5 Easy Ways To Make Custom Designs For Your Products

How Can A Business of Custom Items Benefit You?

Custom-made items can add a lot of value to your company's products in the following ways:

• Attracting new consumers while increasing overall retention rates. 

• Easy to offer with Print-on-Demand (POD) business model. 

• Custom-made products don’t need inventory with platforms, such as Printify is risk-free.

Small business owners can quickly set up their store by simply uploading designs and customizing from over 600+ high-quality products in Printify’s catalog. Users can also set up a whole new venture, such as a custom clothing store or personalized wedding merchandise store. 

Let us discuss some easy ways to make unique designs for your custom products to break the market. Before we jump in, understand what you need to keep in mind before designing. 

Five ways to make custom designs for your product

1. Using a design studio

You may engage a professional design studio to develop unique apparel, presents, or other things for your company if creating designs yourself seems too difficult. Reputable design studio agencies such as Harper + Scott, Fuseproject, Brand New School, Hush, and others may handle the majority of the difficult work.

Benefits of leveraging a design studio:

• They develop realistic and detailed concepts and implement authorized plans to create bespoke goods that are ideal for your individual needs. 

• A quality third-party service ensures that your customization efforts are effective.

• They provide a more refined, professional understanding to allow you to experiment with various designs, colors, and concepts

• They have a comprehensive knowledge of your target audience and match your aims for generating unique products

• They can assist you with brainstorming ideas and creating mock-up designs utilizing the mock-up generator of your preferred POD platform. 

Design studio services are a more practical alternative to designing yourself if you have the resources and time to iterate.

2. Hiring a freelance designer

If your budget doesn’t allow you to leverage a professional design studio, the next best option is to hire an expert on a freelance basis. Once you have a design concept, a designer may assist you in creating aesthetically attractive designs for your items. 

Here are some platforms that can help you with it:

• Behance

• Dribbble

• Upwork

• Fiver etc.,

Discovering amazing designers using a variety of freelancing markets can be done with numerous avenues to locate exceptional design expertise. There are a lot of freelance platforms that could actually benefit you in this. 

You can even solicit referrals from your network. If a collaborator or peer in the same market can attest to a designer's competence and dependability, you can save an expensive vetting procedure.

Once you've found an artist, let them produce one graphic as a commissioned pilot project before proceeding with a sequence of ideas. Check that the design matches your goal, and don't become disheartened if the initial individuals you try aren't a good fit.

3. Using Glorify

If leveraging services from other professionals doesn’t fit your budget or isn’t your thing, don’t be afraid to give designing a try yourself. Glorify is among the most effective eCommerce tools in any design toolkit, whether you are a novice or an experienced designer. 

Some of the benefits of using Glorify are the following:

• It offers a variety of tools, such as mockups and brand kit

• It helps you streamline your process without being tethered to your computer all day long with availability to use on smartphones, tablets, and Chromebook when inspiration and creativity come to you

• Glorify is cloud-based and easy to access from anywhere and everywhere

• You can create customized designs with the phone app anytime and anywhere

• It provides great support even when using a gadget that does not offer plenty of memory or system resources

Using Glorify does not require a lot of skill or talent. It can be your trump card in the competitive environment of POD-based businesses for rapidly generating an inventory of appealing designs.

4. Get Images and Ideas through Shutterstock

If designing takes too much effort out of you, use Shutterstock to boost your POD designs. Shutterstock is a global major supplier of high-quality photographs, graphics, drawings, and other media, along with unique editing tools.

Customized item vendors have access to a vast collection of choices to choose from while looking for the appropriate print inclusion. If vendors use Printify as their POD platform, they can use the Shutterstock integration to simply choose an image during the product creation process by searching with a keyword, image type, and other parameters. 

Once the picture or layout is finalized, it could be published immediately to the business owner's preferred sales channel. These designs will undoubtedly stand out amid their lower-quality peers.

Using Shutterstock has the following benefits: 

• No need for designing your own graphics

• The Shutterstock Editor tool allows retailers to further edit their designs 

• Users can access various features, such as cropping, removing background, adding filters, adjusting the lighting and contrast, and so on

• It has an inventory with over 350+ million graphics to choose from

5. Designing on Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a strong application that is utilized by all graphic artists. It's mostly used for picture alteration, retouching, and corrections. If you know how to use the program, it can help you improve your design abilities.

With Smart Objects and filters, you can manipulate already existing images to create unique graphics for your customized products. Smart Objects are layers in Photoshop that hold and maintain data from imported photos. 

They provide you the ability to make non-destructive adjustments to a picture. With Smart Objects, users don't ever risk destroying a picture's quality or creating an irreversible modification.

There are many such features that give Photoshop an edge over other graphic designing tools; however, if you’re a novice, start by learning the basics of Photoshop through various tutorials made available online. 

You can also play with different features and work with various templates availed by Adobe and third-party designers. 

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How to produce your custom design products?

With the POD business model, the production of customized items is easy and risk-free. Once you have designs for your merchandise, all you need to do is the following:

• set up an account on platforms like Printify

• upload your designs

• generate mockups

• start selling

POD business model frees merchants of problems with managing, transporting, storing, and protecting an inventory. It also eliminates the requirement for order fulfillment since every product is made on order and dispatched directly to your client. It also implies that you won't have to spend a fortune on bulk inventories.

With a global print provider network, the range of products you can offer with such platforms is simply limitless. They offer simple printing services such as tote bag printing or customization of hoodies or you can use their services to produce customized products for pets and home decor. 

Two things to keep in mind before making designs:

While creating designs for your product, ask yourself two questions as you’re pulling inspiration: who uses the product and why is your product useful? 

1. The utility and purpose of your product

This suggestion is intended to motivate you to examine every part of your product more closely. For example, if you’re creating designs for a piece of clothing, you can ask yourself where is the piece intended to fashion. 

Is it party wear or casual? Should it be worn in the evening or morning? 

If it’s summer wear, it makes more sense to use bright colors, but fall colors tend to be cooler and signify changing the colors of leaves and temperature. 

T-shirts can fashion graphic designs and cool geometric patterns, but dresses look prettier with flower patterns. Therefore, it is only logical to find inspiration for your products based on their utility. 

2. Understand your customers

Similar to the utility of the product, it is critical to comprehend the complexities of the industry or marketplaces in which you want to offer your product. Seek to understand the trends in demand by the customers who will make purchase decisions and the clients who will utilize your goods. 

Understanding market trends can be your biggest inspiration in creating designs. It provides a huge advantage in terms of the financial significance of developing, creating, and offering your product for sale. 

When creating custom designs for the product ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the existing market design trend for comparable products?

• What distinguishes your designs from other options?

• Is there a place for your product in the same market?

• What makes a customer or consumer prefer your product designs over another?

Conclusion

Custom-made items can help you stand out from the crowd and connect with consumers for long-term happiness and brand recognition. 

However, make sure you thoroughly analyze your designs for custom-made product production possibilities. Use these easy tips outlined above and start creating custom designs to give a boost to your business today!

About the author:

Filip Nikoloski is a Partnership Specialist at Printify. Printify is a transparent print-on-demand and dropshipping platform designed to help online merchants make more money in a simple and easy way.