Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Cary Barnes, and I'm a mixed BD artist, designer, and teacher.
Welcome to my class. Design your word of
the Ear mug with Printipy where we'll go
step by step through creating your own custom mug
that will serve you all year long to remind you of your
intentions, hopes, and dreams. After spending 22 years managing my own product
based business, I've come to realize that
the easiest way to get your art onto products and out into the world is
through print on demand. I created this class with
the beginner in mind. If you're just getting
started with print on demand or exploring
the possibilities, I can assure you you're
in the right place. First, we'll chat a
little bit about choosing your word of the year, how
it can help guide you, and then I'll share a
framework with you that helped me to choose my word of
the year when I was stuck. Then we log in to Printify, select our Mg and begin
the design process. To keep things as
simple as possible, you can complete this
entire project entirely within Printify without needing any additional design software. Of course, if you're an
experienced designer, you can feel free to import your own design
elements as well. And after our mugs are designed, we'll learn how to
print and order our mugs through the
Printify dashboard. And before we wrap
up, I'll share some additional
design inspiration for those who want
to go further, as well as take a
look beyond mugs at some other fun products that we can use with our
words of the year. By the end of this class,
you'll know not only how to navigate the
Printify dashboard, but also how to design your mug and get it printed and
on its way to you. All you need to
complete the project in this class is a free
Printify account. So get comfy, grab that link in the resources document,
and let's get started.
2. Select Your Word of the Year: So have you ever picked a
word of the year before? Selecting a single word for the year can help you set
your goals and intentions in different areas of your
life and yet have them tie back to a single common goal that you have set for the year. Unlike a New Year's resolution, which is more of a
single specific goal, your word of the year will
guide you throughout the year and kind of form a
single thread or theme. I kind of like to look at it as a lens that you can look
through to keep you on track. For example, a word like adventure could entail being more adventurous in
creating your art. You could commit to traveling to new places you've never been to, or it could even apply to
being more adventurous in trying to meet new people or expanding your social circle. A word like breathe
could help you infuse a sense of calm and centeredness as you encounter
challenging situations as you approach your
art or even how you deal with your kids and
family on a daily basis. So if you haven't chosen
your word of the year yet and you like some
popular words to consider, I've created a resource
of 30 words for you and put it in the resources
section of this class. And if you'd like to go deeper, I'd encourage you to check out a podcast episode
from Nicholas Wilton, the artist and founder of
the R to Life movement. In episode 119 called
Your One Word, he talks about the importance
of choosing a word, and he helps you look a little closer at how your word could impact different
areas of your life, including love, body,
art, play, and soul. I found it really
helpful and insightful, and I wanted to
share it with you. It really helped me to
get unstuck and select my word for the year this
year, which is share. I'm sure it will reveal itself to me in different ways
throughout the year. But I chose Share
because I love to teach, and I'm looking forward
to sharing more of my experiences and knowledge by creating classes
like this one. I know I want to share more of my personal artwork
with the world, and I know that I
will also apply the word share to sharing
more of my time with others and cultivating
deeper relationships. Now that we've
talked a little bit about how to select
your word of the year, let's jump into the next lesson and start designing our mugs.
