How to Create T-Shirt Designs on Canva

Want to create t shirt designs on Canva? In this tutorial, I’m showing you step by step, 3 ways to create and print your own t shirts using Canva. I’ll show you printed Tees I’ve made myself from Canva so you can see the quality and fit

🕒Timestamps🕒

1:31 Livestream starts

4:39 Designing a t-shirt in Canva from a template

9:21 Printing your t-shirt design

9:41 Where to find the sizing guide for your t-shirts

12:46 Single-sided print and Double-sided print

12:57 Selecting your t-shirt colour

14:31 Uploading a premade t-shirt design

17:53 Designing a t-shirt from scratch

19:49 The t-shirt in ladies small and men’s medium

20:40 A look at the women’s medium

21:10 A look at a Bella Canvas women’s t-shirt

22:00 Where do Canva t-shirts ship from?

22:24 Canva t-shirt pricing

23:07 Using Canva to create t-shirt designs to sell on other platforms

The wonderful designer on Fiverr.com who did my squared root t-shirt design: https://www.fiverr.com/valiantgraphic

🔥Get Canva Pro for free for 45 days🔥: https://saranguyenonline.com/canvaprofreetrial

💖Grab my Social Media Checklist💖 https://saranguyenonline.com/special/social-media-checklist/

👁️👁️Surprise: 50% off your print order codes…get them while they last👁️👁️

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How to Create T-Shirt Designs on Canva – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream. Just going to check that we’ve got feeds coming through and that you can see me and that you can hear me and we will get started in just a couple of seconds, but it looks like I have audio and I have video from what I can see.

I’m just going to wait to get the clearance from my producer, but I can, we’re just about ready to start. Thank you so much for joining me. Happy Friyay to everyone! Friyaaay!

Welcome to the weekend, excited to be here, and we’ve got the clearance. Hello and welcome to the live stream. Whether you are watching live with me now, thanks for joining me live, or if you’re catching me on the replay.

In today’s live stream, I’m going to be talking about and showing you how you can create your own t-shirt designs.
Whether that’s you wanting to create t-shirt designs for your business or if you want to get some designs done so that you can get them printed, I’m going to show you step by step, and I’m actually going to show you three ways of doing this using Canva, a really amazing tool.

I’ve got a whole suite of Canva tutorials, so make sure you check out the links in the description because I go very in-depth into how to use the tool. Let’s get right into today’s live stream.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I kind of live stream about live streaming. I help coaches consultants and creative pros build their business and grow using video and Canva’s one of the tools that I talk about a lot because it’s such a great way that small business owners, coaches, consultants can create their own social media graphics, print designs, and a whole suite of other things that Canva produce.

Make sure that you also check out the links in the description. If you are lucky to be live on now and able to grab the codes, 50% off Canva print shirts.

If you watch this tutorial, designer print, and you want to actually order something, you’ll be able to get 50% off the whole order. Even if you order a couple of shirts, it’s the entire order, which is pretty cool, right?

Once they’re gone, they’re gone, but the links are in the description, super excited to have them there. Let’s go into, the tutorial now that we are actually all ready to go.

As I said, I’m going to show you three ways of creating your own t-shirt designs in Canva. And at the end of the tutorial, I’m going to talk a bit more about what you can do.

Some of the rules, I’ve spoken to a couple of people from the Canva team to get the low down so that you understand what you can and can’t do. And this shirt in case you haven’t seen it before, check this out.

It’s squared root. For any of you math nerds, I had this design and printed, in Canva. And I’m going to show you how I did that in this tutorial as well. Let’s go over to my computer now. Okay.

As usual with everything with Canva, you will need to log into your Canva account. I’ve also got a link to a free paid trial of Canva. With Canva, you have a free version and a paid version.

If you go through my link, you get the paid version for free for 30 days. Make sure you grab that so you can use all of their amazing features. Now, in order to design a t-shirt in Canva, the first thing that you want to do after you log in is get to the t-shirt designs.

And I’m going to show you how to create it using their templates. I want you to find the t-shirt design, and you can do that using the search bar. If you type in t-shirt in the search bar here, or you can actually see it in this section here, the create a design, and there are all these things.

But these move all the time, so your best bet is, type it into the search bar. Everyone likes a good search. And then what you get is all of these different pre-made designs, right? And pretty impressive, really beautiful designs.

And the beauty of this is that you can change them. You may like a certain layout, but you don’t, you want to change the text or you want to change the colour scheme or add your own bits and pieces.

And you can definitely do that. Scroll through the designs, see if there’s something that you like, I’m going to select this one, this run kick goal one and open up the design, alright? And from here, what you can do is you can change the design.

This will be the actual print that is on the t-shirt. I’m going to change it, the text, so you just type over in terms of the texts that you want to change. And I’m going to make it a little bit smaller. It’s a bit too big for me there.

