Summer is almost over, and it’s that time of year. No, not the start of school. Time to start thinking about the holidays! Before you know it, they will be here, so it’s time to start getting your holiday designs together. As soon as school starts, all the school supplies in the big box stores will be replaced with fall décor and supplies, including, of course, Halloween. Don’t be left behind. Start planning now so you can have your products ready to set up your online stores with all the new merchandise you have to offer, that or to set up your store fronts and booths at the fall fairs and festivals.

The upcoming holiday season offers a wealth of opportunities for apparel decorators to get their creative juices flowing.
Image courtesy of Dane Clement

When it comes to the holidays, whether it’s Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s or any of the many other celebrations taking place this time of year, there are endless opportunities. From dressing up to decorating the house and throwing parties and dinners, there is a plethora of options for apparel, home décor and more. Therefore, with so many decoration methods and products to choose from, why settle with just a single T-shirt design? Taking a single basic design and manipulating it in different ways to create a collection of products is a quick and easy way to conjure those potential sales prospects.

Think about industries like fashion and jewelry, or even party supplies. A jewelry designer will often come out with a new collection, as opposed to a single piece of jewelry. In the collection, you may have a necklace, earrings and bracelet that all match. Same stone, same setting, same design. Instead of buying a single piece then, someone may be tempted to purchase multiple pieces, so everything matches when they wear it.

Similarly, think about a child’s birthday party. The invitations, the paper plates, the cups, the decorations all work together. It’s all part of the same collection. In terms of your own business, think how eye catching it would be to have a store front, a booth at a craft fair or images online with multiple products displaying a cohesive series of images. Some products may include the exact same design in different sizes or locations. Others may feature variations on a design or the same images or elements from the same layout with different type.

Regardless of how exactly you choose to do things, everything works together. You can tell it all comes from the same collection. People will buy more than one item because all the products making up the collection mesh, as it were. If you only have a single T-shirt for sale or even multiple T-shirts, each with a different design, more than likely than not a customer will pick the one they like best and leave it at that. However, what if you had a mug or some socks that match? Now there’s an opportunity for additional sales.

Collections like this one offer customers that many more things to buy. The witch image is one the author repurposed from years earlie!
Image courtesy of Dane Clement

When starting your collection think about the direction you want to go in. Do you want to do mostly Christmas apparel—hoodie, leggings, socks, scarves, beanies and the like? Or are you thinking maybe a line of Halloween home décor—pillows, coasters, table runners? As a first step, check out the various blank products available and the best kinds of decorating methods to use when customizing them. Just because you may not do a certain decoration method yourself, or are incapable of producing certain items in house, that doesn’t mean you can’t offer them. Look into contract printers or maybe invest in some new equipment, like a heat press, that will allow you to offer more options, such as heat transfers or dye sublimation.

As you’re looking at products and deciding what kind of collection you want to create, think about the kind of artwork you have in mind and how you plan on putting it on these products. Maybe, you have some stock art or a T-shirt design that you have used in the past. Ponder how you can update or reuse it in new ways. Maybe you can extract an element from a previous layout and create a whole new set of layouts for products other than the T-shirt it originally came from.

There are many ways to manipulate an existing image for use on other products in order to create a cohesive collection. Take a T-shirt layout, for example, and resize it for a pillow or reduce it for some coasters. Extract such elements as the text or a single object from the original layout and put it in another location on the same shirt, like a sleeve or the back yoke. Maybe use the layout from the sleeve and put in on some shorts or leggings.

What if you’re just starting out and don’t have any stock art or previous designs you want to repurpose? What if you want to create something entirely new? The good news is it’s easier than ever to not only create artwork but do so in a fraction of the time it once took, thanks to the advent of generative artificial intelligence, or AI. In the past it would often take hours to get an initial layout done, which in turn meant you might not have the time to expand on it. Now with AI, you can get more designs done faster than ever, giving you more time to produce all those extra products.

There are many AI applications available today for creating artwork: Midjourney, Ideogram, Leonardo just to name a few. Photoshop has its own AI available, something it calls Generative Fill. The current beta version of the Photoshop AI even includes something called Generate Image, which helps you create full layouts from scratch. Some of these AI applications are free, but with limited downloads. They also may not be private, which means anything you create can be seen by others or have limited licenses preventing you from using designs you create commercially. It’s therefore important to do your homework and check out the specifics of the various apps available to see which one is right for you.

Once you’ve found an AI program you like, it’s time to create! Think about what you want your main image to be. This will be the image you put on larger items, like T-shirts or pillows. It will be the largest design and have the most components. It will also likely include multiple elements that you can then pick apart to use for whatever other layouts and products you have in mind.

