How To Create A Text-Based T-Shirt Design For Merch By Amazon

1. An Introduction to the Course: without doubt, one of the best opportunities that is currently available to Creatives Online is designing and selling of T shirts through merch by Amazon. Now the good news is you do not necessarily have to be a graphic designer to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. In fact, more often than not, it is the simple, well researched T shirt designs that are selling best on the platform. Simple designs such as text based designs, which worked particularly well, whatever niece you are targeting. Hello, my name is David James Holt, and I'm really excited to introduce you to this new class in my merch by Amazon Siris on Skill Share T shirt designs for non designers, which is called How to Create a text based T shirt design for sale on Merch by Amazon class , begins by explaining exactly why you should be creating text based T shirt designs for much and then continues by taking a look, a basic typography and where you consort with funds that you use on your T shirt designs class, then goes on to show you how you can easily identify thoughts that you like the look off. Finally, the class looks at creating some text based designs. Firstly, the creation of a simple design from within an IOS app over and then secondly, a more complex text design from within a professional vector type application called affinity designer. So why not join me in this class today and discover how easy it is for US non designers to create perhaps the most successful of all of the types of T shirt designs that sell well and make a great new site income through merch by Amazon? 2. Why Create Text Based T-Shirt Designs?: in my experience, the designs that probably sell best of all for me on merch by Amazon on my text based designs. And this is partly because text based designs in general seem to be extremely popular on Amazon, which is perhaps a more niche focused platform than the likes of Red Bubble on DTI spring, where pop culture type shirts seem to do better. The other reason why I believe text based designs sell really well on Amazon is because they seem to be the perfect medium for trending topics in the news. For for funny Mihm's The Go Viral on social media. Certainly it is far easier to react quickly with a text based design than with a graphical one. And if their popularity on Amazon is not enough to convince you that you really should be selling text based T shirt designs on merch if you're not already doing so, then another good reason is perhaps the length of time it takes to create a text based design. Compared to a graphic based design that is now, This might not appear to be much of an issue when you're just starting out on much on are limited to only a few daily submissions. But once you have teared up to a level where you were allowed to submit 20 T shirt designs per day or even more the time it takes you to create and submit, each of those individual designs really does have a huge bearing on the success of your merch by Amazon business. Don't get me wrong. I do also believe it is important to spend the time to create some spectacular and original graphic designs as well. And other tutorials in this Siri's will show you how to do exactly that. But in my opinion, these more time consuming designs should definitely be supplemented with some simple and quick text based designs. Now notice. I did not and easy to that description because although text designs can be a lot quicker to create the graphical ones, they're not necessarily easier to make. And a rushed text based design that uses the wrong front could be just a glaringly average as a graphical design that has been created by someone without an ounce of artistic talent . In fact, more often than not, bad text based designs are likely to get you in more trouble. than bad graphical designs, simply because a non designer is more likely to appreciate their limitations when attempting a graphical design and will probably have a better idea if a design really sucks and thus will not bother to upload that designed to merch. Seemingly, this is not the case with bad text based designs. If Amazon is anything to go by where, unfortunately, there are many would be designers out there putting up a plethora of text based designs that, if truth be told, are unlikely to ever sell. And the thing is a better understanding of typography, font selection and even Kern ing could make a huge difference to the quality of one's text based T shirt designs. And so, in the next few lessons, I'm going to look into each of these areas in turn beginning with perhaps the most important subject of all, namely typography and the importance of selecting the correct type face 3. Typography and the Importance of Selecting the Correct Typeface: before I begin, I would just like to say that this video is not meant to be in any way, shape or form a beginner's guide to typography. To be honest, that could be an entire course on its own. And there are plenty of great resources out there where you can learn the basics yourself, some of which I've included in the downloadable PdF that accompanies this course. Instead, I'm just going to touch on typography and in particular typeface selection as how I see it fits in with text based T shirt designs on merch by Amazon. So let's get started by asking, What is typography? Well, typography is basically both the art and the technique of arranging the letters and characters of a piece of text. Of course, we're concerned with text on a T shirt, and this is important to remember because certain aspects of typography are possibly less important for text on a T shirt design. Then they would be for text on a poster or a flyer, a newspaper or a book, for example, hierarchy, which is basically where you use different weights such as bold regular and light point sizes. For example, headers sub headers, etcetera and styles such as italics to create a sense of order within the text. This is a vitally important aspect of typography when I am designing a landing page for my website or even win composing a post for my block. But it is perhaps less important for T shirt designs. Yes, I do occasionally make use of a font family for a particular typeface to emphasize a certain word within a phrase. But normally I prefer to use a change of color or a font duo, or perhaps even both, to achieve this effect when designing T shirts. Other aspects of typography that are perhaps a little bit more important for T shirts than hierarchies includes tracking, which is where you manually adjust the spacing between all of the letters in a word, although to be fair, I've only really used tracking occasionally for a single stand outward and leading, which involved changing the distance between the texts baselines again. Because my T shirt designs rarely have more than two lines of text on them, I tend to do the spacing between the lines of text manually. However, one aspect of typography, which I believe is very important to help make my text based designs look as good as they possibly can be. Is that of Kern Ing, which refers to the amount of space between two letters or characters within a word. And I shall actually go into more detail about turning in an upcoming lesson while tracking , leading and especially turning our all important aspects for text based T shirt designs. In my opinion, the single most important factor with regards to typography is choosing the correct typeface for your design. That is to say, the font the best represents the niche that you are targeting, as well as the message that you would like to portray. So, for example, a funny Halloween T shirt targeted