Sell Printable Word Art with Canva and Etsy

1. Introduction: If home decor trends of the last 20 or 30 years has taught us anything, it's that people love words on their walls. And even though the message and the styles might have changed, that factor remains the same. Home decor has turned into somewhat of a fast fashion industry. People are updating their spaces all the time, whether that be seasonally for special events or even for photographs. As a result, there is a constant demand for fresh wall art designs that fit different trends or seasons. Printable Waller is a fantastic option for both creators and decorators alike. These designs are affordable, they are easy to print it your local printers, and they can be scaled for pretty much any frame that you already own. Best of all, you get to support a independent designer when you purchase them. As designers, the best thing about creating word art for your walls is that you don't have to be an artist necessarily to create them. A good sense of design is enough to create word art that is impactful and interesting to hang up. In this course, I'm going to help you with that sense of design. We're going to look at some different trends and styles within the word or niche. And I'll share with you some important design tips to help you create high-quality printables will also deal with some of the technical stuff like copyright and how to list on platforms other than ETC, to make your designs go even further. My name is Rebecca. I'm a book designer and a writer who owns several Etsy stores, including some that cell printable wall art. I think that creating WordArt is a lot of fun. So let's look at what goes into creating this type of product and running this business together. 2. Design Trends and Styles: In this first lesson, we are going to look at the general market for word art and what kind of products that you can create with it. Generally, when we're talking about WordArt, we are talking about the kind of art that is printed and hung up on the wall. But of course you can put your WordArt on lots of other types of products, including other printable options. So you could make printable greeting cards for all sorts of locations using cute phrases, poetry, quotes, or other inspiring text. You can make party decorations or table signs with quotes that suit a special occasion. You can make printable worksheets are planners with quotes or motivational sayings. There are tons of different digital products and you can spin off to work with the word art. In this course, we're specifically going to be focusing on wall art like the printable while art. But the principles here are definitely transferable. And if you want more ideas for digital products that you can sell on Etsy, you can always check us out my other courses for inspiration. Now, aside from the different product types, there are a lot of styles and trends within the word or niche. You might want to pick one of these to specialize in or find another common thread between the products that you make to give your shop a bit of a theme. When you're picking a text to incorporate into your Word Art, it's important to consider whether these words have longevity or not. So for example, if you were making a motivational poster with an inspirational quote, if you were going to reference a certain years Olympic games or something like that, that type of item might sell really well around one particular event. But two years later no one's going to be buying it. There are plenty of options to choose from that are kind of a tunnel or at least seasonal. So let's go over seven different styles of word art that you might want to consider making. So for these slides, I've created some examples. These are not pieces I'm selling, but they were just some mockups of what the kind of style looks like. So number 1, our single word art prints or a short phrase. So single word art prints can be very impactful and they are very neutral. So you can think of evocative words like peace or believe or faith. Even short freezes the live laugh, love is one, an example of this. So these types of designs can either stand alone on an iframe on a wall or they can work really well incorporated into a gallery wall. For standalone single word pieces. You want to consider the design aesthetics that is going along with it. A more minimalist design could have the word in a simple thought on a blank background. Something more playful might have the word in a funny shape or a color along with corresponding illustrations. Something that is a bit more artsy might have the same word repeated or manipulated in a way that gives it visual interest. The word itself becomes yard. If you're designing a single word piece to go into a gallery while collection, you're gonna wanna pay attention to the color palette of that collection and the role that this piece has a larger conversation of the wall. It's a little bit artsy, but it should all kinda flow together. Luckily, single word our pieces are very easy to work with, so you can add them into just about any collection. The second type is motivational art prints. So motivational art prints generally have a short slogan or a saying on them. Something that can be read from a distance usually, and we're usually talking about 10 words or less. These types of wall art are often paired with inspirational imagery and bright colors. A subgenre though, of motivational art prints is definition art. You'll see an example here in the middle, a single word in a bold text and then a snappy definition of the word