If you’re new to AI, you’ll find that while it is a great tool for helping generate new designs, it’s not always perfect. Not only will you rarely get exactly what you want the first time around, but the more specific an idea you have in your head, the harder it will be to generate exactly what you are looking for. Be aware that you will need to do some creative editing to get to the final layout. This is true whether it’s adjusting your prompts, changing the words to try and get better results, or actually putting the generated image into a program like Photoshop and making the changes yourself. Regardless, you will still be able to create a final layout much quicker than if you start from scratch and paint the entire design the old way.

One of the AI applications that I like to use is Ideogram. When using it to create a Christmas design, it took some finagling. The initial prompt used was:

A T-shirt graphic illustration of a fun, festive, Christmas scene with Santa Claus, Ms. Claus, penguins and other wildlife creatures ice skating, done in a cartoon style.

While the results did provide some decent options, there were some quirky things going on, especially with the little critters, and overall, it wasn’t the intended look. The prompt was adjusted by removing “cartoon style,” which yielded better results. After selecting the “Illustration” option and using Ideogram’s new, more detailed “Magic Prompt”, the results were even better. However, the little critters still weren’t cutting it. To combat that, the prompt was edited to focus on the critters:

A delightful and festive Christmas T-shirt graphic illustration featuring charming animal friends ice skating, including penguins, a fox, a rabbit, and a deer. The background is a picturesque winter wonderland, with snow-covered trees shimmering in the twilight, their branches adorned with sparkling lights. The overall mood of this enchanting illustration is playful, heartwarming, and filled with the magic of the season.

Now the AI generator didn’t have to worry about Santa and Ms. Claus. Instead, it focused on the particular animals listed providing much better illustrations of what we wanted. Using pieces from the different layouts generated, a final layout was then created. From there, additional layouts were arranged for other products and placements to create a whole Christmas collection.

The final result of the author’s multistep design process looks great.
Image courtesy of Dane Clement

In trying to create a Halloween design, a few AI applications were used, with the same prompts employed in each app – T-shirt graphic of a whimsical Halloween-themed painting featuring Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf and the Mummy grinning and skipping down the street each holding a large bag of candy. Silhouettes of trees in the background lit by the glowing full moon. Jack-o-lanterns flickering in the foreground – the results varied greatly.

One thing they had in common was the fact that by trying to incorporate so many monsters in a single layout, the end result didn’t come out as hoped, similar to the Christmas layout. A number of elements, for example, were either misshapen or distorted. The characters overlapped as well, so you wouldn’t be able to extract them individually.

To create the look he wanted, the author focused on each of the “monsters” individually.
Image courtesy of Dane Clement

To remedy the situation, the prompt was adjusted to call out each monster separately, allowing them to be generated individually using the new Generate Image feature available in the beta version of Photoshop. Each monster could then be extracted and combined with one of the images generated using Midjourney for the background to create a new, final layout. Since the little monsters were all done separately, they could also be used to create additional layouts for more products, similar to the Christmas layout making a cohesive collection.

When creating your design, keep in mind your initial plan and the production method (or methods) you plan on using. While using AI to create a design for a T-shirt, try including specific prompts to improve the chances of it working well in that context. The prompt “a T-shirt graphic,” for example, can help generate edges that are more freeform, making them more suitable for T-shirts than a giant square or rectangle. If, on the other hand, you are creating products like pillows or coasters using dye sublimation, this might not be an issue, since you can print all over if the size of your equipment is big enough.

The end result not only looks great, it offers all kinds of possibilities for yet another holiday collection.
Image courtesy of Dane Clement

In general, AI software will generate images that are flattened and at a smaller size than may be ideal. Therefore, even if you get a design you like, you will need to do some work to extract it from the background and upscale it. Note: including “isolate on a white background” at the end of your prompt will make it easier for you to separate whatever it is you come up with from the background using image editing software like Photoshop. Most AI apps/websites will allow you upscale your design. However, Ideogram is one that does not. To upscale AI-generated images to a larger size and resolution, Upscayl (upscayl.org) is the free application I prefer. It will enlarge your image, increasing the resolution and sharpen the image as well.

Using AI and thinking beyond a single T-shirt design is a great way to offer more to your customers and increase sales. Not only will you be able to create a layout faster, you can utilize the image you come up with for yet more layouts creating yet more products. Turning just a few designs into full-blown collections will invariably provide you with more options for sale quicker than creating multiple unique designs for printing on T-shirts only. Don’t miss out! Start getting your collections ready now for the holidays!

Dane Clement is president of Great Dane Graphics, as well as vice president of creative for GroupeSTAHL. He has been speaking and writing for the decorated-apparel industry since 1987. He has authored several artwork-training books for various garment-decoration methods. For more information or to comment on this article, greatdanegraphics.com.