at kids toe wear when they go out, trick or treating needs toe have a totally different type face to that of a cool, sophisticated, minimalistic design aimed at men who plan toe wear their shirt during their weekly work out of the local gym. And then there's also the added factor that we need to bear in mind the medium itself, in this case, the T shirt that we're designing for the typeface that works really well on a printed card used as an invitation to a Halloween party isn't necessarily going to look great on a Halloween T shirt, even though they are in the exact same niche now. Common sense obviously plays a big part when selecting the correct front. But education and experience are also very important. In addition to reading up on the basics of typography, one of the best ways to educate oneself as to which type faces work best for any particular T shirt design in any particular niche is to research similar designs in the same niche on both Amazon and also on the other print on demand platforms, and then judge for yourself what works well and what doesn't in time. After researching the niche on different platforms, you should eventually get a feel as to which type faces work well for both the niche and the message you're designing for. And it may well also be the case that you see a few funds during your research that you like the look off but which you do not recognize. And in the next lesson, I will show you how you can identify those funds that you liked during your niche research so that you can then use that typeface or a similar alternative fund for your own T shirt designs. 4. Taking a Sample of the Font You Want to Identify: OK in this video, I'm going to look at how to identify a certain typeface that you might see on a T shirt design. When you are researching niches and generally looking for ideas for new designs, it may well be that you are on Amazon determining whether or not a certain leash trend or MIM is suitable to create a T shirt design for and you happen upon a really cool front that you might like to see in a completely different niche for a totally different T shirt sometime in the future. So, for example, here I am on Amazon, and I am considering whether or not the phrase I am silently correcting your grammar would be a good phrase to create a T shirt design, for I have already found out that there are only about 150 old shirts competing for this phrase. So now I'm going to have a look at the Bs are of the top few shirts and see if it looks like people are actually buying these shirts. And if it is worth creating a design, I'm actually using a chrome extension to do this, called D s Amazon quick view, which shows me the BS are for each of the T shirts. And as you can see, this one has a B s are of 237,000 This 1 505,000 And this is 769,000. And this one has a B s are of only 78,000. So we do know that these T shirts are selling. There is a least some demand for this type of shirt. 382,000, 682,000, 409,000 and two million. And if we look at them, they're not that much to look at. They're quite basic designs using basic funks, and I don't think it would be too difficult to create a shirt that could compete here. This designs a little bit better, but anyway, when you are researching an issue in Amazon in this way, it might be the case that you see a typeface which you quite like the look off and would like to find out what the flaunting question is, huh is one that stands out compared to the others. I'm silently correcting your grammar It is a little bit of a different design, but that looks quite a good fund. So let's click on this T shirt and have a closer look. I'll hover over the shirt so we can get the font up close. Yeah, like that Looks good. I do like thes tool typefaces, as I think they were very well on T shirts. Now, if you wanted to find out what fund had been used on this particular design, the first thing that you need to do is take a screenshot of one of the words a sort of sample of the typeface, if you like. So I'm going to take a screenshot off the word grammar like so. And I will then use that image to identify the type face. And I'm going to show you how to do that in the next video. Now, I'm not saying for a minute that you should then create a similar shirt in the same niche using that exact same fund because, in my opinion, that would basically be copycatting. And I would strongly advise you against doing that instead, This is about identifying a font that you like the look off so that you can use that typeface in future designs in completely different niches. So with that in mind, the next thing that you'll need to do is edit the screenshot that you have just taken. And this could be done in pretty much every design application out there, such as photo shopped, for example. But I'm actually going to open up one of my personal favorite design applications, which is available for the Mac and that his pixel mater. So I shall go to my Dropbox folder and open up that screenshot that I've just taken and all I want is a sample of the text. So I'm actually going to crop the word grammar, using the crop tool like so and now Well, I need to do is export the image as a J pic. I'm going to make sure that it is set to 100% quality. I'll just export the image to my desktop, and I shall call the foil grammar. So now we have a sample off the fault that I like the look off, and in the next video, I will show you exactly how toe identify the front from this sample that we have taken 5. Identifying the Font from Your Sample: Okay, So in the last video, I showed you how to create a sample of a typeface that you would like to use in a future T shirt design. And in this video, I'm going to show you how you can use that sample toe. Identify the faulting question, and we're going to do this using a free service that is provided by the website. What Fontes don't come whereby you are able to identify a font simply by uploading a sample j pig. So I'm going to locate the sample, which I saved to my desktop thirties Grandma and he You'll notice that you get the option to tick this box if the background color is darker than the character color. So I only to take that box as the background color was in fact, a navy blue color while the font color was white. And then it's just a matter of clicking on Continue. As you can see, you're then presented with screen where the word that was submitted within the sample J pig has been split up into its individual letters, and you are prompted to then confirm each of these letters in turn by typing them into the boxes which appear beneath the corresponding image. So here, I need to type in the letter G here on ah, on a here, followed by an M and another m on A and finally. And, uh so once I have typed out the entire word, I can click on Continue, and it will search for all possible funds that are either an exact match or a close match to our sample. Now, here we can choose to display all types of funds. We can just display the free fonts or free alternatives and finally weaken display only the commercial funds or commercial alternatives. Now it may be that you are determined to find the exact Funt. And so the chances are you won't know whether it is a free font or a commercial front, in which case is probably preferable to click on all fronts and then discover if it is in fact, a free or commercial fund. So I'm going to take display all funds and click on continue. And what Fontes dot com is now going to list all of the close match fonts as well as hopefully the exact match typeface. And as we can see, it has found 100 possible matches. So the suggested fonso listed down the left hand side and over here on the right, you can see the sample