be designing from scratch a new t shirt design with Canva. Yep. I'm gonna be taking this top selling print on demand t shirt here on Amazon, but I'm gonna turn it into my own t shirt design by switching it up to be about corgis. And the way that I'll do that is by using Canva's pre installed drag and drop elements to create my own version of this t shirt. And I'll be showing you how I do this step by step. But before I do that, I do just wanna quickly clarify something. If you've watched a lot of my videos, you will know that I personally really like Canva a lot. However, you do not have to use Canva if you don't want to. Nope. If you prefer to use a different design app, then you can absolutely use that instead to create your products. I just personally really like Canva myself, and it is my go to app, which therefore also means that it just happens to be the app that I use in my tutorial videos because it's the app that I use. And it's because I do genuinely love it. I personally find it very easy to use because it has so many pre installed pictures, fonts, and elements like shapes that are just included by default within the app. So you can just immediately start creating with it. But you know what? The truth is, is that even in a very beginner friendly app like Canva, there's still a learning curve to getting used to using it. And 1 of the questions I often get asked is this, Sarah, how did you get so good at using Canva? And it's a good question. And the honest answer is that I just practiced a lot with it. Yep. I honestly just used it a lot. The more you use it, the better you get at it. And I'll tell you what, 1 of the ways that I practice using the app was that secretly, I would copy top selling product designs with it. And just to clarify, I did not sell the designs that I copied. Nope. I just used it as a practice way because by replicating top selling designs in Canva using their inbuilt pictures, features, and fonts, it forced me to learn how to use Canva's different tools. So if you're relatively new to the app, then my recommendation would be that as I create this t shirt design on screen for you, that you actually follow along and try and create the same t shirt design alongside me. Because I think that by doing that, that it may help you a lot in learning Canva's different tools and apps and features. So then to get started, you'll need to come to Canva and create an account. I'll have an optional affiliate link to Canva in the description of this video. Please note that it's an affiliate link. Using it is absolutely optional, but it is always appreciated when people do use it. So thank you if you do choose to use it. When you come to Canva, you'll notice that you have 2 different types of accounts to choose from, the free account and the paid pro account, which currently costs around 12 US dollars a month, which also has a free 30 day trial. The difference between these 2 versions is that some of the features or elements inside of Canva have a crown icon next to them, which means that only pro accounts can use those features or elements. And the truth is is that when we are creating this print on demand design, you will see that some of those pro only features are going to be very important. So I would recommend that if you haven't already to sign up for the pro account, and if you are on a limited budget, take the 30 day free trial and use it to create as many designs as you can within that timeframe. But yes, once you're logged into the app, you'll need to create a new blank canvas to design on. To do that, click create a design and then click customize size, and now you can choose what dimensions you want your t shirt to be in. And when you're choosing what you want your t shirt dimensions to be, it's often easiest to just use the printing area size of the product that you're gonna be selling. On Printify, you'll find that information by opening up the product editor tool from the supplier that you want to use. And on Printful, you will find that information by going to the product you want to sell and then coming to the file guidelines for it and seeing what the front print size area is. So I went ahead and typed in the print size area, and then Canva opened up a blank canvas for me, ready to edit. Nice. Now it's entirely optional, but I usually recommend that you go ahead and you change your canvas background color to match the main t shirt color or the main product color that you plan to sell. That way, you will know if your design looks good when it actually gets printed on it. So for example, you take our top selling t shirt design here. You can see that the main t shirt color is black, which doesn't surprise me since, well, black t shirts are usually my number 1 top selling color too. And in the industry as a whole, they are also the top selling t shirt color. So therefore I came and I clicked on the blank canvas in Canva and I selected the color picker and I chose black. And now my canvas is also black. Then next I came and clicked on elements. This is where you will find Canva's huge inbuilt library of graphical elements. So I went and did a search for a cute, quirky butt. I find that being as descriptive as possible makes it much easier to find what I want in Canva's image library. After that, I clicked on graphics since I wanted a cute graphic, but if I'd wanted instead a photo for my design, I could have clicked on photos instead. Canva has a huge amount of photos pre installed as well that you can also use. But again, I wanted a cartoon, so I clicked on graphics instead. And as you can see, Canva has a lot of different cute corgi images to pick from, so you can use these to create a lot of different corgi themed products like t shirts. But for me, of course, I wanted to have a funny, cute picture of a corgi showing off its butt. So I clicked on this graphic here. Once you've added it into your canvas, you can now drag it at the corners to make it both bigger and smaller. And you can also drag and drop it to where you want it and place it anywhere that you like. Okay. So something