Create T-Shirt Designs with Affinity Designer

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this short video course of mine on how to create t-shirt designs with the Affinity Designer. The whole video course will be split up in a couple of different lessons. And I will talk about them in this introduction video now. So the first lesson is, what makes a good design? It's just so you have an understanding on what actually makes a good t-shirt design. So you understand why we take the steps and why we do the things that will be taught in the lessons after that. Then we will learn how to use graphics properly in your designs and how you can utilize them to make your designs look really good. And after that will be around creating vintage sunsets. I think everyone is familiar with t-shirt designs that include a vintage sunset or some kind of a vintage sunset. And that's what the lesson after that will be about. Then we will talk about how to curve and warp text because designs just get kinda boring if you use just the normal straight texts, like it is used right here now in this lesson. But it's a lot more interesting and t-shirt designs can look a lot more better. And you can create a very, very much by the variety of different t-shirt designs. If you can curve or warp your text. And this is what that lesson will be about. After that, we will learn about color choice, how to utilize colors, how to use colors in certain niches, and how to use them together. So they make a really, really cool design at the end and how your college choice can actually affect the design quality. Then we will round up the chorus with how to use ornaments to roundup designs and how to use them to fill the empty space in some designs that you might create. And how you can use ornaments properly in these designs. And this is a quick overview on what you can expect in this course. And now, let's jump straight into it. 2. What makes a good design?: So the first lesson is about what actually makes a good design with the Affinity Designer. And there are two kinds of points which are deciding for the quality of design and the viability of design. And the first two points are not really related to the design process itself. It's more about what kind of designs you should create and the kind of designs you should create. Our I would say mainly two. So not made it to, it's basically one thing, but these are two qualities you have to look out for. The first one is that the design should fit the niche. This is crucial, absolutely crucial. If your design does not fit the niche, you will never sell anything. If you create a design like this for, I don't know, for jujitsu or for karate, you will never, ever sell anything if you use a graphic like this for juicy carry whatever. Your quote is not really fitting because it's pretty self-explanatory. If somebody looks for design for his niche that is looking for, then your design has to be perfect for that niche, absolutely perfect for somebody to want to buy it. The second thing, after fitting the niche that is really important is to appeal to emotions. That means many people buy shirts related to topic that they are emotionally connected to. So for a hobby, many of the shirts are for Father's Day, Mother's Day, stuff like that. So people are more likely to make impulse purchases if you appeal to emotions. And this is why this is also so-so crucial to be able to create good designs. But the second thing about designs is what makes them look good. We really talk about the baseline here, but I want to, I want to tell you the basics because this is a mistake I see many people doing are making. So the second thing you want to do is your designs should fit into a container is how I would describe it. And what I mean by that is, for this example, I will take this design which I created myself a little bit of time ago. And we will make a little bit of texts. So this is e.g. for a barbecue design. So I will just as an example, put text here and then I'll put text here. And then you see here is text and then I'll make it a little bit smaller again. So you can see this would absolutely not look good as the design. And what I mean by containers. If you took this design and made it into a container and painted a container around it. What you could still do here is you have like **** ton of free space here. Like it's a lot, a lot, a lot of free space. And this is what makes the design loop, I would say pretty awkward because there's just so much free space, which just isn't filled out. So it looks kind of weird and awkward and it doesn't look like a unit is what I would say. More looks like you randomly threw in a little bit of texts with the graphic. So what you want in this example to do instead is you take this texts, you take this text, you take this text. And this already makes it look a little bit more natural and a little bit better. So if you would e.g. draw a triangle around this design, this would fit pretty well. Then maybe you could still add a little ornament up here. Appear a little ornament, which we will also talk about later in the course. And then simple as that, you have a design which looks pretty smoothly and it looks a lot better than the one we had before. So if you create designs always before actually finishing it, draw some kind of container around it. It can be this kid can be so many different things that could be a polygon. It can be the square root, can be a circle. You can vary and use different squares. It can be a segment. There are like infinite different opportunities for you. And yeah, this is the basic on how to create a good design. And in the next lesson, you will learn about how to properly use graphics within these designs. 