text so that you are able to compare the fonts and ensure you get us closer match as possible. Who? Even an exact match. And it may be that you prefer to choose a close match that is free for commercial use than an exact match that you would have to pay for. And if we look at the top commercial front, which is called Proxima Nova, we can see that this is a very close match indeed. But it is not an exact match and it is available to download from front stopped. Come. So it is going to cost you some money. It is not the exact match in any case. So I am going to continue my search and see if I can find the flaunting question. This one is from the same font family, so I'm going to scroll down further. This one is called engineer light, but it's not that one either. Air compressed, which doesn't have a preview. So no way of telling how close to match. That one is. And here is the first free front called simplification. And by looking closely, we concede that this is in fact, the exact match. So this is the font. We are looking for simplification. And over here it actually says that simplification is free for personal use. But I know that it is possible to get a free for commercial use license for this particular font on. I'm actually going to show you where you can find that license in an upcoming lesson on the sourcing of funk. But it might be the case that you discover an even better font than the one you were originally searching for. For example, you might think that Nordic alike it will look better on a particular T shirt design, then simplification would. And so you could continue on down the list trying to find one. I think that this one's a bit too different. No, really, like the look of that front, this one's not too bad and so on and so on. Now, just a reminder. As I said in the previous video, if you are targeting a particular niche and find a font that you want to identify. Please don't be tempted to then use that same font in the exact same niche as you do not want to risk copycatting someone else's design. You should always try and be as unique and as original as you possibly can be. By all means, identify the front and then use it on a different T shirt in a totally different niche as that is perfectly acceptable. Okay, so that is how you are able to identify a font from a T shirt that you like the look off. And in the next video, I'm going to show you the different places that I go to source high quality funds for my text based T shirt designs. 6. A Guide to the Sourcing of Fonts: Okay, so this video is going to be about the sourcing off fonts, which I believe is of great importance. Whether you are a Web master creating websites or blog's were a self published author creating printed books or designing covers for your e books. And, of course, especially if you're designing T shirts or other products for that matter, for sell on print on demand platforms such as merch by Amazon, choosing the right typeface is quite essential to your creation and therefore knowing where to source the best fonts will undoubtedly play an important role in your design process. And in my opinion, when it comes to funds, there's no better place to start than the granddaddy of typefaces fonts dot com until we are on the fonts dot com website, where you can see straightaway a slider presenting some beautiful typefaces that would simply look great on T shirt designs, depending on which niches you are targeting. And if you like the look of any of these particular type faces, you can hover over the slider like so and find out details about the font that you are viewing now. The home page of fonts dot com is naturally a great place to find fonts for your design. But perhaps an even better place to look is within their fonts lists, which defaults to their best sellers section. And here you'll be able to find those fonts that other creatives consider to be the best of the best. Of course, if you are looking to discover some cool new funds, then it may be better toe. Have a look at the new releases section. This looks interesting. I am currently looking to design some cool shirts for the Octoberfest, and so this old style Germanic lettering might work very well indeed. So let's look at this in more detail. Sucks involved. I hope I've pronounced that correctly, which has got that whole Germanic Gothic black letter look going on, which I think would look perfect on Octoberfest T shirt. Now the thing is, Ah, high quality font of this type is not going to come cheap. And as you can see over here on the right, a commercial license to use this particular typeface is going to cost you from $49 and it may well cost you a lot more. For example, it's going to cost double that. If you want to use the front within any book now, this might be a small price to pay. If you are determined that the book you have spent the last three years writing is going to look and feel spectacular. But it is by no means an insignificant investment for a single T shirt design, one which you have no real way of knowing as to whether or not it will make a single sale. And which is why, despite the fact, I believe fonts dot com is an excellent resource for great looking typefaces. I rarely purchase any of my fonts from here. Instead, I find the reason that I come to fonts dot com is more for their amazing learning resources on the platform, such as for ontology, the fonts dot com bloke and F. Y T I, all three of which are informative resources. But in particular, I recommend that you take the time to go through for ontology, which I have found to be an extremely helpful guide where you are able to learn the basics of typography. Level one is entitled a typographic foundation where you are able to find out about the history of type, the anatomy of type and finally, all about type families. Level two then takes a look at practical typography, which includes sections on text, typography, display typography and wept typography, each of which I found to be essential reading for the various types of text based designs that I personally do when creating printed books and print on demand products, as well as the websites that I promote them on Level three, then takes a more in depth look at numbers, signs and symbols, while Level four concentrates on fine typography and type typography. So there you go. That's the font ology resource, which I highly recommend. You take the time to read as it will give you a good basic understanding of typography. And incredibly, this is a free resource on front stop. Come now, I'm going to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. From the best known source of paid funds to perhaps the best known source of free funds, which is the defunct website here, you are able to find over 30,000 different funds, many of which are supposedly free. Of course, before you get too excited it is important to determine what exactly is meant by free, as many of the fonts under font are actually only free for personal use, which is not really any good. If you are writing books, creating T shirts or even designing websites, others are licensed as donation way, where you are asked to make a donation to the author in return for using their fund. If you are considering using a website like defense to source a typeface for your creation , my advice is that you spend a great deal of time checking the fine print A. Making sure that the font you want to use it's free for commercial use, and even then specifically for the use that you have in mind. Personally, I never use the likes of different instead, rather than using either of these two extreme examples, I actually source most of the funds that I use from what I consider to be the middle