases, you shouldn’t!

    While trying out a range of colors may work well in your social media networks or perhaps brand-name product packaging, that is not necessarily the case with clothes. Many individuals like to stay clear of ‘loud’ clothing in favor of even more specific items, as well as the goal right here is to make it as wearable as possible. So, if, for instance, your brand colors have silver, blue, purple, as well as black, you might choose to choose only two colors for your design.

    There are two collections of colors you’re dealing with when producing t-shirts. The very first is the color of your fabric, and the second is the colors of your design, logo, or graphics. To ensure your t-shirt design is aesthetically unified, you’ll want to provide these two complements to each other. You can see this in action in the below video.

    To guarantee your textile and also design colors are complementary, utilize your textile color as the base when you begin creating your t-shirt.

    Choosing the best font for your Canva t-shirt design:

    Similar to any design task, your typography is an essential piece of the challenge. Utilizing the ideal font can be the difference between making your shirt appear like an amateur or a polished and also wearable garment. Readability is the critical factor. You don’t desire people to have to look at your chest to decode what your shirt is trying to say! While cursive fonts can look womanly as well as sophisticated in various other brandings, these can be difficult to read on tees. Fortunately, there are numerous serif and san-serif fonts for you to choose from in Canva.

    Canva’s design template library for tee shirts is a great area, to begin with when it involves selecting readable font styles, as these have been hand-picked by specialist developers that understand precisely how to make a design look nice.

    Naturally, you require to surpass simply readability when choosing the ideal font for your tee. Brand name personality is essential as well, as well as different fonts can stimulate very different feels. As an example, Monserrat is a geometric font that is ideal for robust and also modern-day brands, while a brush-script font can conjure up a more earthy and natural feeling.

    How to choose the best graphics on Canva for your t-shirt design

    If you plan to allow your typography to do the talking with a slogan tee, you can avoid this action! Nonetheless, you may choose to integrate graphics right into your tee shirt, as they’re an excellent means to make your layout attract attention in a crowd. To start with, you might select to keep it simple and print your very own logo design throughout your t-shirt. This can offer your product an air of downplayed calm as if the brand name speaks for itself, as we commonly see with companies like Nike or Adidas.

    If you currently have an existing logo for your brand, you will undoubtedly need to import it in PNG and your color layout and import it into the brand section in Canva. Otherwise, you develop your logo design from scratch in Canva.

    You could likewise choose to try out pictures or other visual graphics. This is a beautiful way to offer your t-shirts a much more enjoyable and spirited feel, as you can see in the listed video example.

    Studies say that graphical elements and visuals attract attention by 60,000 times faster than a message. This implies you can make a memorable influence much quicker with tees that include aesthetic symbols. If you have the budget, you might choose to have your graphics developed by a specialist designer. Or, you can just select from Canva’s considerable library of totally free and budget-friendly icons.

    Another Canva T-shirt Design Video for you:

    Get Your POD-Specific T-Shirt Layout Dimensions right

    If you are planning to upload your design to one of the print-on-demand platforms, it is important to understand that each platform has its dimensions. Each printing shop or print-on-demand service provider will certainly have its very own documents requirements, with remarkably huge variations from one printer to another. There’s an excellent factor for this: each printer understands which dimensions and resolutions are most likely to work best with its devices, inks, and sublimation procedures. In other simple words, a layout that works wonderfully for Printer A’s equipment and also ink might be too big, tiny, or pixelated to collaborate with Printer B’s arrangement.

    Right here are some tee length/width pixel measurements from a few famous Print-on-demand platforms firms (current as of the day of this post). Below are the required dimensions of some of these famous platforms:

    Amazon Merch: 4500 x 5400

    Printful: 3600 x 4800

    Redbubble: 2400 x 3200

    TShirtGang: 2200 x 3000

    T-Shirt design Dimensions of famous POD platforms

    So to make sure top quality– and to stay clear of having your attractive style turned down when you try to upload it– style within a Canva document that is established for your hull company’s measurements. If you do not intend to upload the design to any print-on-demand platforms and are willing to print it directly, ignore this part and jump straight to the practical part below.

    Practical Tutorial: Canva T-shirt design practice

    Step 1: Creating your free account on Canva

    Create a free Canva account from here. Log into your Canva account first and then click the “Create a design” button in the upper right of the screen. Write “T-shirt” in the search bar to get the t-shirt template ready and open in Canva. If you have specific dimensions mentioned above, choose and click the “Choose Custom Size” button and type in the width and height as per your needs. Now a new blank sheet will open on the right side of your screen.

    Step 2: Choose a ready template that fits your niche

    Canva opens a ready pane on your left side which is filled with many templates that you can use for your designs. You can still customize is total to fit your design requirements. Check all the templates and choose the one that fits you. Otherwise, just type your niche in the search bar and see which template fits best for that niche.

    Try to look for these when choosing a template:

    -Plenty of white space

    -Short text

    -Simple graphics

    Now click on your chosen template and it will transfer automatically to your work board.

    Step 3: Choosing a name for your t-shirt design

    Always make sure to rename your design so that you can find it easier later. You can do that by clicking the word “File” in the upper left menu. You can then change the name by clicking near the words “untitled design” and writing the altered name.

    Step 4: Edit the Canva template graphics.

    You can click on each graphic element and click the Backspace/Delete key to remove each one separately. Otherwise, if you tap the shift key while clicking each graphic element, Canva will put them in one group together which enables you to delete all of them together. You can always press the “Undo” button on the upper menu of you delete an element by mistake or even if you want to undo your last action.

    Canva also enables you to upload your own images or graphics. You can do that by clicking the upload icon on the left bar, followed by the “upload media” tap.

    You can upload graphics and fonts from creativefabrica.com, allowing unlimited access to fonts and graphics with a commercial permitted license just for a starting trial of USD 1 for the first month. Click here to get the offer.

    Step 5: Edit the font on your Canva template.

    Similar to Microsoft word, text boxes in Canva work the same. You can click the word and click on the font box in the upper left menu to change the font. There are many fonts available inside Canva. Even if you can’t find the font you like, you can upload any font to Canva through the brand section on the home screen.

    You can choose between a variety of font types for your design.

    To test out a font option, click the font, and Canva will show you a preview of what it looks.

    T-Shirt Design Tip:

    Always try to avoid fonts that have thin strokes or elaborate ornamentations. This is because words that are printed on fabrics should be readable even after numerous washings, and light parts of fonts might not hold up in such cases. So always consider that when you are using Canva to create a t-shirt design.

    Also, when designing a t-shirt, try to avoid overlapping graphics over and under fonts. When elements are separate, you keep the words readable, make the overall design easier to grasp and avoid tricky ink sublimation issues in print shop production.

    Step 6: Download as a transparent PNG

    When you create in Canva, you can make the background color the same as the t-shirt you’re designing. So if your market prefers black t-shirts, just change the canvas background to black to get an accurate visualization of your design.

    Yet you can’t use an image with a colored background since POD companies require transparent PNGs for t-shirts. Luckily, Canva makes it easy to download your design as a transparent PNG without adjusting the background. Click the Download button in the upper right of the screen, check the “Transparent Background” box and download.

    You can watch the below tutorial to fully understand how to create a design on Canva.

    Conclusion:

    Canva is the best beginner-friendly online software that enables you to make your t-shirt designs. With this Canva t-shirt design step-by-step article, you are now ready to start creating beautiful designs just by a click of a button. So what are you waiting for until this moment; open your free Canva account now from this link and let your imagination do the rest.

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