3. Design Your Mug in Printify: Now that we have our word
of the Year selected, it's time to jump into
Printify and start designing. Okay, so when you log into
your Printify account, this is generally what
you're going to see. This is my demo account, and over here you can see, I am logged into or
connected to an Etsy shop. If you don't have
a store connected, you won't see this area here. But the first thing we
want to do obviously is to pick a mug. Let's go here to the catalog. I'm going to click this
arrow and you can see just how many
different categories and products they have and they're always adding new ones. But we're going to go over
to the far right here to the home and living
category and click mugs. And here you can see
all the different mugs. You have quite a
variety to choose from. This plain ceramic
mug is very popular. They've got these with
the little accent colors. You can do a black mug. You can do these cute
little camping mugs. These enamel camping
mugs are popular. But we're going to select
this one right here, which is the ten ounce
insulated coffee mug from District Photo. So we're just going to click on. When we click in
here, it'll give some basic information
on the product. It says these
insulated coffee mugs are lead in BPA
free, which is nice. And also here underneath
the main photo, you can click to see if you're going to
end up selling these. They come with some nice mockups that you can take a look at too. When you're ready
to start designing, you're going to scroll down and click this start
designing button. Here we are in the Editor. If you look over here, when
you first come in here, this little information
tab will be open and just gives you
a picture of the product and you can download a design template if you're
going to design something fancy in Photoshop or Illustrator
or something like that. It shows you the
production cost and also the total print area
size, which is nice. But you can click off here. If we go further down the menu, you can see some other options. You can do an AI image, which is fun to
play around with. You can add a text layer. If you already have
images uploaded, this is where you would bring
one in from your library. Printifi has some stock graphics that you can select from if you wanted to
look through those, and you can also
create templates. There's some link to shutter
Stock and then also fiber. But for our purposes today, what we're going to do is
a really simple design. We're going to
upload a color block from our computer,
lay down some color, and then we're going to use Printifis native text editor to overlay that with
our word of the year. You could just use
the text option if you want to have a really
minimal look, that's fine too. But I really like the way
that the color block with the text makes that word
really pop off the mug. So in your class resources, you'll find a couple
of images and they're just simple colored
rounded rectangles that I created here in Canva, and then I exported
them as PNGs. One is the Pantone color of the year this
year is peach fuzz. Then the other is creative
Markets color of the season, which is called Orchid funk for those looking for
a little more zing. Okay, so I'm going to
add that color block now and we're going to hit this upload button and
you can see you have different options to
upload from our Mdvice. You could do a Dropbox
or even a Google Drive. It gives you the types of print file requirements
that you need, the types that are supported, which is JPEG, PNG or SVG, the maximum file size. Again, here's the
print area size, and this is pretty important
the DPI or the resolution. You're going to want at
least a 300 DPI file to get the best print. I'm going to click on my
device and find it on my computer and
I'm just going to click here and click Open. Okay, so here it is on the canvas and you can
you mouse over it, you'll see the little hand
appears like most programs, and then you can just click
and drag really simply. Um, I'm going to
resize this a little bit so that it doesn't go
quite to the edge of the Mug. And if you're resizing a file, again, you want to
keep that DPI in mind. So say I wanted to
resize this to 110%, for whatever reason that
it went over the edges, you'll see that that
will drop the DPI down and then that's
not sufficient enough. So um make sure when
you're creating a file, if you're not using
the resources I'm going to give
you with this class, that your DPI is at least 300. So I'm going to
scale this to 90%. You can either type it
in that box here or you can just grab one of the little anchor points
and click and drag. Okay, so then we want
to position this on the right side, I
guess, of the mug. And as you can see, when I start mousing over, there's a nice guideline
there that pops up that shows me that I am in
the center vertically. And then this white line here corresponds to this little
green dot and shows you, like, pretty much the center
of that face of the mug. So I'm going to maintaining
that vertical position. I'm going to mouse this all the way over where it snaps
to the edge just like that. Okay. Then I'm
going to click off and you can see we have our
first layer right here. Now we're going to add our
word of the Year text. I'm going to go over
here to the left and click the add text, the T, and Printifi has a lot of
different fonts to choose from. I've looked through the list and I've picked one
out that I like, and it's called LuckiestGuy. And we're going to I find
this vibrant purple. It's exciting and I thought the word play would be appropriate for something
that's this color. So I'm just going to
type in the word play. Again, if you click off, then you can pick it up and
move it to your location. You can adjust it like that. By dragging that like that.
