4 Takeaways I learned from the Book "Thread's Not Dead: The Designer's Guide to the Apparel Industry" by Jeff Finley:

Back to basic in times when AI invaded our designs. In today's blog post, I would like to share to you the 4 takeaways I got for the book Thread's Not Dead: The Designer's Guide to the Apparel Industry by Jeff Finley. But before that, I would like you to check this design here with discount within 48 hours. This design is the result if the ideas I got from reading the book. Grab it here. 

Now without further ado here the things you can learn if you read the book:

1.  Strive for a hand drawn design or something that looks like a hand drawn illustration. This means that if you know how to draw then by all means draw but don't be discouraged if you can't. As long as you can make your design looks like a hand drawn you are doing it right. Fortunately, I know how to draw and paint. Even when I am not yet starting a print-on-demand t-shirt business, I was already drawing a lot of subjects (buildings, woman, anime, and flowers). I was also hand lettering a lot which means I am drawing letters. When I read this, I felt I was back with my first love which is drawing. When I was starting out I was relying on AI for my clip arts. Now, things will be different moving forward because I don't want a design that can easily be copied by others using the AI website. I want a personal touch in my every design even when it would take me a while to do it. 
2. It's the Brand that sells. Capitalize on developing a t-shirt brand. "The most important thing in branding," according to the boos, "is consistency (design, website, packaging, social media presence, the way you talk, email signature, verbiage on website. The number one thing to remember is you are setting and meeting customer expectations. Work hard to make the entire customer experience a great one that consistently please and exceeds their expectations. Make sure all your designs look like they belong together and aren’t a smorgasbord of various design styles and themes. Be human in your branding and marketing. Craft a story behind your brand and put a face and voice to the company that customers could relate to. Cultivate relationships by doing things like surveys, allowing customers to vote on designs, showing them the process of taking design from sketch to shirt, and even showing them how a shirt is printed.” I am planning to dig deeper in branding my t-shirt design soon. 
3. You design must have meaning to the one who will buy it -- your target audience. The book said, "Have a solid idea and purpose behind it. It should mean something to your client or customer. What moves them and makes them feel good?" The design you are seeing here as an example is intended for the gardeners. Why I come up with this? It's because based on my Pinterest Analytics, most of my audience are looking for gardeners design. So I give what the customer are looking for. However, I would like to create also for Book Lovers because I am both a gardener and a book worm. I believe that in order to create a great design, the designer also like what she's doing. She herself is also proud of wearing what she created. 
4. When you are just starting out, you must focus solely on perfecting your design and nothing else. I fall short here because instead of focusing in designs I busy myself finding another means of earning online because I want to quit my job. I think of affiliates, copywriting, opening more store in different designs etc. I overload myself with more side hustles that I forgot I should be creating and sketching more. I have no focus and I open am overwhelmed. 

Now, I want you to take a look of this design and let me walk you through in my new process that is aligned from what I learned from the book. 

This design is  hand drawn starting in this sketch here--a pencil sketch to plot all of the needed elements. Then, I trace it with a red ballpen so I can see the letters in photoshop. 

The next thing I've done is tracing each element using a brush tool in photoshop. 

After that is re-arranging of letters, it's spaces in between and kerning. Then I proceed to cleaning. I erased all the unnecessary lines made by mistake as well as some dirt around letters. As you can see here, I already colored the letters.

As someone who's not very well trained in color combinations, what I do here is to find a t-shrit onlne with my intention color already executed in the design. I don't want to think too much about the color combination. I just need to find one that's already working and selling then use it. In the above screenshots, you can see that the background is white while below, the background I used is black, This is because I want to make sure that my design works in both light and dark t-shirt.  

The below screenshots shows how I added lines and arrows pointing to a flower in the middle to avoid white spaces. The flower that I created here was also coppied and placed below near the dog drawing because there were awkward spaces there.

This is not necessary but I do it anyway, I placed a "stroke" around letters to make the design pop-up even better in dark background. I don't know but I like doing this because this final touch make my design look like I don't draw it myself 😅

I made some few more adjustment like adjusting the arrows, the plants and the flowers, erasing those extra-elements that looks more as distraction to the design.

Then, it's ready to be posted in Teepublic and gifted to the gardeners in our lives. The niche is the "Plant lovers" cross niche to a "Dog lovers" in typography style with doodles and kawaii. See in real life:

I hope you learn from this blog post. What do you think of the design?