in a smaller font alongside it. A lot of the motivational wall art that you find on Etsy pertains to work, hustle, and exercise. These niches are exceptions to that bright and colorful rule. Often you, they're going to be really blocky and you see a lot of black background with white text over top. That's a unique kind of nation that regard. These designs also often quote from famous people, particularly athletes or politicians. So think of like the role models for the people in the niche that you're serving. Contrary to this more hardcore cell niche, there is a demand for a motivational wall art that focuses on positivity, encouragement, and healthy lifestyles. You'll find motivational art that focuses on mental health, kindness, self-care. These pieces are the ones that are more bright colors, rainbow text. You find a lot of script writing and other soft elements. The third type is literary art. So literary word art prints feature quotes from books or poetry is generally focus on classic works like Jane Austen books, Shakespeare, gerald, Tolkien, and more. And also this is the niche that I tend to work in myself. Unlike other art prints that we're looking at, these are frequently whole passages from a book rather than a pithy sentence. So you'll find some pieces, bad features, several paragraphs formatted nicely in a very aesthetically pleasing way. These in particular use a lot of black and white without much embellishment or decoration. Usually you'll find the author name or the book name included in a different font and the main body text. For literary quote art that does include imagery. We see a lot of watercolors. There are images of nature and images of books. So think of it the kind of person who wants to hang a passage from a favorite book on their wall. They're probably very well-read, kind of a, a bookish type with a sense of adventure that is often reflected in words or pictures around them. For the most part, if you browse through this type of art print on Etsy, you'll see that the color palettes are pretty subdued. You'll mostly see black and white pieces and those that do have color are a lot of earth tones. Of course, this isn't a hard and fast rule. You could do whatever you like, but this is just what the market is kinda dictating for this trend. The next example is funny or sassy or humorous kind of art prints. People love putting up ironic or humorous saying on their walls. And there's a lot of opportunity here to capitalize on events, cultural trends, and slang. What you actually find funny is pretty subjective. So there are a lot of submissions of humor within this category, we have the tired mom or coffee sayings, their sexual innuendos, swear words, especially swear words in the context where you wouldn't normally find them. That's kind of the point of humor. Parodies of Zen or relaxing motifs. Again, often with swear words in them. Puns and funny turns of phrase and nostalgia, humor as well. Majority of these word art pieces are also black and white if you take a look on Etsy, but they often have an illustration to accompany them or to complete the job. Next, we have religious art. Religious art is a really big niche in general and Etsy. And when it comes to Word Art, Bible quotes tend to take the lead here. Design wise, we are almost always looking at entirely black and white text designs. If there are any illustration or artwork is usually going to be leaves or maybe flowers. But there isn't any overt religious symbolism on the pieces that ranks highest and this niche. So we're not seeing crosses or any religious connotations like that. It would actually be very easy to kind of look at these pieces and not realize it was religious. If you'd weren't reading closely. There's also a branch of this niche which is dedicated to religious art or Bible art for children. Here we see a lot of that flower and nature imagery still, but more colors and also animals mixed and especially very cute animals. As far as fonts go in this genre of Word Art, we have a lot of all caps text with one or two words in an accent script. So bold, minimalist, and feminine are words that I would use to describe the majority of this style. Next, we have seasonal art. So seasonal word art has some very big pros and cons. On the pro side, there is a guaranteed increased demand for this kind of product at certain times of the year. On the con side, the rest of the year, you're pretty much not going to see anything in terms of sales. For this reason, it doesn't necessarily make sense to run a shop that has dedicated only to Halloween themed art prints, for example. Unless you are also selling some other types of products, seasonal prints tend to be mixed in with more general types of Etsy shop. So if you have a general shop were or art prints that are run a different niche, you can also add in some seasonal ones if you want it. And when I say seasonal, I'm really talking about two things. So there are weather based seasons and there are holidays. A lot of people like to change out the art in their homes based on the season outside. And we see a lot of seasonal declarations and motifs for this purpose. As for the holiday art is most relevant for holidays that have a lot of lead up. So Easter art prints, for example, may not be in demand because there's not like a month leading up to it where you think about Easter, Halloween, and Christmas for example. Those are very big holidays that people are usually preparing for and decorating for at least a month in advance. The design themes that you see in this category