Tutorial – Customizing A Ready-Made Design

Tutorial time!  I’m going to give everyone a step-by-step pictorial on how you can take one of our ready made designs and turn it into a completely new and different work of art by changing colors, adding text, uploading photos and using some of the advanced features of the designer to dress things up!  Ready – here we go!

1. Choose a design.  You can do this by either clicking one of the popular designs listed on the right side bar which will open up the graphic in the product designer:

 

or clicking the graphics link in the top menu bar:

 

The graphics link will take you to a page which lists all of our designs by category, or you can just look through them all page by page:

If you click on a design that you like, it will open up the graphic in the product designer, just like first option above.

2. So, now you’ve found a design you like.  You can try it out on all of the different products that we carry by using the dropdown in the designer

Then you can resize it by dragging the handles in the four corners shown above until it fits/looks how you like.  Please keep in mind that all of the graphics in the designer are not the same size so the designer will let you know if you’re stretching/expanding a graphic too large for it to be printed correctly.

3. Once we have our design set up on a product, now we can make some changes!  Whenver you want to edit a design, click on the design name to open up the options available:

Now we have options!  Want to change the colors in the design?  To the right is a color bar which shows all of the colors that make up your graphic.  By clicking on the color you want to change a box opens – click the print colors button and a color palette opens up letting you choose what new color you’d like to change to – see:

I want to change all of the pinks in this image to blues.  Look what happens when I choose blue from the color palette ( I selected each of the pink shades in the graphic and changed them blue):

You can also add text to your design, just click the add printing text button and type your words into the box and click ok.  Then you can move the text around, change colors and fonts! 

Just make sure that you click on the box for the text or image you want to edit and you can go back and make changes as often as you like!

Now wasn’t that easy!  Let’s try some other options in the designer.  Clicking on the advanced link in the designer will open a box with more effects for your design – you can change  tones, turn your graphic black & white, give it a look like an oil painting, or charcoal sketch, whatever you choose.  There’s a small preview of what the image will look like on the right – click the green checkmark to accept or the red x to delete.  You can also remove your changes.

Lastly, lets take a look at the options under borders in the designer, you can find them under the advanced settings as well.  Click the borders tab as seen below:

In the picture below I chose to add a TV border to my image:

And in this one I chose a flower border:

See – now wasn’t that fun?  When you’re all done with your design, simply add it to your cart, or you can save and come back to it later!

And thats it!  See you for the next tutorial!

Edited: December 14th, 2009

Hmm, What should I design and how?

One of the questions I get the most from first time customers is what kinds of things should I design, and how?  Trust me…once you get your feet wet creating your own designs for print you’ll be hooked, and you’ll find inspiration for new projects everywhere.  One of the quickest and easiest ways to get started with a new project is to use our online design tool.  I’ve loaded the designer with lots of graphic elements that you can use to create an image for print, and more are being added all the time so you’ll have a large selection to choose from.  You can also upload your own images, which you can use as a finished product, or as a base to add other graphic and text elements to.  Don’t be afraid to explore all of the options that the designer has to offer!  You can easily change the background color of your items, adjust the colors of your graphics, choose different fonts and sizes for your text, and more!  Experiment with the advanced options, which allow you to choose different borders and shapes for your graphics, select gradients, different color effects, and filters.  You can warp your text, rotate it, enlarge it, add a stroke to it, and so much more.  You don’t have to be a graphic designer to get a great image, you just have to experiment and you may just be surprised!

Other ways to start creating designs are to use an image that you already have and love and make it into a printed product.  Scan in a picture of your childs new drawing, snap a picture of something that you think is beautiful, search the web for free graphics and arrange them until you’re pleased with the result ( be careful to check the copyrights of any images you don’t create yourself – you don’t want to get into trouble for using an image illegally!!).  If you have a graphic design program such as photoshop, take an image and play around with the different filters, these can change a graphic into something else entirely with awesome results.  Don’t have photoshop?  There are plenty of free graphic software downloads out there, one that I’ve used is GIMP, and I’ve posted about it here.  Try it out and in no time you can be creating graphics like a pro!  So now that we know what to do, get out there and start creating!!

Edited: June 16th, 2009