You can also go up to the top and select a font
size, which I'm going to do. I'm going to you could
position this anywhere. Some people might like
it in the middle, but I'm going to put
it in the upper third. And then I think I'm going to change the color if
you come up tier to the top and click on Font Color, you can
pick all of these. You can also add a custom color, which I tend to other
than white and black, I tend to not like
these stock colors, but you can put in a hex code of your favorite color
and use that. But for this demonstration, we're just going to use white. And then I thought it would
be fun to add the year. So we're going to add
another text layer. And I like this little AeoFont we're designing this for
next year, so go 2025. Shrink it down. I think
I'm going to put that in just the lower
right hand corner. I found 28 points to be nice and then I'll also
turn that to white. Able to snug that in over here. And I thought it might
be fun if we get into this to collect you could collect a whole set
of these and see what your inspirations were and what your words of the year
were going forward. Might be kind of fun. So let's take a look at the preview and see how
this is coming along. So you come up to the upper right hand corner and
we're going to click Preview and you'll see it'll show all of
the different views, as well as a couple
of the mockups. So I'm going to click on
this right handed view. Yeah. Cute. And let's just see what it looks
like in a scene, what it might look
like in your house. Yeah. It's quite vibrant. Let's go back to the editor, and we're going to do a two sided mug, and
it's super simple. Once you have the
one side designed, you're just going
to click and drag so that you pick up
all of the elements. If you come up to the
upper left hand side up here at the top,
click the duplicate. I will create another three
layers just like this one, and you can slide it on over and there's
the vertical guide, and I'm going to line it. Snap its let go too soon.
Snap it to the left. And there we go. Perfect copy. So let's take one more
look at how this is. Let's take a look at
the left handed view. Yeah, it looks great. Okay, let's go back
in the editor. There's one other thing that
I wanted to share with you, and that is this
background color option. You could do this
background color and then just overlay text
if you wanted to. Let me show you though what the edges look like if you
do the background color. So number one, it doesn't
go. Let's look at the back. Number one, it doesn't go
all the way to the edge, and also it leaves this very sharp these
very sharp corners. I don't particularly like
these really sharp corners, but it's a design choice, and you certainly might. I just wanted to show you so that you were aware of
how that would look. Okay, so let's go
back into the editor. We'll turn this back to white. And then you're
going to come down to when you're happy
with everything, you're going to come down to
this save product button. Click Save product. This is where you can pick, if you were going
to upload this to say an Etsy or Shopify store, you would select the mockups that you want to include
in your listing. So in order to do that,
you would click on them. When they're here, you just hover over them and then click, and then they appear over
here in your library. And if you're just creating this for your
own personal use, you can pretty much
skip this section. Then click Save Selection. Here we are in the
mockups that we selected. And what you're going
to want to do is you see there's a Save as
draft or a publish. The publish is, you
know, obviously, what you would choose if
you were going to post this to a Shopify or Etsy store. And I go into a lot of detail into all of
that and how you can connect your
Printifi store to a Shopify or Etsy
store in my class, the artist guide to
PrintifyPrint On Demand. But for our purposes right now, you're just going to want
to click Save as draft. If you prefer a
softer color palette, here's an example mockup
that I created using the peach fuzz color block that is also included in
your class resources. If you want to
replicate this look, the font I used here is
called Architect's daughter. Now that you have
your mug designed, join me in the next
lesson and I'll walk you through how to
get your mug printed.
4. Print Your Mug: So now that our
mugs are designed and looking just the
way we want them, it's time to get them printed. So here we are in our
My Products listing, and this will show all the products that
you have designed. And when you're ready to
place an order for your mug, you're going to click
the Create Order icon, which is this little kind
of hat looking thing, and we're going to
click Create Order. And it kind of just gives
you shows you the price. Particular mug is $19.27, and we're going to
click for shipping. So here's where you would
fill in the recipient name and email and then also
the shipping address. If you were selling items out
of your Printify account, here is where you could put
in different name and email, you can also send the shipping notification
to your customer, and then you would click
Calculate shipping. Oop. Make sure you
choose your state. Here I can choose
from the standard, which is 674 or priority and just verifies
all your details, and then you can
proceed to payment, enter your payment information,
and place your order. That's the basic process
from start to finish, please join me in the
next lesson as I share another fun design option using decorative fonts from
Defunt and Canva.