ground out there, the kind of places where you can get a bargain, and by some high quality funds at very reasonable prices and perhaps the best well known of these types of websites. His creative market now creative market is basically a website where you are able to purchase bundles of graphics or bundles of funds and sometimes a mix of both, and make incredible savings on the original prices. For example, here is a bundle called the 102 fronts Bundle and which, as you can see, also has a few graphics thrown in for good measure and the supposed value. This bundle is $1630 but you can purchase it today for only 19 bucks. Now, I am not suggesting for a moment that anyone in their right minds is going to splash out almost two grand for the creative resources included in this bundle. But if you see a font or to within the bundle, or perhaps even more, that you feel you definitely use within a Siris of T shirt designs, for example, or perhaps within the cover design of your latest book, then $19 is a complete barking. A word of warning, though with creative market. I do find that their standard license is somewhat restrictive with regards to the graphical designs that they sell, certainly when compared to similar bundle type websites, but their standard license for fonts is perfectly acceptable. As and I quote, fonts can be used in an unlimited number of projects and end products for sale and as well as the monthly bundles that are on offer. You can also browse different fonts by their categories. Such Aziz Black Letter display non Western etcetera, etcetera. So if we have a look at the display fonts, for example, we can have a quick browse. And here's a nice looking vintage funt that would probably work well on a T shirt. Yes, I like this one another vintage style typeface, and you'll notice that this particular font will set you back $19 which, although is the same price as the complete bundle of 102 funds that we have just seen, is still considerably cheaper than the font we looked at on fonts dot com. This looks quite a good one that could be used for a Halloween shirt. And here's another Halloween type front. And here's another front bundle. 120 different type faces, this time for only $29. Okay, so that was creative market and another similar site where you can get these type of font bundles is the appropriately named font bundles dot net, which just happens to be one of my personal favorite websites for sourcing fonts. For my designs, as with creative market, they also feature font bundles, but on the whole, they are probably slightly cheaper. This particular bundle will only cost you $10 and they also offer design bundles on their sister site. Design Bundle stopped net, and here you can see the expired bundles, which will give you an idea of the kind of promotions they might offer in the future, as well as their premium front bundles. They also offer free funds, which are usually only free for a limited period but which do come with a commercial license. And it is certainly worth having a look through here from time to time. Now, one of the reasons that I love front bundles so much is because of their $1 deals, where by every month or so they put up some of their top selling funds, which would normally sell for 12 or $15 ago and reduce the price to $1 performed. However, they limit these fonts to, I think it's 500 units, and it's first come first served, and the popular funds sell like hot cakes, so you really need to get onto their site as soon as the sale starts. If you want to have any chance a tool of picking up a great looking front for only a dollar , as you can see, the next event begins on October the 11th at six PM Central European Time, where I'm based so five PM in the UK on between nine AM and midday in the States, depending upon the time zone where you live and I advise you to join their Facebook group so you can get reminders for their upcoming events. So that is the front bundles. $1 deals, depending on when you see this video, you may or may not make this particular offer, but like I said, there is usually a new one every month. The final site that I would like to show you is another bundle site called Dream Bundles, and they currently have a great free bundle that you condemn load with 20 free funds again . This may or may not be there by the time you watch this video, or they may have a new bundle that they are offering, but this site is certainly worth looking at. And as you can see, you have full commercial rights to use the funds. They are handpicked best sellers, and you can get 99% off of their paid bundles, which obviously doesn't apply with this bundle as it is free. So I am going to click on the link and show you the fonts that are included. As I think there are some really cool fonts here that will look great on T shirt designs and other print on demand products. You will need to click on this link and into your email so you're going to be on their mailing list. But I personally think it's worth doing that, considering the quality off the free fonts you'll be getting. So here is a mock up of the 20 funds that are included in the bundle, and there are a couple here that I really like such a simplification and mosque Cornerstone looks quite good as well. Personally, I don't really like these handwriting type fonts on T shirts, but they can work quite well on mugs, as do these brush script typefaces. That one doesn't look too bad. This one's quite interesting and goes into a lot of detail. He is a vintage display front. That's pretty good. This is quite a modern one. And another Ving, teach one not so keen on these. That's not bad. Yeah, I quite like the look of that type face. Okay, old. Just scroll down a bit further. Uh huh. Simplification. I really like this simple typeface. The boldface works very well on T shirts. It also works with all these different foreign characters, such as the room levels on the acute and grav accents. I think it's worth the download. Just for this fund alone are really like this mosque front as well. And as you can see, it comes in nine different whites. A lot of detail has gone into this one. Another great typeface. This one's good as well. And it handles the Cyrillic alphabet, the S BUCA, which is good if you're designing Russian or Ukrainian shirts. Yes, I really like this one. The game very well presented. And there's another vintage one. So there you go, some incredible looking funds there that are free for commercial use. So I hope you have enjoyed this video and that it has given you some idea as to where you can source some great looking funds for use in your different design projects, whether that be whipped design, self publishing projects or, of course, print on demand products. And before I finish just a few final words to win the video, please try and avoid using funds where you do not have the commercial rights to use them. First of all, because it's not really fair on these incredibly talented designers who have put ALS that effort into creating these type faces, but secondly, because it might end up harming your business, possibly resulting in you being thrown off 1/3 party account, for example, your merch by Amazon account where you will, no doubt to put in a lot of effort to build up your business on there. So please always check those licenses. Even if you have paid for a font or donated some money, you really need to read the fine print before you use a particular fund. Okay, so that's all for now. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time 7. An Overview of the Over App: OK in this video, I am going to show you a super quick way of creating simple text based designs for use on merch by Amazon. I'm actually going to show you a free app. Although the APP does offer a premium subscription as well, which is available for both IOS devices and Android devices. And as you can see, I will be demonstrating this app on iPad. But the apple work just as well on your iPhone as well on the APS name is over. Now let me say right off the bat that over does have some limitations, especially if you're using the free version of the app, which we shall come onto in more detail later on. But basically this is a nap that is super easy to use. That means that there is now literally no excuse for any non designer who does not own a copy of illustrator affinity designer photo shop, etcetera to not get their text based designs uploaded and selling on merch by Amazon. And even if you do own one or more off, the aforementioned professional applications over is also a great way to quickly create text based designs. When you are away from your computer, like on the commute toe work, for example. Okay, so I'm only going to be creating a very simple example in this video, certainly in contrast to the example, or she'll be showing you in the next lesson where I'll be using affinity designer to create a text based design. But nonetheless, I feel that this will give you a good overview of the over app and hopefully inspire you to get active and get a cool looking text based design up on Amazon as a result. Okay, so let's get started. Then I shall swipe over to my page of design APS and this yellow icon at the top. Here is the over. Now. I'm not going to go into great detail about all the different functionality of the APP. The aim of this video is to show how easy it is to create a simple text design That said, I will be giving you a quick overview of the app in this particular video before creating a text design in the following video. So when the app opens, you are presented with thumbnails off the previous designed you have created using over as you can see, I have blurred those thumbnails out. As obviously, I do not want to advertise the different niches that I am designing in at the moment. But to get started with a new design, you just need to click on this big plus icon here, and you are presented with a new art board on which you are going to create your design. Now, obviously over has been made with a number of different media in mind and especially social media so as well as a basic square art board. There are also many other templates to choose from along the bottom here, such as an iPhone one, a cover image for Twitter, a Facebook post image, a Facebook cover image, a Facebook square, etcetera, etcetera. Now, obviously, I'm not interested in any of those templates, as I am creating a design for merch by Amazon. But if you look up here at the top where it says adjust size, you'll notice the current dimensions for this particular template. And if we tap on those dimensions, you're then able to adjust the width and height manually and create a custom art board, which is great because it means we can set up the dimensions for a merch to sign, that is to say, 4500 pixels white by 5400 pixels high. I just need to switch off the constrain proportions down here so that I condone, adjust the wit to 4500 pixels and then adjust the height to 5400 pixels like so And then tap on the tick icon appear in the top right hand corner, which results in an art board that is perfect for a merch by Amazon T shirt design. Okay, so I'm going to quickly take you through the different icons that we can see here on our screen. So up here in the top left, you are able to tap the arrow to go back to the templates page. Then the next icon along the curly arrow icon is undo, and obviously there's nothing to undo at the moment, so it is not currently highlighted. The next one along from that is the layers I come, which currently just shows the art board on which we won't be working within this video, as we will only be working with the text layer and the final icon along the top is the save icon, where we are able to save our design to the photos app on the iPad or the iPhone. Of course, save to circle, which is a community that over has where designers can collect and create together, but not something that I have ever used. And finally, you are able to share to other wraps such a Zmeskal, jizz, male and the likes of Dropbox. Now, if we turn our attention to the bottom of the screen, the first icon over here on the left is the images. I come where you are able to access images that you would like to incorporate into your design, and you can add images from services such as unspool ash and also picks obey as well as your own photos on the left here, which accesses your camera roll and which I am not going toe open, as lots of those images will be from my previous projects. And again, I do not want to share the niches that I am currently designing in. If you look over to the other side of the screen, you can see the shapes, icon and If I click on that, you'll see that it is actually on over pro feature, so you would need to be a subscriber to use. Thes, as I said before over, is free to download free to use and create designs commercially, but there are certain features that you will need to be a paid subscriber to use. It costs £9.49 per month over on this side of the pond to use over pro. But I would imagine it is slightly cheaper than that over in the States. Now you do not need to bother with a paid subscription if you do not plan to use the shapes within, over or any of the other paid features provided in the at. Personally, I do not use thes features. And to be honest, I do not even use the funds that are freely provided with over as I've installed my favorite fonts onto the app for which I own a license to use them commercially. And perhaps at this point, it is also worth bearing in mind that you are somewhat limited when using over in that according to their terms and conditions, which you can read on their website made with over doctor calm that although the services are provided for your personal and commercial use, the end product that you create with over is only allowed to have lifetime sales of up to 400 units. In other words, you can use over to create a T shirt design and then sell it on merch by Amazon, so long as it does not sell more than 400 copies. Now. Obviously, that is a nice headache tohave, and it is unlikely that many of your T shirts will reach 400 sales. But I think it is important that I point this out now as it is definitely something that you should be aware off before going ahead and creating a design using the app. Okay, so the next icon is graphics again. This is a feature that I do not use a tool on over, but it consists of a library where you confined graphics for use within your designs, many of which offer pro users only. And I suppose if you were to use a lot of these graphics in your designs, then the $10 or so monthly fee for over pro is quite reasonable. The logos area is where you can save your watermarks, logos and those graphical assets that you use most often. And finally, we have the latest area where you are able to find the latest graphics that have been added to the APP. Okay, so that brings us on to the final icon on our screen, which is the feature that you will probably use most often in over, certainly together with the images feature here on the left. And that is, of course, the text feature, which is the main focus of this tutorial, on which I am going to demonstrate for you by creating a simple design in the next video. 