And with Canva, everything that you do is a matter of selecting the element that you want to change. Whether that’s the text or adding an image, and then you’ll see at the top here, the menu items change.

I’ve changed the text there. All I did was put my cursor in there and type over it. And then this menu item changed where I could change the size. I could change the font and you know, make it bold, underlined whatever I want. I’ve done that.

I’m going to keep changing it. You can also duplicate elements. I’ve selected this whole block and on the right-hand side here, there’s this plus square thing. And if I click that, it would duplicate it. I’m going to go and just go in and design it.

My point is that you can really customise it to be whatever you wanted it to be. Kind of classy, kind of classy, kind of classy. And really it is so flexible.

Go in and change the elements that you want. This is yellow. I clicked on it in order to change it in the left-hand side here, there’s this colour option, and I can change it to be pink, right?

Or I can change it to be blue, or I can change it to be any other colour in the colour spectrum. Alternatively, if I wanted to add, let’s say I wanted to add photos.

I could, or you know, other images I could type, I could look up the photos to see if I wanted to drag one through. I could look up the elements on the left-hand side. All of the things that you can do are on the left-hand side for the most part.

And then I can search what I want. Let’s say, I want to add a heart because hearts are cool. I would type in elements in the left-hand side, heart, find a design that I liked, click on it, add it to design, resize it just by dragging it and moving it to where I want it to be, right?

You can have a play around, change the text, move the text around, and that’s essentially it. You’re able to, you know, play around with their actual templates. Now, what if you don’t like this template? That’s okay.

You’ve opened a template and you’re like, “Hmm, I’m not really liking this one anymore”. You can click on, add a new page, so you can keep the old one while you look at new ones, then in the template section here, you can swap out to have it as another design.

You can either scroll through all of their designs here or search for something that you like. Maybe you want something with unicorns, right?

Search for what you want, if they don’t have it, they’ll present you with other, shirt options. But there are so many options here. Unicorn was one I didn’t research earlier before I did this. Hence why this returned no results.

There’s so many designs that there’s bound to be something that you really, really like. I’m going to go and have a look at some of their pop culture ones, right? And look at all of these ones, beautiful designs.

It’s a matter of clicking it you know, adjusting the text to be whatever you want it to be. And then adding extra elements to it, using their templates. And it’s so easy.

And I’m going to show you the one that I ended up with. I took this one here and then I created this one, this kind of classy kind of hood one. Alright so after you’re happy with the design.

What you want to do is go to the top right-hand corner and you want to click on the print t-shirts or just click on that button there and click on print t-shirts. And then what this would do is that will open up the options for you to actually print it.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about sizing and the sizing guide and printing. In terms of the sizing guide, you’ll see here underneath the select your colour and just above the quantity, it says size and guide.

If you click on that, you’ll be able to actually see the t-shirts sizing. And this will vary depending on which region you’re in, I’m in Australia. The t-shirts that Canva used for Australia they are, I just forgot there, AS Colour.

They use AS Colour for Australia and New Zealand and they use Bella canvas for the US, Canada and the EU. As you know, AS Colour is a really good, t-shirt brand and Bella Canvas, if you’ve never had a Bella Canvas shirt, I’ll show you one in a minute.

It’s this beautiful quality, soft, luxurious, quality t-shirt as well. They use really high-quality brands, but it really depends on where you’re at and you know, they use different suppliers based on which country you’re actually in.

Make sure that you check on the sizing guide because this means that the sizing will vary depending on which colour, which colour, which country that you are actually in as well. And you’ll see that women’s shirt, they’ve got the sizes here, men’s shirt, they’ve got the sizes here.

I found that they were actually true to size. I got the women’s small and the women’s medium just to try it out, ’cause you know, I like to live on the wild side like that.

And when I measured it, it was actually the correct size. ‘Cause you know sometimes t-shirts can be a bit give or take, but I found this was actually quite accurate and same with the men’s size as well.

The men’s size we got in a medium and that was actually true to size as well. That’s where you go to check out the sizing in terms of which size to actually pick. I’m just getting a message.

The next thing that you want to have a look at is, you’ve got the options here to print, just one side. You can select to print one side just the front of the shirt or you can print on the back as well.

You just choose which one you want. If you have two designs, then you can choose which one goes on the front and the back. I’m just going to put another sign here. And then you’ll see that you get to choose which one will go on the front and which one will go on the back.

That’s pretty cool. We want page one to go here. And then on the back, we can choose page two to go on the back. You can choose whichever one that you want to go on the front or the back.

That’s how you would choose the print, whether you, where you want it to appear single-sided or double-sided.
That was really unclear. Let me talk about that again. If you wanted like one print only, you would select single-sided.

