How to Make Your Own T-Shirt Design in 5 Easy Steps

Final product image
What You’ll Be Creating

Always wanted to make a DIY T-shirt design, but lacked the courage since you didn’t actually have the required tools or skills to design your T-shirt?

Well, all of that changes today, since I’m going to show you how to design your own T-shirt using Placeit’s online T-Shirt Design Maker.

From finding a T-shirt design to learning how to make your own T-shirt design, the entire process is as simple as it can get, as we will see in the following moments.

So, if you want to learn how to make T-shirt designs so that you can design your own tee shirt line, this video was meant for you.

Follow along with us over on our Envato Tuts+ YouTube Channel:

1. What Is Placeit?

Before we begin, I wanted to take a couple of moments and quickly talk about what Placeit is and how it can do all the hard work for you.

If you aren’t a designer yourself, most of the time that means that you won’t have access to the tools and resources that designers usually use, such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Designer, Sketch, etc.

But what if sometimes you actually need to create something yourself, but don’t feel like spending a lot of money on a graphics suite that you probably won’t use all that often?

Well, when this happens, Placeit can prove to be the perfect fit, since it comes with a set of dedicated online tools that help you create professional banners, mockups, logos, etc. using just a couple of clicks.

Let’s see how easy it is to design your own tee shirt using Placeit’s custom T-Shirt Design Maker.

design own t shirt

2. How to Access the T-Shirt Design Maker

Before we can begin working on the actual design, we first have to navigate to the correct section of the website in order to be able to access the T-Shirt Design Maker.

To do so, we’re going to be using the horizontal navigation menu by heading over to Designs, which will bring up a submenu as we hover over it.

Here, we’ll want to look for T-Shirt Design Templates, which should be the first option that we’ll see.

design your own tee shirt

When we click on the link, the website will redirect us to a new page, on the left side of which we’ll find the Tags menu. This will allow us to filter the available designs using the provided categories.

diy t shirt design

3. How to Use the T-Shirt Design Maker to Create a Custom Tee Design

So now we’ve seen how easy it is to find the tool, let’s take a look at the actual process of using it.

The first step that we need to take is to decide what design we’re going to be using for the actual T-shirt. As you’ve probably seen, there are quite a large number of really good-looking designs that we can choose from, depending on what we’re aiming for. Here are some that I really liked.

Mother’s Day T-Shirt Design

how to make t shirt design
Mother’s Day Tee Design

Illinois T-Shirt Design

make your own t shirt design
Illinois T-shirt Design

Illustrated Fox T-Shirt Design

how to design your own t shirt
Illustrated Fox T-Shirt Design

Business Cat T-shirt Design

design your own tee shirt
Business Cat T-Shirt Design

Valentine’s Day T-Shirt Design

design your t shirt
Valentine’s Day T-Shirt Design

For this example, I decided to go with this retro-looking design, which has a lot of potential, as we will see in the following moments.

retro sports t-shirt design
Basketball T-Shirt Design

Once we’ve decided which design template we’re going to be using, it’s time to go through the process of customizing it.

Quick tip: no matter what template you end up using, the layout will mostly be the same. On the left side you’ll have all your text-related options, while on the right one you’ll find all your background- and shape-related ones.

Step 1

We’re going to quickly overwrite the default provided text using the two input fields, and then adjust their fonts and colors using the dropdown boxes.

Since I’m going for a “funky” vibe, I went with Lakki-Reddy for the font and white for both colors.

As you can see, we can also add another text line using the Add Text button, but for this example, we’re going to keep to the default number.

example of adjusting the text

Step 2

Once we’re done working on the text part of our design, we can move over to the right side of the page, where we will adjust the Background by removing it completely so that our design can be used on any colored fabric (any except pure white ones).

By doing so, the tool will save the final design as a PNG file with transparency enabled, which will make it more versatile when used on non-white T-shirts.

example of setting a transparent background

Step 3

Next, we’re going to customize our Main Graphic by replacing the basketball with a hippy heart, and then setting its color a slightly lighter orange.

adjusting the main graphic

Step 4

Finally we have our last option, called Flag, which allows us to pick a different theme for the horizontal stripes, or even remove them completely using the No Image button.

Personally, I really like the default flag, so I’m going to stick with that version for the current example.

example of available flag options

Step 5

Since the template supports interactive editing, we can easily adjust the position and size of some of the text and shapes. Just select them, which will bring up their bounding box, and then click and drag them to another location, or drag the bounding box’s squares outwards or inwards, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

For the current example, I’m going to enlarge the main graphic just a little bit, so that it will draw more attention to itself.

If for some reason you’re not happy with your changes, you can easily undo them using the Reset Layout button.

example of resizing the main graphic

4. How to Export the Final Design

Once we’re happy with the final banner design, we can easily download it by clicking on the Download button, which will charge us a small fee each time we use the banner template generator, or we can choose to go with a monthly subscription plan, which will get us full access to all the templates.

example of downloading the final design

Now that you’ve downloaded the custom created design, you might be curious to see how it would look like on an actual T-shirt.

Well, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll quickly see that Placeit gives you the ability to do so using its custom clothing mockups, which will give you a quick preview of your current design.

quick mockup example

If you want to explore the entire range of available T-shirt mockups, you can head over to the T-Shirt Mockup Generator page, where you can upload your design and get a quick preview of how it would look when applied to all the different mockups.

example of using the t-shirt mockup generator

Once you’ve found a design that you like, you can click on it to further customize it, and then go through the same process of acquiring it.

example of using a custom t-shirt mockup

Since I really liked how this one looked, I ended up using it for the final design presentation, which as you can see really makes the design pop.

design applied on mockup

Great Job!

As always, I hope you had fun working on this little project, and most importantly managed to learn something new and useful during the process.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them within the comments section and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Expand Your Creative Skills!

Just finished going through this quick tutorial, and feel like learning more of what it takes to become a visual creative? Well, if that’s the case, then you’re in luck since I’ve put together a little list which should get you up and going in no time!

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