8. How To Create Simple Text Designs in Over: Okay. So to call up the text feature within over, we just need to tap on the text icon like so. And this brings up a keyboard where we can now type the text that we would like to use in our design. Now, the design I'm going to create for this particular example is for quite a popular niche which is trending at the moment. And that is the Funchal niche, which basically means fun. Uncle. Now, this is a totally saturated niche. So I do not recommend that you create a Funchal design yourself, not least because there are a couple of trademark spending. I don't think they've been accepted at the time. I record this, but it's probably best to steer clear of this niche just in case. Anyway, Funchal works perfectly fine for this example. So I'm going to begin by typing out the word Funchal. I shall type it in lower case to begin with, but I will probably end up choosing a front that displays the word in upper case. Okay, so I just need to tap the tick icon like so. And the word Funchal now appears in a white typeface or now transparent background. Now, if you look along the bottom here, you can see that we're currently using the next sir typeface, which is a default font that comes with over, as are all of these funds. But as I said before, you are also able to add your own funds to the app That is to say, fonts that you have the rights to use commercially, which is something I highly recommend you do. And I found that the easiest way to add new fonts is by exporting them to the over app from Dropbox using the dropbox app on your phone or iPad. But for this example, I'm just going to use one of the default fonts that comes preinstalled with over and we can scroll through the different fonts until we find one that we like the look off and specifically a good display front that will work well on a T shirt design. I quite like the look of this lemon milk front, but as you can see, this capitalizes all of the letters. And for the time being, at least I am going to choose a fund that doesn't do that. I quite like the look of quick sand as well. Yeah, I think I'll use that one. So once we have written the text and have chosen our typeface, there are still a number of different ways that we can change the look of our text using the different tools along the bottom here. And I am going to quickly go through each of these tool menus, in turn showing the different options we have for manipulating. Now text. The first is the style menu. Then we have the color menu. Next up is the size menu in the shadow menu. Then you have the A pass ity menu, followed by the rotation menu. Then there is the nudge menu to make little adjustments to the positioning of your text. Then there is the Blur menu, and finally, the blend menu. Now, before I do anything else, I'm going to go straight to the size menu and increase the size of the fund using this cool slider them the bottom here, so that will be able to see better when I apply further changes to the text later on. So that's how you can easily increase or decrease the font size of your text and As you can see, the text has remained sainted. Now the first of the menus I'm going to look at is the style menu. And as you can see when you tap on the style icon, two new rows of icons appear. The bottom one lets you choose from the four submarine use of style, which are a line space caps and curve, while the top row is basically the options available from that particular sub menu, in this case, the Align menu, where we are able to left, align the text right to line it or justify the text. Obviously, these are more relevant to a social media design than to a T shirt design. So I shall move onto the next sub menu, which is space where we can uniformly increase the spacing between each of the letters of the text, like so or weaken. Decrease the spacing. Okay, I don't want to change the spacing for this particular design, so I'm going to go up here and click on Undo so that it returns to how it was before. The next sub menu is caps where we are able to change the text to all caps or too small caps, which is basically lower case and finally title caps. But the first letter of each word is capitalized. I think I'm gonna make the text. All caps. Yes, that looks pretty good. Right. I'm going to leave that last sub minion to later on and move on to the next menu item, which is color where you get the choice of changing the text toe black white for opening up the color spectrum, where you are then able to use this top slider to choose a color. And then these three sliders below to determine the shade of that color, either darker or lighter as well as the A pass ity. Okay, I like that color. So I shall take that. Oh, actually, I shouldn't have ticked that just yet, as I've now saved that layer. And I still haven't showed jewel of the menu items yet, but not to worry. If this happens, all you need to do is click on the layer and then you get the choice to edit it, replace it. That is to say, change the words in the text or you could duplicate it, delete it or copy it. But I'm going to tap edit, And now I'm back editing the text once more. So where were we? Oh, yes. I've already shown you how to enlarge or reduce the text, but here we are also able to reposition the text. Now you may have noticed a yellow guideline appear here, which only appears when the text is centered. So that will help me while I reposition the text to where I want it so that it will appear near the top off the T shirt. I'm just going to pop back into color as I've decided that I want to create a design for a dark T shirt. So I'm going to change the front back toe white. Okay, The next menu item is shadow where the default is naturally set at shadow off. But if we tap on angle, you'll see that a shadow appears and we can now change the positioning of the shadow using the arrow keys so we can make it a little bit more subtle, like so and by tapping on blur, weaken blur the shadow with this slider that's making it even more realistic. That looks pretty cool. And we can also change the color off the shadow so we could change it to black. But I think, oh, going to the color spectrum and I'll make it a nice reddish glow. Lighten that. And last but not least, we have a pass ity so we can make it a bit more pronounced, all less so. That looks pretty good. But I'm actually going to turn the shadows off and go to the next menu item, which is a pass ity where again we have a slider which lets us control the level of a pass ity like so away, down to zero. Right. I'm gonna put that back up to 100% and move on to the next menu item, which is rotate. And this really is a cool feature whereby you can rotate the text through 360 degrees either anti clockwise, more clockwise, which means that we're able to place the text vertically like so which might look good on the side of a T shirt design. But I think I shall put it back to how it waas and move on to the next menu item, which is nudge. And this is quite a cool feature to as it zooms in on the text and lets us and nudge it up a tiny bit like so, or perhaps down a tiny bit, so that we can position the text exactly where we want it. And then the next menu item is the blur tool, and you get a choice of different brushes where you can add effects to your text by blurring portions or flat out deleting them. This effect probably works better on images, but I suppose it gives it a sort of simple, distressed look. I'll undo that. So we go back to what we originally had, and that brings us to the last menu item, which is the blend tool. But as we only have one layer in this example, there is not much I can do with this. But if I have some text and an image, then I could use this tool to blend the two layers. Okay, so I have saved my best feature on over toe last, and that is the curve text tool, and this really is a simple way