If you wanted to print on the front and the back, you can then choose which design. Page one to be on the front or page two to be on the back and you get to choose that. That’s where you select the settings there.

Then you get to choose the colours, you’ve got at the moment for the Australian orders, black, gray, navy, and white, and then you get to choose the size and they’ve got a range of sizes: small, medium, large, and then a couple of extra-large sizes as well.

And check out the sizing chart, the size and guide in order to pick the right one for you. That’s essentially it. You create your design, you choose whether you want it to be single-sided or double-sided, if it’s double-sided you can choose, you know, which one goes on the front, which one goes on the back.

And then you choose your colour, you choose the size, the quantity that you want. And then they, all have the Canva print, t-shirt prints, they include delivery. Delivery is free, but it’s included in the cost and then you select continue and that’s how you would actually order your t-shirt.

It’s as simple as that. You would create the design, go through to print it, follow all the prompts, select continue, and then it will put my personal details for the whole internet to see, add all of your details so that you can ship it to an address, so put your address in there, have a contact number and then you’ll pay for it as well.

That’s how you would do it. If you were to create a t-shirt design using their existing templates. The second way that you can create a t-shirt design is that you can upload a pre-made design. Whether you get a graphic designer to create it, you can commission people on fiverr.com to do it, or whether you have a graphic designer, you know, that you pay for the design, you can get them to create a design, upload this to Canva and print this as well.

Let’s look at what this would actually look like. I’m going to create a brand new page, get rid of that design. This is, as you can see here, a t-shirt design that I had created and it’s the one that I’m wearing right now.

It’s the squared root that I had designed by designer on Fiverr. I briefed him on what I was looking for. And then he provided me with the file, which I can then upload to Canva, but this is the actual design. There are really two ways that you can do most things in life.

You either do it yourself or you get someone else to do it for you, so this is the option of getting a design and then uploading it to Canva. Once the design was created, I go into Canva to create a t-shirt design once again, and then I go into uploads and then I can upload this file.

I’m going to upload it, click upload. I’m going to choose the file so that you can see, this is the file. Nope, that’s it. I’ll show you what the file looks like. That’s the file there. And I’m going to upload it into Canva.

It’s a transparent image so that just the tree and the elements of the tree show up and it doesn’t have, it’s not on white. That’s how I’ve requested it to be. Once that’s uploaded into Canva, I click on it and I add it to the shirt.

As simple as that, I’m going to just size it now. I’m just going to drag it so that it fits to the size of the canvas, I’m happy with that. And then I’m going to remove this background. And once again, so I’ve uploaded my own design and I’ve added it to Canva.

And now I’m going to go to print t-shirts once again, I get to choose whether I want to print single-sided or double-sided. If it’s double-sided I can like change the positioning a little bit of the shirt, as you can see, it moves a little bit.

As I change the design, you’ll be able to see it in the preview on the right-hand side here, but I’m going to keep it as a single design. Once again, you get to choose the colours, I’m going to choose it in navy.

The other cool thing that I did when I ordered this one was I ordered it in my size. Then I added another order. I ordered it in a medium for men and it will come as one order. That’s pretty cool.

That’s the second way that you can create a design, a t-shirt design in Canva. Uploading a design that you’ve had a graphic designer created. The file type that I uploaded was simply a transparent .PNG file.

That was how I got it to work. And, it’s simple as that. And it’s the one that I’m wearing now, and we’re going to do a bit of a model and showcase after the last demo. I can a bit more about the quality of the shirts.

Now, the third way that you can create your own t-shirt design using Canva. We’re going to go back to home. The Canva home is let’s, let’s start from scratch. Let’s just say that you don’t want to use, well, you want to explore another option.

I showed you how to do it using their templates. I showed you how to create a t-shirt design uploading one that you’ve had created externally, and let’s just go and select t-shirt. And that’s the third way is to create one from scratch.

We’ve got a blank canvas. And what you can do now is you can add your own elements or, you know, you can add things that you’ve uploaded already to Canva, whether that’s your own images. I’m just going to add an image.

You can, it’s a beautiful image. I did not plan this, as you can tell, you can add your own text. You know, they’ve got, text, you can add your own elements. Let’s add a sun, it’s a matter of just piecing together designs that you like, and then adding it to the canvas, whether that’s text, whether that’s images and you can add your own photos, you can add your own you know, texts.

You can add your own stuff or you can use Canva’s one. That’s the third way of creating a t-shirt design. It’s really, really lots of options.

And I want to come back to talk about a bit about the quality of the shirts, but first I’m going to call in my model. You can see the t-shirt design. I’m just going to put myself back on camera now.

Okay. I showed you how to upload a design and this is the print design for the ladies medium and Dave is going to come over now, and this is the design, you know, a couple that wears the same t-shirts together, stays together, right? In men’s medium.