is pretty much what you would expect. Seasonal color palettes definitely apply here. There's also a lot of competition, but these types of prints can make great additions to your shop to capitalize on year-over-year trends. And the seventh type of art print is hobby or interest based Word Art. And this type is very different than the other categories that we've talked about here Because they cater to very small but very specific demographics. For example, people who own and ride horses may not be the biggest demographic on Etsy with his hobby is more like a lifestyle from these folks. And so it spills over into their home decor. Highly targeted designs feature references to riding to the barn and common pitfalls are inside jokes to people who are part of this community. All that kinda stuff works here. I find that this type of product works well if you're able to target and interest groups that you yourself are part of. That way you'll actually know the inside references and lingo that makes the word art for these designs impactful. Otherwise, you may find that your design references are a little bit shallow because it might be hard to appreciate some of the nuances of these lifestyle hobbies and the types of humor that they enjoy from the upside. So now we've looked over seven different types of niches for word art on Etsy. These are by no means the only categories out there, but these are the major ones that you'll find people searching for with the intent to purchase. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we're going to look at some more specific design tips. 3. Technical Design Tips: Once you have a great idea for your word art, you're going to want to start to play around with the text on the page. Since we're talking about specifically designing WordArt with Canva in this course. In this lesson, we're going to go over some of the tools that Canva has to offer in addition to some general text design principles that you can use to make your piece look professional. My first tip is to limit to one or two fonts for your design. Creating designs with multiple fonts is challenging. The more fonts that you use, the harder it is to execute something that has a visual appeal and coherence. While it can be tempting to mix a bunch of fonts together when you're just starting to learn design and font pairings, it's a safe bet to limit your fonts to one or two that work well together. Typically, this will be a mix of Serif, sans-serif, and display fonts. Serif font is a font like Times New Roman. It has those little strokes or line embellishments on the end of the larger strokes in a letter. A sans-serif font simply means without serifs. So these fonts are a little bit block here and a little more simple. A display font is a fancier font that wouldn't be appropriate for everyday documents, but have high design impact. He's fonts are more frequently used on physical products or titles and headers. You wouldn't see a whole document of piece of texts written in them, but maybe a few key words or accent words. You can play around with pairings to see what looks good for your particular kind of design. Canva offers some suggestions about pairings in the text tab. You can see an example of what that looks like here. Just scroll down through the options to see different combinations of fonts that they recommend. You can also find font combinations on Pinterest. You can get inspiration from lots of different sites and examples have got appear our font joy, font pair dot co and type IO. We'll generate some font pairings that you might like to use. You'll just want to make sure that the fonts are using are available in Canvas. Or if you have a pro account, you can actually upload your own fonts. Generally, you can find pretty similar fonts for whatever you're seeking. If you just browse through Canvas library, they have a lot of options that looks similar to foxy might find elsewhere. My next tip is to play around with spacing caps and weights. So an even easier way to make sure that all of your fonts work together is to simply work within the formatting of one single font. You can do this by adjusting many different settings in your texts. So for example, you can change your font to bold, italic, or underline. You can mix up text capitalisation to be all caps or some caps. You can change the spacing between your letters. And you can combine these effects to create some very different results. So here on the screen you can see 14 different variations created by mixing those different font effects. The font I used here was called Josephine Sans Regular. If you're interested. Not all Canvas fonts have the bold and italic feature available. Some reason, but most of them do. So I made all of these and Canada, but just playing around with one font. Kendra specifically offers a lot of different font effects that you can use. Some of these are better than others for the purpose of word art. But I don't want to live at you by saying that any of these aren't useful. It obviously depends on your context. Shadow provides a layer behind the text you can customize in terms of the color, transparency and the blur. Lift puts a very faint black shadow behind the letters. The shadow is in all directions. And you can adjust the transparency of it. Hollow turns your text into an outline. And as a little side note, if you're ever going to create coloring book pages in Canvas, this is a really cool effect to use because it makes the text able to be colored in. If you've printed out the sheet. Splice is a combination of shadow and