for curving text, whether it is above on an imaginary circle all below one. And when used correctly, I think this is quite a powerful tool that can give you a great looking effect very quickly . So, for example, this text could sit above a graphic, and I think that would look pretty good. Okay, I'm going to undo all of these changes as we're going for a really simple, minimalistic text design in this particular example. But I hope that this has given you a good overview of just how easy it is to create a simple text based T shirt design using the over app. And once your design is finished, it is just a case of tapping on the save icon up here in the top right hand corner and then tapping on save two photos where it will save your design as a transparent ping. And in the correct I mentions already to be uploaded to merch by Amazon 9. How To Create a Text Design in Affinity Designer: Okay. So in the previous video, I showed you how to create a very basic text based T shirt design using the IOS or Android application over. In this lesson, I am going to use a professional design package to create a text based T shirt design. This is actually affinity designer, but I could just as easily be using another vector graphics application, such a za Dobie illustrator or even a Raster graphics application such as Adobe Photo Shop . And I suppose affinity designer has become my go to application nowadays when creating T shirt designs in terms of a vector graphic application, it is probably the second most powerful currently on the market after illustrator. But in my opinion, it is far easier to use and is also available at a fraction of the cost. So I would highly recommend affinity designer, especially if you were just starting out designing T shirts for merch by Amazon. That said, there are also some great free applications that you could use to create the type of text based design that I'm going to show you in this lesson. So don't feel pressured into purchasing a graphics application until you assure that the world of print on demand is definitely for you. And with that in mind, I will try and keep this tutorial as universal as I possibly can, so that you can follow along in whatever application you happen to prefer. And basically, what you can see before you is what I call my dark background template, which is the template I use when creating designs for the dark shirt. So much as you can see, it consists of these two rectangles at the bottom called gold color and cream color, which is basically a color palette that I have set up for. My dark T shirt designs and the other five layers that make up this template are simply rectangles that take up the entire space of the art board and are filled in with the exact colors of five of Amazon's dark shirts, namely asphalt, navy brown, I believe and black. And if I antic each of these layers in turn, you will see that my color palettes of golden cream works very well indeed, with all five of these T shirt colors. So I should just take them all back again, and I've managed to get the exact colors for the asphalt, navy, brown, olive and black shirts by using a really cool Google chrome extension. And I have simply gone onto the Amazon website, found a shirt that is available in asphalt black brown, etcetera and then used a color picker chrome extension called Eye Dropper. And if I go up to this chrome extension, all I need to do is click on the button pick color from Web page and then hover over the T shirt that I want to get the color code for in this case as felt. And over there in the bottom right hand corner, you can see the color that is currently showing, and if I click on the color, I have now selected it, which means that I can return up to the top here and open eye dropper once more where I can then make a note off the color codes for us felt. They're actually calling it dark slate grey, but Amazon called the color ass felt, and from here I can copy the Hexi decimal color coat, the RGB code, etcetera, etcetera, basically, which ever code works best for the graphic application that you happen to be using. So that is how I set up the background layers for my dark background template, and I would highly recommend that you do the same. Does it means that you are then able to see how your color palette and, more importantly, your design will work on each of the five T shirt colors. Okay, so now that I've explained my set up, let's begin on the actual T shirt design. And again, this is going to be a simple Funchal design, although perhaps a little bit more sophisticated than the designer created in over. And I'm going to begin by clicking on the text tool like so, and you'll notice that for this design, I am going to use a typeface called Mosque, which is one of the fonts that I showed you how to get for free in the earlier Funt sourcing lesson. And I have currently set it to a 288 point size, which happens to be the largest default point size in affinity designer, but which we can, of course, then change to fit out design. So I shall click on the art board and begin typing the word Funchal in upper case like so. And as you can see, 288 point is probably a little bit too big for this particular fault, as it's far too near the site of the design area for my liking. So I'm going to highlight the text and change it to a smaller point size. Let's try 240. Yes, that looks much better. Let's just reposition the text so that it is centered with the help of this green guideline , and I like to line it up near the top of the design space. That's about right. Okay, I shall make the text white to begin with. Using the color will over here, and the white color will obviously work with all of the darker colored T shirts. But I'm actually going to use my color palette as I want my design to stand out a bit amongst all of the competition out there and in affinity. Designer. We can easily change the color of the text by using the color picker tool. I just need to make sure that the text is highlighted. Click on the color picker tool and then click on the color gold, for example, which I'm sure would work very well on all of the dark T shirt colors such as asphalt, navy and brown. But for this particular design, I do not want to gold fund, but rather this beautiful cream color, which is really going to stand out on the shirt Now. At the moment, this is a little bit too simple for my liking. I actually want to do something different with this design. But before I get onto that, I just want to repeat what I mentioned in the previous lesson that the word Funchal has a trademark pending at the time of recording. Now, this may or may not be accepted in the future, but in any case, I would advise you not to risk publishing any T shirt designs around the word Funchal. Certainly not until we know whether or not the trademark has been approved or declined. However, it makes for a great example, especially because in this particular design, I am going to try and graphically show that this made up term. Funchal is based around the phrase fun uncle, and so I want to come up with a design that emphasizes both of these words, and I thought I would begin by separating the word fun from the word Funchal. And in order to do that, I will need to be able to manipulate the individual letters of this word and an affinity designer. The easiest way to achieve this is to convert the text to curves, and we can do this by highlighting the text, clicking on the move tool and then going across over here on the right 10 side and clicking on this double arrow, which reveals a menu that includes the command convert to curves. So if I click on that, the text has been converted into separate vector graphics that