Merch Design 101: How to Create Designs and Customize Products

Opening a merch shop is easy! Creating high-quality, custom designs? Now that’s a little more difficult.

Designing your merch should be fun, not headache-inducing. That’s why we created Merch Design 101: the lowdown on how to make quality designs and customize products in your merch shop.

Read on for everything you need to know about merch design!

Optimal Design Size

The size of your merch designs is essential for optimal print results. Our recommendation: Set up the longest side of your design with at least 4000 pixels. This allows your design to be scaled razor-sharp on any print area – regardless of the product, without loss of quality.

Design tools like Canva allow you to easily adjust the size of your designs to whatever you want. This makes it easy to upload your designs onto multiple products – T-shirts, stickers, tote bags – with ZERO issues!

Customize Your Products

We give shop owners the freedom to experiment with different design placement on their products. The standard front-and-center design on T-shirts and hoodies can get old.

Take your logo or any design and downsize it so it fits on the top right of your chest, like shop owner Nena Shelby did. And any design looks great on the back of T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies for fun change-up. These small design changes will make your merch more unique and appealing to your audience. Customize hundreds of products with your unique designs.

Make Quality Merch Designs

Canva is a great FREE design tool that allows you to create print-ready designs for your merch in minutes. If you want to pay a little extra for something more professional, we recommend our Spreadshirt Graphics Service.

They can take a rough sketch or any general design ideas you have and turn it into something stellar for your shop. The graphics service will have your design prepared within 3-5 workdays. Make your dream graphic design a reality — in 4 easy steps:

• Fill in the form below and let us know a) where you want to use the design, and b) what you want it to look like.
• Attach your file to the form. Possible file formats are jpg, png, gif, bmp, eps, ai cdr, svg, psd or pdf.
• Go to your shopping basket and place your order.
• After 3-5 workdays you will receive the finished graphic design file via email.

Customize hundreds of merch products with your own online storefront!