hello and is fairly rigid stylistically, I would say not a ton of application for this. Echo is like shadow, but several different layers behind it, which allows you to pick the color combination and the offset. It's basically like a 3D effect and make sure texts look kind of emotion. Neon creates a glow that varies depending on the color of your font. We will say that some of the colors look really great. This affect others, don't read very well. Curve is one of the most useful effects that Canva offers as it allows you to customize the curve that your text appears on. So the three of these that I find myself using the most InDesign work and even outside of the wall prints is lift, neon and curve. So let's take a quick look at my tips for using those three. So this is demonstrations of the lift effect. Lift is going to make your text pop off against certain backgrounds. Here if you read examples of four different backgrounds, just true for an example. In each box, the top two hellos have the lift effect in the bottom two do not. So generally, the two applications of this are to make light text pop off of backgrounds. Make dark text looks slightly soft around the edges. So mainly I use this font to make light texture up against lead your backgrounds, but have light or that have mixed light and dark tones so that cloudy sky in the bottom left here is a great example of that. Though white texts, it can disappear on the parts that are lighter. But look firing It's a darker. So lift effect threats that contrast. If you are going to use the lift effect for light colored text, I would recommend that you increase the intensity of the effect using the slider they give you. If you want it for when using dark text, you want to play around with the slider again, because sometimes you want it not to look too blown out. Now the neon effect requires you to play around with it a little bit to get some interesting effects. So first of all, I think this effect works really well for script. Fonts like cursive writing. So this is mainly because a lot of neon signs, trendy neon signs use that kind of writing due to the mechanics of the neon tubing. Like it's a, it's a tube that has the phosphorescence in it. I think. Don't quote me on that, but this is why the script font looks more natural. So on the left side of the screen here you can see that the neon effect I applied to four different colors. Black, white, and then pink and blue. I think that the hot colors like the pink tend to look best on their own. But you can't actually layer these up to create some more interesting effects. So on the top right we have two layers of neon text. Front back to the back one is neon and black and the front one is neon in white. So this kind of creates a soft look where the, which is a little bit like the lift effect actually butt lift doesn't allow you to customize the colors for some reason and doesn't go as intense as this. Second example here on the right has Pinckney on in the back and a plain white font in the front. There's no litho, no Neon effect on the white layer here. So this makes the edges a lot sharper as you can see, the white is really crisp along the pink. The third example on the right is that same combination of pink neon and white plain text. But I've offset the white layer slightly. I dragged it over a little bit. This almost creates like a neon shadow, which is kind of interesting and kind of Barbie texts. The fourth example on the right shows two neon layers offset with different colors. So the glow effect around the letters is transparent. And you can also play out the intensity and create a lot of different layered looks this way. The font I use for this example, by the way, is called zing rest script. And here are some examples of the curve feature. You can adjust the slider to decide how much your texts curves it gives you like a circle and you tend to have big circle is up to a full half circle. As you can see here, you can combine the curve effect texts with everything else we've talked about. You can use the other font defects like neon. You can do bold or italics. You can do an underlying technically. But it often looks a bit weird because it gets broken up like little chunks as it curves. So I wouldn't recommend that. You can also adjust the width between the letters as I've done in some of these examples, which looks quite nice. I think you could also do an inverse curve as seen in the bottom. Good morning there. So as you can see, there's a lot of ways that you can make a single font stand out and look creative and a design, you don't actually need multiple thoughts or even fancy wants to make a big visual impact as long as you play around with all these different formatting options. So going back to my design tips, my third tip is about artwork and illustrations. Sometimes words are not enough and you'll want to include another visual element in your piece. Generally, word art is combined with simple shapes or line illustrations. The focus of the piece is meant to be on the words. So any visual elements that you add, I meant to complement the text rather than instruct from it. Canvas own library of graphic assets can provide you with some materials to work with. So for example, a watercolor splash like I included in the first example here, or a simple line art flower Mike really compliment your text. I would highly recommend being very sparing with your illustrations that go along with the text. Of course, this will depend on your design niche. And also if you are an illustrator yourself and you want