each of the letters which can now be manipulated individually in any way we see fit. As you can see, each letter now appears as a separate layer, and what I'm going to do is select the three letters if you and n making up the word fund and I am going to group together these three layers so that I can now manipulate the word fun. Okay, the next thing I'm going to do is use the control key and drank the word fund in words like so to make it a little bit smaller, but keeping it to scale, I will put it back over here for now. And so basically I have emphasized the word fun by making it that little bit smaller, and I'm now going to emphasize it further by putting a box around the word fund. So I need to come over to the Tools menu and click on the rectangle tool, and I'm going to make a rectangle that is the same height as the bigger letters. That is to say the C, l and E. I'm going to remove the fill off the rectangle so I shall make that transparent. But I do want the rectangle toe have a thick outline, so I'm going to increase the stroke value to five point. Okay, so now I want to move our newly created rectangle and fit it over the word fund, and I want to make this nice. And even so, I'm going to zoom, mean using the zoom tool, and then I want to adjust both the box and perhaps also the letters inside. Yes, I probably also need to make the word fun a little bit smaller That should be about right. Let's adjust the box as well. That should do it. And I will highlight the fun layer together with the box layer so that I can move it over a bit. Aziz. Well, excellent. Okay. Ah, think whole. Zoom back out now. So I'll choose Zoom to fit. Okay, so that looks pretty cool. I have definitely emphasized the word fun in Funchal. But what about the word uncle? How can we emphasize the word uncle within this design? Well, perhaps one way of achieving this would be to change the color off the letter F. I'm just going to zoom in again here so that we can see the word clearly on. What I want to do is click on the grouped word fun. And then if I go over to the layers menu, I can click on the individual letter F and highlight it. Now, I am able to use the color picker tool to change the color of the letter F to this gold color. And it might also be a good idea to change the color of the box to this gold color as well . Now, I actually meant to change the outline to gold, but I have in fact changed the fill color to gold. And if the F was still a cream color, then I think that would probably work really well. But let's make the outlying gold by clicking the outline here on the right hand side and then using the color picker tool to change it to gold. And then I don't make the fill transparent like so Okay, so I'm going to click on Zoom to Fit, and we can see that the design concept is working in that both the words fun and uncle have now, Bean emphasized. But I think we can make this design look even better. And if you remember in a previous lesson on typography, I explained that as well as the correct font selection. Another important thing to bear in mind when designing text based T shirt designs was Kern ing, that is to say, making sure that the typefaces evenly spaced and as you can see, although the letters in the second part of the words are evenly spaced, this is not the case in the word fund. You'll notice that the spacing between the letters F and you are considerably different to the spacing between the letters U and N. Now, depending on your graphics application, there are different ways to sort out the Kern ing of letters. But I'm going to employ a very simple method, which should be universal no matter what software application you are using. And that is to simply use a rectangle to make sure the spacing between the letters is the same. I'm going to change the color of the rectangle, so that's it shows up nicely. How about a bright yellow? I need to get rid of the outline. Of course. Let's zoom in so we can see what we're doing properly. And I just want to make sure that the spacing between the F and the U is the same size as between the U in the end. So I should just adjust the rectangle a little bit. That should be okay. And if I now drank this over to the other side of the U, I am able to highlight the pain you now layers menu and then use the left arrow key to notch the pain up beside the yellow rectangle. Like so and once I'm satisfied that the spacing is now uniform. I can readjust the box around the word fun and, of course, get rid of the yellow rectangle. The problem we now have is that the word fun is too far away from the rest of the word. So I just need to highlight the fun layer as well as the box layer, and I shall zoom to fit so that we can see what we're doing better. And then I could move it over like so right. Let's zoom backing, And I think you'll agree that now looks much better, thanks to the Kern ing. And while with zoomed in our think, we'll have a look at how our design will appear on the different T shirt colors just to make sure that it does indeed work. So the default is ass fount. This one is Navy, which is fine. He looks good on Brown also works really well on Olive, and it looks great on black as you put, probably expect. Okay, so let's assume to fit again. Obviously, when we come to exporting the images a transparent ping, we need to make sure that none of the T shirt color backgrounds are visible, or these color palette correct angles, for that matter. So I shall make sure the cream rectangle is no longer visible and do the same with the gold rectangle as well. However, before I do that, I had better check that out. Design is correctly centered, so I am going to group everything together on the layers menu, both the words and the rectangular box. I shall click on Group, and now I can make sure that the entire design is correctly positioned like So let's give it an ass felt background again. And there you go. That is our design, which is basically emphasizing the words fun and uncle in the word Funchal. So I'm quite pleased with that, and all that there is left to do now is to make sure that none of the T shirt color layers are visible, and then we can export our design as a transparent ping. Just double check that the dimensions air correct, and then I can export this Funchal designed to my desktop, and now we have a transparent ping that is ready to upload to merch by Amazon 10. What Next?: Hello. I would just like to take this opportunity to thank you for watching this class. And I hope it is giving you a good grounding on how us non designers can get started designing T shirts for sale through merch by Amazon. If you have enjoyed the class and feel that you have got something useful from it, then please take the time to leave it a thumbs up and perhaps also partake in the short class project, which is simply to state whether or not you have already been accepted into merch by Amazon , and also to state what type of simple designs you would like me to demonstrate in future classes in this Siri's based on this feedback as well as the direct feedback I received through my website how to sell T shirts online dot i shall continue to create a series of classes aimed at non designers which show you how to create great looking simple designs. The type of designs that just so happened to sell well on Amazon. Make sure that you follow me on skill ship so that I can alert you whenever a new classes published, and you can also have a look in the about section of this particular class for an up to date list off a lot of different design tutorials in the series so far. Okay, so thanks again for watching this class. And I hope to see you in one of my other classes very soon. Bye for now.