And I just had to do it. I don’t know, I couldn’t miss the opportunity. We both really like the print design of the shirt. This is how we got, yeah, so, you know, it looks pretty cool.

In terms of the fit, this is the men’s medium and we thought it fit pretty well and it was true to the dimensions and the female size was also true to the size as well. It was a really great size.

Thanks Dave, for showing people the fit. You can leave now. Okay, bye. That’s the fit in terms of the ladies small and the men’s medium. I also printed that other shirt in a medium, a ladies medium as well.

And I found like the fit, as I said, was beautiful. Exactly to what they said that it would be and the print quality I’m going to try to, it’s pretty good as well. Now the other shirt, ’cause this is, I’m Australian, and they use AS Colour as the t-shirt brand in Australia, in the US and EU they use Bella Canvas.

This isn’t a shirt I printed with Canva, but it’s a shirt that I had printed elsewhere because I have a t-shirt printing addiction. And this is in Bella Canvas. And I find with Bella Canvas, the fit is a little bit on the smaller side.

They’re true to their size but I do find it a little bit more fitted than AS Colour. And that’s just a personal thing. This is the one from Bella Canvas.

And I thought in terms of like the cut and the size Bella Canvas is such like a beautiful quality shirt as well. You definitely be happy with that.

Now let’s talk a little bit about, so we talked about brands, Canva also say that they use sustainable facilities and sustainable brands as well. That was a really good thing to hear about as well.

In terms of shipping, where do the items come from? Depending on where you’re at, they’ll use local facilities and local print places based on where you’re at. In Australia, they come from a facility in Queensland and that’s the same for New Zealand.

If you order from Australia or New Zealand, it’s coming from the Queensland facility and then in the EU, in Canada in the US they’ve got separate facilities there. And that’s how, I guess they also keep the price down in terms of shipping ’cause otherwise it would cost a fortune to send it overseas from wherever.

That’s what they do in terms of shipping of the shirts. Now, in terms of the pricing of the shirt, it will vary once again. The currency will be in Canva based on what your currency is, but it’s pretty much $20 a shirt.

If you buy two, then it’s 34. The unit price is $17 each then. And the price depends on which region that you’re in. The more you buy the cheaper it kind of gets.

And the third thing I wanted to talk about was, I asked Canva in terms of using Canva to create your own t-shirt designs, what can you do with them? Can you use Canva to create t-shirt designs and then sell it on Red Bubble or sell it on Teespring or sell it on Etsy?

And their answer was, we are okay with users designing and printing through Canva and seldom on other platforms, but in terms of what users designs and what user prints it’s in the terms and conditions that the owners is on them to ensure they have the right to use the designs in the first place.

That comes down to copyright, that comes down to you having the rights to use the image. This design that you saw myself and David wear, I did have it designed, it was a variation of a design I’ve seen in the past.

It was an adaptation of someone else’s work. Would I sell it? I don’t know. I don’t know if I would actually sell it. I just wanted it for personal use, but if I was to design something from scratch, that was original work in my own using Canva, then yes you would be able to upload that and sell it yourself.

When you start using like you know, other people’s work, it becomes a bit grey and you really need to look into the fine print of, you know, what’s fair and what’s right. I’m gonna leave that with you to do that research.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered that one, but that’s what I wanted to address. Hopefully that covers Canva t-shirt design. I talked about quite a few things today.

We talked about Canva and I showed you how to create a t-shirt design quickly using their existing templates and how you can modify them just by clicking on all of the elements. I showed you, how to upload a design created by a designer so that you can print your own shirt.

I also showed you how to create one from scratch really badly. And then I showed you the fit of the shirts. And we talked about a couple of pictures of Canva’s t-shirt printing facility.

I think they’re a really great tool. I love Canva. I have a lot of tutorials on Canva as you know, so absolutely love this feature. And it was a question I was getting all the time where people were like, “Can I actually use it to create t-shirt designs and can I print with it?” and you can do both, so you just need to work on the I guess the technicalities of what elements you’re actually using if you’re going to sell it.

That’s where, that’s where it becomes a bit tricky. If you’re using, if you’re going to sell it, you need to make sure that you have the rights to sell it. I’ll leave that one with you.

That essentially wraps us up the live stream today. Thanks for everyone for joining me. If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel where I do lots of Canva tutorials.

I live stream a lot, and I also teach you how to use video for business. And if you are looking to grow your business, if you’re looking to make a bigger impact and get up and running, make sure you grab a copy of my Social Media Checklist.

I show you how to get up and running on all of the major social media platforms so that you can start leveraging social media to grow your business with ease. I’ll put the link on the screen, hopefully, and in the description as well.

Thanks for joining me. And I will see you in the next live stream. Bye for now.