to create your own article with it. By all means. Most WordArt on ESI does tend to lean towards minimalism. So unless you're doing something very specific or bold, you want to just carefully consider your options here. My next tip is to consider the final print size and orientation of your piece. Consider how your piece is going to be displayed. The most basic aspect of this is whether your piece is going to be horizontal or vertical. I think there's a tendency to go with a vertical principles on Etsy based on what I've seen and what I've sold myself. But there is no limitation here and you should do what makes sense for your design. You'll also want to consider what aspect ratio you're going to be working with. If your pieces intended for a five by seven inch picture frame, you wanna make sure that the dimensions are correct for this, consider what common frame sizes your customer might want to put the pieces. I always recommend creating your Canvas bigger than the final dimensions, but with the correct aspect ratio. That way the customer can print the piece bigger or smaller depending on their needs. But the image will stay the right dimensions and the right quality, it will get squashed or cutoff to fit. So now that we've looked at these design tips together, let's head into the next lesson. I'm going to show you a walkthrough on how I create a particular kind of literary art print that I actually sell. And I am recording this walkthrough as a screen recording rather than a Kanban presentation like a do for the rest of the class. So the audio might be slightly different level, but it should still be clearing even. 4. Demo: Creating a Literary Art Print: In this walkthrough, I'm going to show you how I use Canva to create an art print that looks like this. Now this is a design that I have on one of my stores. That is a quote from Pride and Prejudice. And I think it looks pretty nice. It's got a good reception. So I'm going to show you how to make it right now. The first thing I've done is I've opened up Canada and I've created a canvas that is 8.5 by 11 inches. This is the size of a standard sheet of paper. And that's because I want this field to kind of fit in a normal average frame with just a typical mat on it. The design is also somewhat in the middle of the page, so there's a lot of whitespace on either side. So it is quite flexible in terms of the frame size. In order to stay organized, I have actually put down here in the notes feature of Canvas, all the text for my quote. And as I mentioned, visit Pride and Prejudice, which is a book in the public domain. So there's no copyright issues of me creating art with this quote. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just put the main text on the page so I'm going to copy everything except for the word Elizabeth. I'm going to leave that behind and copy that. And then over here I'm going to press T on my keyboard and it will put a text box and I will paste the text from the quote. So I'm just going to kind of shrink it down and get it to be the right size. For what I'm looking for. Here we go. And in terms of alignment, you can obviously do whatever fits your style. I'm going to justify this, which is this one here. That means that all the text ends on this line and ends on this line. It does increase the spacing between some of the texts or someone's had to adjust a little bit to make it look good. But since pretty okay. So you should be kips. There is how it looked on the example. So now because it's a literary quote, I like to put them in a serif fonts and medulla per one here. And let's try serif. Actually, I like this one. I think this looks quite nice. Okay, so we'll use this one and I'm going to make just a tiny bit bigger and then a little bit narrower. And put that roughly in the center of the page. So the design feature that I included was that the word Elizabeth, the first word of the quote, was in a different font and quite large. So I'm going to first give us some room, gonna go to the front of it. I'm going to press space and a bunch of times just to kind of push it over there and give myself some room to work. I think that looks pretty good. Pictures look too cramped. So now we're going to create another text box with T. And I'm going to write the word Lisbeth with comma, which is how it looks in the book. I think that could lot bigger and I'm going to look for a display font, which I think I'll do a handwriting. Thought. I like these Amsterdam fonts and their productive, they can, but they're not for pro members. Anyone can use them. So that one's quite nice. I like, I like this one. I think this is the one that I originally used. So I'm going to take it and I'm going to drag it right there. Just to try and fit it in. I don't want let me zoom in a little bit. I don't want this button to the z to touch this text just from a design perspective. So I'm gonna go into this box and I'm going to increase the line spacing a little bit. I'll put some more space between each line and that should give me enough space. So there we go. I quite like the look of that. And just make sure it's all up a little bit. Next, there is a small flourish that goes here that I want to add. So I'm gonna go into elements and when I search for flourish. And there we go, I like that one. This one is, I will say this is a Pro Designer here with the crown. I have a camera pro count, which is why I can use it. But if you want to use something that does not have a pro, logo is going to look like this one is free, that one's pro. You can just look through