5. Using Decorative Fonts: Now that you got
the basics down, I wanted to share a
little fun inspiration using decorative
fonts and Canva. Now, this is a little more
of an advanced technique, and it does require
the paid version of Canva in order to upload the
fonts into your brand kit. Alternatively, it would require some other design software such as Procreate or Photoshop. So here we are on defant.com, and this is just generally enormous library of fonts that have been added
by various artists, and it's changing all the time. And it's just a really
fun place to get some ideas for fonts that are, you know, a little
out of the ordinary. From the homepage here,
you can view any of the recently added fonts and
you can scroll through here. They also have a really
great menuing system up at the top, for our purposes, I really like to concentrate
on the fancy category, and some of my favorites in the fancy category
are the cartoons. There's a lot of
fun ones in there. They also have a
groovy one if you're interested in that
70s vintage style, and also another really
popular one or one that I think really fits
our application here is the decorative style. And you can really get lost
looking through all of these. But one thing that you really need to be aware of when you're looking for fonts here is if
you look over to the right, the far right, you'll
see here the licensing. This one says free
for personal use. Most of them are free
for personal use, and that's what we're
talking about here, making a mug for your own use. If you were looking to create something some products that you maybe wanted to sell in
your Shopify or Etsy store, then you would have to, um contact the author. Usually there are
licensing terms, and this one here says note from the author,
new license terms. Just be aware and conscious of which they're all
different because all of the artists are independent. I've gone through here
and I've actually picked out just a few of my favorites or
ones that I thought would go with some of the
popular words of the year. I'll share those
now. Okay, first, we have the pencilized font, which I thought was adorable. You might use this font
for a word of the ear, maybe for journaling
to journal or if your word was focus
that might apply. I noticed on this one, in order to get the
eraser and the tip, you have to use the
little brackets. So just keep that in mind
if you like that one. Next, we have one
called cute notes, and I did think
this one was cute. Looks like you're writing little posted notes to yourself, and I thought this
might be fun for one Award of the Year maybe
for learn or Organize. The next one is called
Monstar and this is a really different font and maybe for words
like sparkle or dream. The last one I have here is Doodlegum you could use this
for a lot of different ones. What I have here is words
like friendship or smile. And with this one, this
kind of brings up a point. You want to be aware also
besides the licensing issue, when you're using
fonts like this, you don't want to select fonts that have
super tiny details. So a font like this one
does have tiny details. It depends on the scale
that you use it at, whether or not those are
going to replicate very well in your print on
demand application. So in this class, we're
not going to go real deep into how to upload fonts and getting into
all the technical. But I thought I'd just
include a general overview on how you would use these fonts and how you
would get them on your mug. So generally, you would download the font
from defont.com. And then if you had Canva, for example, you would upload the font into your brand kit. Where you would then
be able to create a design with that type face, and then you would export
that as a PNG or JPEG, then you'd be able to
upload it to Printify just like we did in the
earlier lesson in this class. Now, please join me in the
next lesson as we look beyond the mugs to some
other fun products that are available
through Printify.
