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