Solid design skills and experience are extremely crucial in the print on demand. After all, your customers are paying mostly for your design. Although essential, lacking design skills and experience doesn’t prevent you from finding success in POD.
If you want to know how you can create in-demand designs without graphic design skills, this guide will provide exactly what you need!
How to Create POD Designs Without Design Skills
Understanding POD Basics: What Sells and Why
When creating a design for your POD business, one thing you should know is that it’s more important to create what your target audience wants rather than what you think looks good. If you don’t have extensive design experience, your perception of what constitutes ‘good’ design may differ significantly from the general public’s. Therefore, it’s better to stick to these popular design categories first before offering something unique.
Some successful POD design categories:
- Niche-focused designs that speak directly to a passionate community
- Text-based designs with clever sayings or meaningful quotes
- Simple, clean graphics that communicate a clear message
- Seasonal or trending themes that capture timely interest
Simplicity often outperforms complexity in the POD market. The benefit of that is that they are relatively easier to create. Sometimes you only need a few words with minimal decoration to create a hot-selling design, as long as it resonates deeply with your audience. Additionally, don’t forget to learn the basics of design, such as font choices, color schemes, and overall layout.
Use Free Tools That Make Design Easy
You are not an artist, therefore, you don’t have to create your print on demand designs from scratch. There are many powerful free design tools out there with templates and designs that can be edited. These tools are your best friends when it comes to creating professional-looking designs with minimal experience in this field. Here are some of the tools you must know:
Canva: The POD Designer’s Best Friend
Canva has been my lifesaver! This free online design platform comes with thousands of templates, elements, and fonts that make design work incredibly simple. I remember sitting at my kitchen table, coffee in hand, absolutely stunned at how quickly I could transform a basic idea into a polished design.
The pre-sized templates for t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, and other popular POD products take all the guesswork out of dimensions and formatting. Plus, their drag-and-drop interface means you can create professional-looking designs in minutes, not hours.
Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels
These free stock photo sites have been absolute goldmines for my POD business. They offer high-quality images that you can legally use in your commercial designs. I’ve found that combining a striking stock photo with the right text overlay can create designs that really catch buyers’ attention.
Just be sure to check the license requirements — most images on these sites are free for commercial use, but it’s always good practice to verify.
Using AI Design Tools: The Game Changer
If there’s one development that’s revolutionized the POD landscape for non-designers, it’s AI design tools. Most AI-designed arts can be used commercially, and you can simply create a design by giving the AI generator the appropriate prompts. However, before you start using them on your print-on-demand designs, read the terms and conditions of the AI art generator of your choice carefully.
Midjourney (Paid Plans), DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion
These AI image generators can create unique artwork based on text prompts. The key to success with these tools is learning how to write effective prompts. In order to create designs that match your imagination, you have to be very specific with your text prompts. For example, instead of simply typing “cat design,” try “minimalist line drawing of a playful cat in black ink style, suitable for t-shirt printing.”
It may take a few refined prompts to get the ideal design you want. One tip that I learned about how to get accurate prompts is to use the reverse prompt features that many AI art generators have. For Midjourney, it’s called “describe”. When you provide a photo with this prompt, Midjourney gives you four text prompts to describe the image, and you can use them to generate the art you want.
AI-Enhanced Design Platforms
Another way of creating aesthetic designs is combining both the free tools available with AI Tools like Designify and Placeit now incorporate AI to help create professional-looking mockups and designs specifically for POD products. By searching up some stock photos on Pixabay or Unsplash and going onto Designify, you can create something unique. After that, you can use Placeit to create mockups to help you visualize how your designs will look on actual products.
Focus on Text-Based Designs
One way to be successful in the POD business with no experience is to focus on text-based designs. They’re the simplest to create and often sell extremely well, especially when audience connection is more important than visual appeal. Here is what you do:
- Research trending phrases and quotes in your chosen niche
- Select complementary fonts (typically no more than 2-3 per design)
- Add simple embellishments like underlines, borders, or basic shapes
- Choose a color scheme that works well for your target product
Alternatively, you can leverage AI to generate some heartfelt and humorous phrases, metaphors, puns, and other imaginative expressions.
Find inspirations
It’s never right to just copy designs, but imitating others is a crucial step for beginners to improve themselves. By studying and learning from others’ designs, you can improve your design skills and incorporate elements from them into your own to create winning designs.
Market research
Have a look at the designs that are on the market for your niche. Maybe do some competitor research to find some of the best-selling designs and modify them to suit your specific niche. This is a direct way to find designs that have a high chance of selling well.
Pinterest and Designspiration
Finding design inspiration from other artwork is also an excellent way to help you create your designs. There are numerous platforms, such as Pinterest and Designspiration, where you can collect some ideas for your designs. You can apply the patterns, colour scheme. typography, imagery, texture, shape, space, and more into your designs.
Learn and Improve as You Go
You should continuously improve your design skills, and you don’t have to do it through paid online courses or lessons. There are plenty of free resources online that can help you improve your design skills.
YouTube Tutorials
YouTubers are incredibly generous with knowledge sharing. There are many tutorials on YouTube on how to create POD designs. From how to create a POD using Canva, how to design in bulk, learning beginner to advanced design skills, basics of design, and more. Their free resources are sufficient for learning how to create winning designs, as most of these YouTubers have successful POD businesses without taking professional design courses.
POD Communities
Joining Facebook groups and Reddit communities focused on POD is invaluable. These groups not only share trend information, design feedback, and platform updates that can inform your design strategy but also provide guidance on other aspects of POD to help you build a successful POD business.
Conclusion
The biggest obstacle to POD success isn’t lack of design skills — it’s hesitation to begin. Even if you don’t have any experience in design, never let that stop you from starting a POD business. Start creating today, follow these tips, and learn as you go!
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