them and find something that fits if you only have a freak out. So I'm going to resize this a little bit, can make it small. It's sort of reminds me of the little insignias that appear at the top of chapters and books. So I wanted to kind of get that literary vibe, which is why I like this little decoration, Not, not nothing too big. Next, we need to add Jane Austen imprinted prejudice at the bottom is show what is quote from. So I know textbox will type jane Austen. I'm not opposed the idea of doing this. A fancy font again, but I think for the sake of the style that I kind of like, I'm going to go back and use our same font as the body text here. And we're gonna make this text capitalized with the right here, with the uppercase feature, and make it a little bit smaller and center it. And I think I'm also going to increase the letter spacing just to kinda make it look a little bit different from the main body text. A little bit smaller still. And then that looks good to me. And I just need to add the title. So I will duplicate that and type in Pride and Prejudice. And I'm gonna make that even smaller. And line it up right underneath. I'm going to select Oliver. Just move it up the page a little bit now it's halfway. Deal, I think with this particular design you want be careful is that this E gets a little bit close to the merchants. So I could make it a little bit smaller. And it's a little bit snugly in there. I think that's a bit safer for the margins of the page. And overall that's the design. So it's really pretty, I think what it looks like to me is as if there is a page from a book taken out and kind of shown as a snapshot. I think that looks nice on a wall in library, in a living room, and somewhere you have bookshelves around. Given that there's a bit of a cult following around Jane Austen's writing. This kind of art has a built-in audience of people who like her work. So making this something that's very minimalist, clean and pretty is going to appeal to that particular audience. To prepare this, to give to my client, I would go and give it a title plus 10 print, and then I would download it. I tend to do PDF print being a high-quality PDF just for the sake of the client. And then you could also create a JPEG or PNG as well of the same file. I would export that and then send it off to my Etsy listing. So as you can see, it's not terribly difficult to create something that is attractive and will look good either on its own or in a gallery wall. 5. Copyright Matters: We've covered a lot of design-related information for your word art business. But since we're frequently dealing with text that somebody else has written for this type of artwork is important to understand copyright and appropriate use of words that you incorporate with your design. So what are copyright terms for texts? You're going to be quoting something that somebody else has written or said. You want to understand the copyright restrictions about what you can and can't do with that. Text. Quotes are intellectual property. Therefore, you want to make sure that you're legally able to use that intellectual property for profit, which is what you're doing by selling a piece of art featuring those words. For example, public domain books sneak a really great resource for quotes. You can create art prints with quotes from Pride and Prejudice. Shakespeare can do ancient Latin saying, you can't, however, take a large passage or something from a piece of work like Harry Potter, for example, because that is protected intellectual property. But common sayings, turns of phrase, short combinations of words, anything like that is usually okay if it's not trademarked or anything like that. If in doubt, you can always just go on Google and search for the phrase you're looking for with the word copyright or trademark and see if anything comes up. Now when you're browsing through Etsy for quote art in particular, you might find that some sellers are trying to get away with words or images representative of certain big franchises. Disney would be an example of that. I would strongly discourage you from even touching those franchises because it is highly likely that your product will be taken down by xy. There are very specific loopholes you can use to get around these rules in terms of what sort of things you're using. But I personally would ever want to risk any of my shops over someone else's intellectual property. One not so bad method that you can't actually use those sort of one of those loopholes. Is it for a particular cases where you could go to the source material? So for example, a Disney's Alice in Wonderland is based on the Lewis Carroll's book. You would absolutely make word art from the book because it's in the public domain. You just want to make sure that you aren't incorporating design elements that include Disney trademarks. So for example, you could put a smiling cat like the Cheshire Cat on the piece, but you couldn't use the Disney Cheshire Cat. Typically, these sorts of intellectual property issues only apply to word art that relates to a fandom or specific media interests. Many of the other styles that we talked about don't have the same kind of intellectual property concerns. Now on the other side of the coin, we have the fact that you are creating a piece of unique art yourself. If you're using elements from Canvas library, you should be aware of their licensing terms. They say that you are welcome to use their free assets for commercial purposes. But you can't trademark designs that use them. This isn't really a problem for