How to Make a Shirt Design for Cafepress

One of the hottest selling items on the internet are T-Shirts. People love to show their style or voice their opinion with a t-shirt. And while it is possible to buy your own t-shirt printing equipment, buy a domain name, and then put up your own site, it's really a lot easier to let somebody else do all that for. There are several online sites that let you set up a shop, load your designs, and sell though them. They do the printing and such, and you do the designing. Of course, they take a hefty cut, but if you want to avoid the trouble and expense, this is a good way to go. And perhaps the best known of these sites is Cafepress. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to design a T-shirt for Cafepress.

I'm going to be using Adobe Photoshop CS2 for this, but any good image editing software should do. The first thing you do is open Photoshop. Then go to File, and then click New. A dialogue box will open up. Here you should set the Pixel Width to 2000, and the Pixel Height to 2000. You should also set the resolution to 200. Unless you ant your design to have a background that shows as a square on the shirt (and you usually don't), change the Background Contents to Transparent. Leave the other settings as you see them in image one.

Now go over to the Layers palette and click on the Create a New Layer icon. This isn't strictly necessary, unless you later decide you do want a background color after all, in which case you can just Fill the background layer with the color of your choice.

Next, in the new layer, or any addition layers you add, create your design. This part is up to you, since I'm teaching you formatting, not art. In any case, you can see in image two that I have created an image with three layers. When your design is done, go to File, and then go to Save for Web. This will bring of the Save for Web dialogue. Now go to the upper right panel and make sure that you have it set to PNG24. This is important, since if you save in JPEG you will lose you transparency. While GIF also preserves transparency, it produces a very poor quality image for our purpose. Make sure you select the pane that shows the PNG preview, and then click Save, name your file, and you are all set. Now just load it into the media basket on Cafepress, and start making products.