3. How to use graphics: So now let's come to what actually makes good graphics. In the usual t-shirt design. You have, usually, I will just put a circle in here instead of an actual graphic. But the usual t-shirt design is always like a circle. Is it inherits the graphic actually, this is what I want to say. This is a graphic actually. So there's a graphic within the design. And then on top there's like a little bit of texts just there as an example. And then at the bottom, there's a little bit of texts. The graphic could also be instead of circular, could also be rectangular or whatever, whatever. Just, I mean, you get the concept. This is what the usual t-shirt design looks. It looks like. And what do you want to think about in this video is what graphic should actually look like in a design here. So what you actually want from graphics. So the two main things that you want from a graphic and I will also pull up examples here are, firstly, they should be absolutely straightforward. If you look at them, you have to be the first, second, 100% sure what you are looking at. There has to be no room for doubt, not a single bedroom for doubt. They have to be really simple and really straightforward. So it simply says, Neil Brian, yeah, that's the book. These are two people, kick boxing. This is what you immediately see about these graphics. And the second thing is, which also play into the stuff we already learned in the first lesson is that they should be easily containable by something that it'd be, in this case the rectangle. We already talked about it in the last lesson about the rectangles, circles, whatever, whatever. And these two graphics are really good examples for that because they are also easily containable in a rectangle. So these are the basics you really have to know about graphics. And just to repeat it for you once again, containable within some form. Which are these two then really straightforward and simple. Everyone instantly knows book fighters. Really simple. You don't have to think about that at all. And also they have to fit into the niche or fit with the whole design. So you can see these two designs are both pretty simple, which usually sell a lot better than designs that aren't simple, but more complicated. Because everybody just like simple designs more, they are just more popular. So you shouldn't over-complicate your designs, but they should be really simple and you don't overcomplicate them for any reason if it's not 100% necessary. Yeah. So that's pretty basic. You don't have to worry about much with the graphics. And now we will continue to talk about how you can create sunsets for your t-shirt designs yourself. 4. Create Vintage Sunsets: In this video, you will learn how to create one of those sunsets. You usually see on some of the t-shirt designs. As an example, I will use this sunset and use the exact colors. So we have 12345 different colors for the sunset. And that's what I will be working with. The first step you have to take is to use the Ellipse tool and create an ellipse and make both the stroke and also the fill color completely transparent. These are the first two steps you have to take. Then after that, what do you have to do next is create a bunch of rectangles and put them beneath each other. Exactly five in this case. And after you have the five rectangles, you can make them a little bit smaller. Adjust their gaps between them by aligning them vertically and space them vertically. And then you can move forward. So what you want to do is to fill the rectangles with the exact colors that are later used in the sunset. So you want to put them in the right order. So this is the rectangle at the bottom. The one above, above, above, above. You get the idea. So the first one gets red as a color. The second one gets this kind of yellow beige color. The third one gets this kind of Turkey, turkey cos, two keys, blue color. And the fourth one gets this yellow one. And then the last one gets this blue color that you can see here. And I see I just made a little mistake and forgot. Accidentally put the wrong color in here, but now they all have the exact colors from this sunset here on top. The next thing you do is you put them in a group by using Control G, put all the rectangles in the group and then place them beneath the ellipse. So this is what it will look at the end. This is what it will look when you're finished with it. That's actually how simple it is. It's not that complicated and this is all you have to do in order to create this ellipse here and this sunset. And you can now add all times, use the group and change the rectangles Colors to whatever you please. And then simplest that you already have your sunset finished. If you now, just like here, one to have a graphic that is completely subtracted from the sunset, where you can see through like the retired and the palm trees and the umbrella with the girl and the woman here. What you have to do is, I will, as an example, use across here. What do you have to do is to put the cross within the group of the rectangles and then go right next to opacity, you can choose erase. It is an option for the whole layer and then it just subtracts whatever you want from the other layers here. And it's just simplest that, not that complicated. And this way you can also create those kind of see-through graphics on the sunset. And yeah, that's basically it. Now you know how to create a sunset. And in the next lesson we will learn about how to use texts. 