else that you might notice about this t shirt here as well that we are using as our inspiration is that it has a red line under the chicken's head to break up the design, which is a nice visual element. And to do that, we're gonna use Canva's shape tool. So we're gonna clear the search results to go back to the beginning of the elements menu. And now we'll be able to see the shapes option. If we click see all, you'll see that Canva has a lot of different shapes pre installed that you can use in your different designs. But since I wanted a line, I clicked the straight rectangle and then I changed its color to 1 that would match the corgi, which was easy because you can see that Canva's AI technology has automatically created a smart color palette. A smart color palette is when Canva takes a color palette of an element in your design and turns it into a palette that you can easily match colors from it. So it made 1 for me from my corgi graphic. So I was able to very easily choose the color that I wanted. And then I dragged and dropped it and changed and manipulated the shape of it so that it would be a long, thin thin rectangle sitting under the chin of my cute corgi picture. So once I had the pictures in place, it was time to add in the text. To do that, I clicked on the text button in the menu, and then I selected to add a heading. And then I clicked on the heading that I added and I changed the color of it to be the color that I wanted, white. Then I deleted the filler text and added in my first line, yes. And I dragged it into the position that I would roughly want it to sit in in my design. Now by default, when we added in this text, the standard font that Canva chose to use was, of course, its own Canva font. However, I wanted to choose a a custom font, and I also ideally wanted to find a cheeky bold font that matched the feel of the cookie picture that I had picked. So to change the font, I clicked on it, and then I clicked on the font dropdown box. And I went through and I tried out different fonts. When you click on a font, it will change the text that you've selected to that font. This way you can quickly try different font styles and see which ones you like and which ones that you don't. Canva has lots of fonts installed though. So it can be pretty slow just scrolling through all the fonts and picking 1 this way. And so instead, I recommend coming back up to the top of the font box and using Canva's built in font folders. You see, Canva has separated different fonts into different types of folders. So for example, if you were creating a retro design and you wanted to find a groovy style of font to give it a sort of hippie vibe from the fifties, sixties, or seventies era, then you could come to Canva's retro font folder, and you'll find a bunch of different retro fonts that are callbacks to previous decades, such as the groovy font style, nectarine. So for my design though, I wanted to have a fun, quirky, yet blocky style of font. So I instead came to the display fonts, and I went through the list, and I tried out different types. Because I had a lot of empty space to fill, I quickly realized that rather than going for a thin font, that I would need to go for a thick, bold font to fill in an empty space. And eventually, by trying out lots of different fonts, I settled on the capsulon font. And I like this font for 2 reasons. First of all, as I said, the design did have a lot of empty space that I wanted to fill, and so because this was a bolder font, it helped to fill in that space nicely, which was good for creating a balanced design. But secondly, it was a cute and playful font, which matched well when paired with the cute and playful corgi picture. So then next, I right clicked on the text and I clicked to copy the text box. And then I right clicked on the canvas and I selected to paste that text box. So now I had 2 copies of it. And then I switched out the text this time to say, what? Then I right clicked the canvas again and clicked paste to make a new text box. And I changed this to be corgi. And then I did the same thing again. I created a new copy text box and I changed the text this time to but. So I had created my text boxes, but now I had to play around with spacing them out. After all, you can see here in our top selling t shirt design that we are using for our inspiration here that the 2 lines of text on the top are smaller than the text on the bottom because the chicken head fills in some of the space at the top. By switching up the spacing and sizing of the text boxes, it created a balanced design. So this is exactly what I did now. I played around with the sizing of the text. I tried out different text sizes to get a look that created a balanced design. I also played around with spacing between the different lines of text by dragging and dropping them. And while I was moving the text boxes, you'll see that Canva would create some ruler lines and snap text boxes into certain positions. These recommended positions are automatically created by AI by the app being smart and guessing based on other elements in your design where else you might want to place text boxes to create a balanced layout. And at 1 point, I also realized that some of the letters were a little bit too close together. So I selected the text box that I wanted to edit, and then I clicked the spacing button in the editor menu, and I dragged the slider to increase the spacing between the letters so that the letters and the word would be more spread out. And so once I had moved it all into place, that was it. I had created my own version of this t shirt to sell. However, something was kind of missing. You see, I really liked how in the top selling t shirt that we're using for our inspiration, that the chicken had a little x on its butt. That both adds to the humor, but also compliments the quote too. So I decided to achieve this effect by using an image layer. I took 1 piece of clip art, and then I combined it with another piece of clip art to create the picture that I wanted. So to do that, I came back to elements, but this