6 Tools to Create Shirt Designs

Creating shirt designs in today's fast and technological world isn't just about artistic value, but about how flexible and efficient it is. Whether you’re choosing print on demand options or designing merchandise for your personal brand, having the right tools at your disposal can be the difference between your business succeeding or failing.

 

With the rise of AI, shirt design platforms have upgraded far beyond just pasting logos or art onto a shirt. They have mockups and AI generated art to guide beginner business owners.

We’ve gathered six tools widely used in the shirt design business, each serving the core purpose of shit design but with their own slight advantages. Depending on what your needs are, these tools can range from allowing scalability to speed and efficiency. 

1. YupTees

YupTees specializes in simplifying print on demand services for business owners. Instead of overwhelming users with complex designing systems, it helps users create shirt designs as quickly as possible with minimum input. This enables beginners to step into the clothing business by shipping out designs quickly for testing purposes.

 

YupTees also offers templates that users can edit as they like along with drag and drop options for easier customization of their designs. This helps users quickly visualize their design ideas with little to no time, making it an important tool if you are trying to test different styles. 

 

YupTees also shows what designs would look like in real life, this is one of the most important features of this platform. Many beginner sellers tend to fall in the trap of their product looking good on screen but fails to deliver during production due to either sizing issues or varying color profiles. YupTees also allows integration with many print on demand services, making the pipeline from designing to selling much more efficient.

 

YupTees may not offer in-depth artistic tools, but it is not meant to. It serves its purpose as an easy to use and fast way of designing store-ready designs with the least amount of effort. If you are just starting off in the clothing market, YupTees is a great starting point for you to learn and understand the designing process.

2. Vexels

Vexels is a design editor serving as a hallmark for building design ecosystems. It hosts its editor with one of the largest design libraries of ready-to-use graphics, logos and templates as of today.

 

Vexels biggest strength and benefit comes from its ability to provide scaling options for businesses. Its focus lies in providing users with professionally made vectors that are pre-optimized for printing rather than building everything from scratch. This is especially useful for businesses that are part of multiple niches and do not focus on one singular type of design.

 

Vexels also allows layered vector editing, what this means is that designs can be scaled to any size or shape without the loss of quality. This is crucial for long format prints, large screen printing and detail oriented embroidery. Many current online businesses rely heavily on Vexels because of its accessibility, low design times and ability to maintain a professional standard during printing.

 

For creators who want the best trade-off between quality and quantity, Vexels serves as a powerhouse for scalable shirt production.

3. Canva

Canva has become one of the most recognizable names when it comes to anything design related, and there is a good reason behind it. Canva allows accessibility that no other tool can provide, Canva can be operated but anyone without any background in designing.

 

For shirt design, Canva has a broad selection of pre-made templates, multiple text tools and image editing features. Its best use case is for text based shirts with minimal graphics and illustrations. These types of tools work best for brands looking to ship simple shirt designs at the utmost speed without any emphasis on complex designs.

 

Canva allows collaboration features. This makes it easier for design teams to view, edit and enhance their ideas along with their co-workers without any hassle. This attracts many startups and small businesses who are looking for free and simple to use tools for their small-grade productions.

 

Canva might not be the most advanced in terms of complexity and detail, but it provides a fast and beginner friendly interface for users of all kinds. If you are someone who just wants to design simple shirts and ship them to your personal brand or small businesses, Canva can get you started in a matter of minutes.

4. Kittl

Kittl belongs to the more advanced side of design tools, with a heavy focus on typography and layout aesthetics. Unlike other design platforms, Kittle isn't for generalized designing but rather optimized for bold and unique designs.

 

Kittl offers advanced levels of font editing, styling and various effects. It possesses layout designs with depth that would normally require users to know their way around professional design softwares. This accessibility allows designers to access high level and advanced designs despite not possessing any design skills.

 

Kittl also has templates that are tailored just for apparel related designs, ensuring that users don’t end up making common errors such as poor spacing or weak contrast between color combinations. 

 

Kittl focuses on making statement pieces that are enhanced by advanced level styling and editing, while maintaining scalability and print-friendliness. This makes Kittle an ideal tool for traditional printing as well as digital printing. 

5. OpenArt

OpenArt is OpenAI’s take on bringing AI generated creativity to the shirt design market. Its focus lies in generating visuals for shirts using text prompts, similar to LLMs instead of manual artwork. This integration allows for new realms of creativity, especially in experimental niches.

 

For creators in the shirt-design niche, OpenArt opens the door to custom and conceptual art that would normally consume a lot of time or cost a lot to be commissioned by manual work. It removes the limit to the user's creativity and allows experimentation without any drawbacks.

 

Another strength of OpenArt is originality, AI-generated artwork is unique and inconsistent with markets that are saturated with the same templates and repeat designs. Learning the right prompting strategies and keywords can produce phenomenal designs that would generally not be replicated.

 

While AI art is still in a gray zone regarding its ethical and moral uses and not every AI generated image transitions well into the production, OpenArt still remains a power idea generation platform that provides solutions in a matter of seconds.

6. MysticPOD

MysticPOD is a tool designed with automation and scalability in mind. Rather than providing just creative designing, it serves as a common ground between design, product creation and finalized pipelines.

 

MysticPOD focuses on allowing users to upload designs and spread them across multiple products. It also allows automating product listings on different platforms, making it ideal for sellers that manage multiple designs across different markets.

 

MysticPOD is not a tool that is used on its own, it works alongside other design tools to help efficiently deploy designs across marketplaces. For serious sellers that are focused on operating automating and scaling operations for their business while maintaining a standard across all platforms, MysticPOD serves as a backend support system for your business.