our purposes as it's highly unlikely you're going to want to trademark your word art, but it is just something to be aware of. I would recommend that you devise a way to put a little signature somewhere on the art piece. This could be your name, your shop name, social media handle. I like to put the at symbol and then my social handles. You can also design a very small emblem that it can be on the art piece as well. You'll want to make sure that there's little additions are subtle enough that they either don't catch your eye at a first glance or that they complement the design. Overall, I would recommend using a very simple font, an unobtrusive color, and the curve texts in Canva to make your name element hug another piece of the design. You can see this in action in the two examples here. So it's a little hard to see on the orange circle, but it's the same font color. And then on the S, I put it around the curve. When printed out, the text should be small enough that the enjoyment of the art print isn't impacted by the signature. But at the same time, if somebody looked at it closely, they'd say your name and they could potentially find your shop again to purchase more prints from you. This is partly for marketing and partly for protection. If someone ever tried to steal your designs, It's not impossible to erase these signatures, but it definitely creates a hurdle that would deter some art thieves. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we talk about creating the deliverable that your client receives when they make a purchase. 6. Creating the Deliverable: Once you have a cool piece of art design and your customer purchases it, they will be able to download the files right from xy. It's very convenient. You can certainly make this simple and just provide the print file here. However, I think this is a really great opportunity to provide some positive customer service. I like to include a README or thank you note with all of my digital products on all of my stores, if the file requires any instructions like a template or something, but I'll go with the read me that kind of includes details and how to use the file. But for something like an art print, I'll usually include a thank you note instead, this accomplishes a few things. One, it provides a more professional impression to your customer and reminds them that you are a real human being, an artist or a designer. They haven't just purchased a printable, but they've purchased heart. The thank you note is also a really great opportunity to prompt additional action from your customer. There are a few key things that I like to include in mind. So for example, I include a thank-you statement and reminder that their purchases supporting an independent artists that makes everybody feel good. I like to include a discount code for future purchases on my shop. I link my social media accounts or other online presences. Do note that Etsy will allow external links on their platform, but not to sites where you can purchase the same items that you sell on Etsy. So you couldn't link to your own online shop for example, but you can link to social media portfolios, custom contact forms, that kind of thing. All of those are fine. I also like to offer a freebie if they join my mailing list. So usually this looks like a statement saying, if you join my mailing list which sends out monthly emails about whatever my subject is. And you'll receive three art prints constantly to add to your gallery wall. You wanna make sure that whatever items you're offering as your free welcome gift are fairly universally appealing. They should be on-brand for your store. This is a great way to build a mailing list for marketing purposes, as he doesn't allow you to add customer emails from their website to mailing list directly. So offering a freebie here, you can kind of start to build that mailing list elsewhere with the proper permissions. And I will usually format this. Thank you. Note as a nice PDF and Canada with my own branding added in. But at the very least you could add it as a text file or something very basic when it comes to adding your art files. So the Etsy listing, you can upload five files per listing. However, these can be ZIP files which can contain multiple images if necessary. This is really useful if you're selling a big bundle with a lot of pictures. You may also want to include several versions of your art print. This could be a PNG or JPEG and a PDF. You never know where a customer is going to have it printed or what file type suits them best. If I'm only doing one file type, I usually go with PDF just because I find these images scale really well and the file size is usually pretty reasonable, but you can do whatever makes sense for you. So now that you've got your deliverable set, let's move on and talk about a couple of other tips for listing your product on Etsy. 8. Beyond Etsy: In this course, we've covered designing and selling your bird art in the context of creating an Etsy shop and listing your products there. However, Etsy has no exclusivity clauses and there are plenty of other marketplaces that you can try and sell your designs in order to expand your design business and increase the number of income streams that you have. And just before we get started, just note that this is an overview of the marketplaces that you can explore. Each of them has their own techniques and strategies for success, which you should look into if you're considering selling bear yourself. First, let's talk a little bit of a print on demand and how it works. Our focus