5. Curve/Warp Text: Now that we finished talking about sunsets, the next thing that we will teach you in this course is how to use texts properly. Because it's just kinda boring if you always have like the same basic plain texts and no variations. And just gets pretty boring if you always just go with the text tool and then say texts, texts, whatever. And it also doesn't look too nice because it always leaves a little bit space down here, especially with round graphics and circular vectors that you might use. So the next thing that I will teach you is how to actually adjust the text to make it round just like e.g. the sunset here. The first thing you have to do is to use the Ellipse tool and open up an ellipse here. And then the next thing you have to do is to choose the text tool and then hover around this line, the line of this, of this ellipse. And what you can actually see then is that the little icon changes from an a to a little tea with kind of a curve beneath it. So if you press while the cursor has this little t around him are beneath them. You can then write again. And now the text is written around this ellipse. Then the last thing you have to do is they are like two little regulators down here who regulate the borders of the texts. You put them at the side of the lips and then align the text to center. And then you're basically done with it. You can then adjust the lights a little bit so it looks better around the graphic that you might use, whatever, whatever. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Not too complicated. And this way you can get really nice texts effects and really level up your designs quite a bit with this technique. And there's also a second technique to actually may curve texts and be come a little bit creative with the program. And this is the second thing I will show you, has nothing to do with the whole adjusting the text to analysts or to another form or another path. But a complete whole different technique. But this is also one that you can use to make great designs. And this is one that I use very frequently. If not, I would actually say that it's the most frequent style of texts that I use for designs. It's super useful and this is definitely something you should keep in mind whenever you're designing. For. The second technique, we use an ellipse that's a little bit more flat because you can't really, with this technique, put a text in like 180 degree space. Same thing. And that's why I use a little bit smaller thing here. So what I will do here is texts, texts, text, whatever, whatever, whatever we stay with texts, texts. I think. Just to show you an example. So the first thing you do is you align your bottom of the text with the ellipse. And then you convert everything to curves. You click convert to curves right here, then ungroup them. Now you have to edit those one by one. So the first thing you do is to always pull down the middle. Like where you can see that I am scrolling up and down on the exact middle of the letter. You put the exact middle on the border of the ellipse that you are trying to draw around. And then you on the side here, pick the node tool. And what you do then is you put both or all notes directly on the thing you're using. But I made a little mistake here. I think I press the Control button while yeah. Okay. So let's do it again. You put it on the bottom. Next thing, no, to pull it down here. Pull the other node up. Then also adjusted a little bit so it fits with the lips. And then you go onto the next thing to the e. You do the exact same thing here. Pull the middle down, then this node, this node down. And then next thing you do is you adjust it and make it a little bit more circular. Same thing with the x. You just repeat this whole process over and over again. It's a little bit, it's a little bit annoying, gets annoying at times, but it's just what it takes to make texts look this way with Affinity Designer. Not really, not really way to work around it unless you also have Affinity Photo. But with Affinity Photo, it's so simple that I don't think it's necessary to show it in this course. And also it just doesn't fit the course because I assume that not everyone who takes this course also has Affinity Photo besides Affinity Designer. So I'll leave that out for a different course that I may create for Skillshare. Yeah. So just keep keep adjusting the whole thing. A little bit down here. Again. Like I said, can get a bit annoying at times, but just what you gotta do. To make this work. You will also see the effect the cells after we delete the lips. And it isn't there anymore than we can see