6. Bonus: Additional Products to Consider: I hope you've been
inspired to create a mug of the Year of
your own with Printifi. But before we go, let's take a look at some
other fun products available through Printify that we can use with our
words of the year. Okay, so here we are back in Printifi and let's take
a look in the catalog. And for our purposes here, I think the home
and living category is probably the best
one to stick with. And we've got a
couple of categories that I'd like to go
through with you. And the first one is going to
be journals and notebooks. And you can see that
there are a lot of different styles from the hardcover,
they're spiral bound. You can do post it notes
and even a note cube. And just a lot of great choices. But my favorite here
is the best seller, and I've created a mockup using this, and I'll
show you that now. Okay, here's an example
I want to share with you of the spiral
ruled line notebook, and this is a piece of art
that I purchased on Etsy, and I thought the word transform was of course appropriate
with the moth. And let's just do a preview and see what it
actually looks like. I think that's really beautiful. You can look at the open where
you see the rule blinds. That would be a fun way to
have your word of the year around you and you
could use it for journaling throughout the
year and things like that. The next category I wanted to show you was the
pillows and the covers. Just like the notebooks, there are a lot of choices. This is a spun polyester square. This is the cover and the insert or you could
just do the case. They come in four
different sizes, which is nice and
different sizes. You can do a sham. You
can look through these. Again, I'm going to focus on this best seller and let me show you a mock
up. I did on this. So here's the spun
polyester square pillow. Here's a mock up that
I did just using the peach fuzz color
and the word dream. And, um, this is
the corget font, and I would probably put it
on both sides of the pillow, but just for this,
I did one side. Let's take a look at what
that might look like. And if you did this in a color that matched
your home decor, it might be really cute to have hanging around for the year
to remind me of your word. The next category I think we should take a look at is
magnets and stickers. And this is a fun one. Again, several different
styles to choose from from the kiss cut sticker in which the background
is retained, but it's cut around
your sticker design. You've got vinyl. They've
got the die cut stickers, which actually cut out
the background as well. There's magnets, even sticker sheets and things like that. So you can take a look in there. We're going to take a look
at the kiss cut stickers, and I have a mockup that
I'd like to share with you. Okay, for the kiss
cut sticker mockup, I went back to the word play, and this is Titan
one is the font, and it is the orchid color, the orchid funk color
from creative market. And it's interesting on
this kiss cut sticker, you only get one layer. If you want it, um
uh, multiple words. This is a six by six sticker. What's really cool,
I'll show you in the mockup is that if there is a certain amount of white
space between two items, it will make them
separate items. So instead of one sticker
with three play words on it, you'll get three
different stickers. This is quite a large sticker. Let's do the preview. Here you can see
that you're going to get three different stickers. This darker line denotes
where the cut line will be. So let's take a look
at this mockup. I don't love the mock ups that they have on here at the moment, but it gives you an idea
of how big these are. You could do a smaller sticker and have them
smaller, of course. But you could have a couple
of these printed out and put them on your water
bottle or your notebook or anywhere around that you think would be helpful to remind you of your
word of the year. The last category is
bottles and tumblers. Again, lots of items
to choose from. Here they have a standard
20 ounce tumbler, stainless steel water bottles. You've got wine tumblers, can coolers, the
slim water bottle, but we're going to scroll
all the way down here. Actually. There it is. We're going to take a look at this Marsmker
skinny matt tumbler in the 20 ounce size, and let's take a look at
the mockup for that one. Okay, so here's the mock up on the Whoops Mars maker tumbler, which I thought was cool. I didn't go over the specifics, but if you look into the
details on this one, it keeps liquids cold
for up to 24 hours, which I thought was amazing. And instead of doing the
words as a wrap around, I thought it would
be fun to do them vertically along each face, and these dotted lines depict, each plane of the tumbler. The other thing I
liked is that it comes in all of
these great colors. And the other thing
is that you can have different designs for
different colors. So for example, on
the darker ones like the pine needle
and the deep teal, you'll notice the
words are white, that the font is in white. But they have some
lighter colors like this seglass and then you
can have them in black. So this doesn't really apply if you're just printing
it out for yourself, but if you were
creating products to offer for sale and
offering all of the colors, it really makes it nice. Let's take a preview and
see what this looks like. Okay, that's what it looks
like in the dusty blue. I think it looks really
elegant in the black. Yeah. I thought this would be really cool to put your maybe
morning smoothie in or sipping your water throughout the day and remind you
of your word of the day. So that's just a few of the
fun options that I had found. I hope they help to get your
creative juices flowing. I really encourage you
to just jump right into the PrintiFy Catalog and explore all the great options that
are available for yourself.
7. Class Wrap Up & Final Words: So thank you for joining
me in class today. I hope you've been
inspired to jump into Printify and create a mug
of the year of your own. Feel free to leave a
comment below if you have any questions or comments on the things that I've
covered here today. You can always connect with
me on Instagram at carry dotbns dot R. And when you
complete your project, be sure to share it with a
hash tag Create with Kari. I can't wait to see
what you create. So thanks again for
joining me today. I hope to see you again
soon. Bye for now.
Kari Barnes, Abstract Artist / Surface Designer