has been selling art prints as digital downloads. This means that the customer has purchased the listing and are given the digital file for the artwork, and it's up to them to print it and display it. Another option for delivering your design to customers is to use a print on demand service. This means that you partner with a company that will print your design on an item. That could be a poster, it could be a T-shirt, tote bag or many other options. And they will ship it to your customer for you. You don't have to hold any inventory and you don't have to handle any shipping yourself. This makes print-on-demand a very attractive option for designers and artists. At C will allow you to partner with, select a proof, print on-demand companies by installing an integration onto your shop. They provide detailed instructions on how to do this on the website itself. Some examples of companies that they do this with our Gooten aren't aware and print full. And if you're Canadian like I am, you might like to know the art of where he's based in Canada. You're still in control of your listings when you do this and you're responsible for providing the images, the text, and the prices. And whenever a sale is made on your Etsy store at the integration Tells the partner company what to send and where. This can be a good option when you feel ready to expand your business beyond just printables, especially if you've had a lot of success with a particular design niche. But there are also other print on demand websites that you can use in the meantime that aren't just complicated, setting up an integration on Etsy. Red bubble is a very popular option for artists as it's extremely easy to open up a store front and upload products. You can upload your design and then check off which types of products you want to allow it to be printed on. You can create stickers, clothing, home decor, and many other categories of products. This is the platform and values, trends and means. So you'll see a lot of trending designs and reference Tiktok videos or media trends. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for WordArt here, many of the popular designs include text or quotes. However, you may find that the long-form pieces of Word Art get lost here a little bit. So you may want to stick with short phrases, humerus, sayings and things like that rather than multi paragraph classical literature quotes. Society 6 is similar to Red bubble. It's another website that you upload your artwork and select what types of products it can be printed on. The main difference here is the type of design that tends to flourish. Society 6 has a lot more artwork, particularly art that looks very professionally designed, like what you might find it a physical decor store. If you have WordArt this combined with illustrations or otherwise very visually impactful and it couldn't find a good home here, like red bubble, it's pretty simple to get started on selling here. You can create your accounting is starting right away. Next we have merged by Amazon. So this is a program run by Amazon where you can upload your designs that are printed mainly into t-shirts, but also a few household goods. They're kind of rolling out new products. This is a really different marketplace when the others that I've mentioned for a few reasons. First, there is an application process to get in. You need to be approved. And some people report that they have a very difficult time meeting the mysterious criteria. Others have no problem at all. And I'd say I'm one of those people. I didn't have any delays getting the proof for it. Secondly, this is an extremely competitive marketplace. Not only do you have the huge buying power of the Amazon customers, but you also have intense competition in the most popular Nietzsche's successes platform requires a lot of strategy and research to figure out how to stand out in those subnets. You can definitely print your bird art on the itemset, a merch by Amazon offers and t-shirts with quotes and texts are pretty common. Humerus sayings and trends do very well here in particular, but so do niche hobbies. So again, it requires some strategy to find success here. But there are a lot of artists thriving on this platform. And with that being said, we've now reached the end of the course. Thanks for sticking around and learning all about creating and selling word art using Canva and Etsy with me. I hope you found this course interesting and informative and that you are feeling ready to start creating some WordArt of your own. If you like this course and learning with me than you might enjoy some of the other courses I offered, particularly on Etsy success. If you're interested in learning by selling Canva templates on Etsy, then check out my course on that. And if you're looking for the more well-rounded introduction to selling digital products on Etsy. And you can check out my digital product success course. And that'll walk you through topics like keyword research, setting up your shop, creating your listings out what to put in listing descriptions, things like that. It's much more detailed. If you have a moment now to review this course, I would really appreciate it. I read every single review and they totally make my day. Now for the assignment for this course, I would love to see you create a piece of Word Art and share it with the rest of the class for inspiration. Don't worry about creating a masterpiece the first time. Just focus on getting some experience first and make something that inspires you. Happy creating and thanks for watching.