like the full magnitude of what we're actually doing here and how it looks at the end. Yeah, let's go, that's nice. Now we also have this whole texts like kind of bend around the ellipse. But if we now deleted, you can see that after we group the text again, you can scan it very well. You can make it larger. Whatever. You can scale it up, down and you see that the text itself is still really straight, despite it being curved. And this is how you do it this way with a text. Yeah. So we're done with the two methods on how to use text. Everything else about the text is pretty self-explanatory. You can just type something and choose a font right here at the font selection. Then if you want to do something special with the texts, you can go with either one of the two methods that we just are I just showed in this video. So without further ado, let's move on to the next lesson, which is how to use colors problem. How to use colors properly in the Affinity Designer for t-shirt designs. 6. Color Choice: In this lesson, we will learn about colors and how to utilize them properly in your designs. This isn't really too complicated and there are pretty simple rules that you can follow when it comes to using colors in your designs. So the first thing is that obviously the color has to fit your niche. Which I don't know. It's pretty obvious. An example for that would be, I don't know, if you e.g. take this design here. This text isn't really a good text for the design. Just as an example, no world ever anyone who likes mixed martial arts or something like that would buy a shirt with the color in like heavy purple or pink and stuff like that or something like Turkey's a light green whatever or green, yellow, yellow maybe, but also not that popular. More a little bit darker colors and light colors. A little bit more serious like dark blue, the dark red and stuff like that, like a Bordeaux red vive and kind of calories more popular in that niche. And I think that's just pretty obvious. So for kids shirts, you don't use colors like black and white too much, but rather exciting colors. This is where you can use really light colors like pink, like turkeys, stuff like that. This is especially good for kids niches. And then the second thing you have to look at is the color of your design. What I really, really like to do is just for the texts. Use. Just let me make an example. Just use the exact colors that are actually also in the graphic. Because it just makes everything look pretty random, pretty nice. And yeah, that's basically it. So this is what I would recommend you to do with colors. Not too complicated, pretty simple, but makes sure to follow these steps. Because if you don't follow these steps and you do something else with the colors, it can basically be a K or criteria was why someone would not buy your stuff. And like your shirt designs and the colors have to be fitting every single time or else the shirt is just bad. But the rules you have to follow regarding the colors are still pretty simple. 7. Using Ornaments to round up designs: So the last thing that we will learn in this course is how to use ornaments properly. And ornaments are really, really simple things. So just like small shapes or small things you use to make your design look nice. So e.g. you could, in this design gives little stars to round up the whole MMA thing down here. Then you also use the same color. And those little ornaments are used for one only purpose. So I already talked about that earlier. But if you e.g. around this design, if you make a shape around it, then you see that if there weren't the stars with the MMA, then give me a second here, then right here, and right there, there would be kind of empty spaces that aren't used. So the excepts, exact same thing also goes for the spaces here, here, there, and there. And these are also spaces where you could use small little ornaments. I don't have them at hand at the moment, but I would use something like little boxing gloves and stuff like that you can just use to round up your whole design. That's basically the main purpose of ornaments. They're not a must-have, but if you have to round up your design, use them. They make it very simple for you to just make it look more round and better as a whole. 8. 8WrapUp: So that was it with the whole video course. I hope that you really enjoyed it and I hope that you learned something. Again. If you create any t-shirt designs with my course, you can upload them in the project folder beneath this course. And I will get feedback and give feedback to you as soon as possible. And if you have any questions or you want to see what else I'm doing, what are some upon? You can check my website which is linked, my Instagram, which is linked in my Twitter which is linked. And you can also send me an e-mail at the anatomy and sigma.com. I read through all my Twitter and DMs and through all my emails. So if you have a question or any inquiry, you have to contact me forum, send me a DM there, or a message there and I will answer you as soon as possible. I hope that you liked the course, it helped you. I would really appreciate a positive review. And without further ado, you can now start designing your own t-shirts. And I wish you the best success with designing those t-shirts.