time I did a search for a heart doodle, and I clicked on graphics. You can see that Canva has lots of fun heart doodles to pick from, so I selected my favorite 1. And then I clicked on it and I opened up the color selection. And I again use the AI color palette feature that Canva has to put the same color as the other line art on the corgi picture so that it blends in and matches. And then I dragged and dropped this to the exact spot that I wanted to be in the middle of the corgi butt to highlight the heart shape that the fur usually looks like. And I also wanted to angle it slightly, so I used the angle button to slightly change the angle that the heart sat in. And once I had done that, I was done. I had created my t shirt design. So then what I did next was I took my cursor and I dragged it to highlight all of the elements that I had added to the canvas. And then I clicked the group button. By doing this, I had now turned them all into a single group, which made moving them around the canvas and increasing their size to fill the entire space much easier. And once I had done that, I was actually done. I had finished creating my t shirt print. However, we're actually not yet done because I still had to save my t shirt design, and this can actually trip people up because you need to do 2 things. Firstly, you need to make sure that you save your design with a transparent background because if you don't, you'll end up with that colored background as a giant box in your design, which we obviously don't want. But secondly, Canvas saves its PNGs currently by default as 96 DPI quality, which is not good, and I'll quickly explain why. It's because you see DPI stands for dots per inch. And well, when you do save your image in the format that print on demand apps require that you do, which is the PNG file type, the way that a PNG image is created by our computers is by adding in lots of little dots together. If you zoom in on an image really closely, you will see these dots. It's a lot like a mosaic painting. That is why the more dots that you have in your design, the bigger that you can print your design onto a product while maintaining good, crisp, clear, high quality prints, And why also on the flip side, if you have too few dots per inch and you try and print that image, it will come out looking blurry because you didn't have enough dots to actually fill the space that you printed onto. And so you had to stretch the few dots that you had to fill in that extra space, making it look blurry rather than crisp, clear, and sharp. And unfortunately, 96 dots per inch is not enough for printing a crisp, clear design. In fact, the bare minimum that Printful and Printify require is that your design be in 150 dpi, and this wouldn't even print it in high quality. That would be medium resolution. Instead, if you wanna print your design in high resolution, you really want your design to be in 300 dpi or close to that. But, of course, we can't do that in Canva, right? Well, you see, here is the thing. While we can't save our PNG image as 300 dpi, we can increase our canvas size when we save it in Canva. So what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna save our image as a much bigger image so that when we upload our image to a print on demand app, it will compress that image down in size, which will in turn increase the image's resolution. It's a little Canva printing trick that I actually invented myself. So first of all, give your new design a file name, and then to save your image, click share, and then click the download button. Then make sure that PNG is selected as this is the correct file type for print on demand apps. Then come to the size slider and pull it all the way to the highest point to make your image as big as possible. As you can see, this feature has a little crown next to it. So this is why we do need a pro account because otherwise we couldn't use this crucial feature. After that, click the transparent background box. This will now remove the background box from the image, so it will now be transparent. This feature also has a crown icon next to it, and so this is also why we need a pro account too for both of these features, and then just click download, and that's it. Canva will now turn your design into a printable PNG file. Because it is a very large file, due to us increasing the size, this may take a few minutes. Don't worry. This is normal. And look, we can now upload our design onto the product and sell it. Nice. But as a bonus, I also want to show you something else inside The E con clubhouse. Because you see in that top selling design, which inspired our t shirt, you can see that it has a distressed vintage texture that has been applied to the design. Well, as much as I love Canva, unfortunately, there is no way within Canva right now to easily add in a distressed texture. Nope. You can go inside of Canva, and you can find distressed filters and textures, and you can place them on top of your design, but all that is going to do is it's just going to add black markings onto your picture. And so then if you try and print that picture onto a t shirt, for example, that is not black, it's going to look terrible. Instead, we need to add a distressed filter that will add this texture, but make it transparent to match with any product variant color. And to do that, I actually use 2 other websites in addition to Canva. 1 is Creative Fabrica, and the other is Photopea, which is a free version essentially of Photoshop that you can access on your internet browser. So I will have a separate video tutorial that you can watch that will show you how to do this. But you know what? Not all products need a filter added to them. For example, here is another top selling print on demand t shirt on Amazon, and look, it has no distressed filter added to the design. So not all designs need to have any filters at all and can be sold as is. For many different types of design styles, you can just create them in Canva and sell them as is. So go ahead, give this a try for yourself, and I'll see you in the next video.