The insanity of the impending holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching, and once again we find ourselves asking where the year has gone. With that in mind, now is a perfect time to start getting your Redbubble shop looking fancy-schmancy.

In addition to making sure your tags are up to snuff, a great way to get things in shape is to review your existing work. So let’s run through some common issues we see on three different products.

All of these changes will be made in the Manage Portfolio section of your shop.

T-Shirts

When editing the position of your t-shirt designs, the “center horizontally” button is a great tool for ensuring your design sits correctly. However, depending on the height of your design, the “center vertically” button may work against you by moving the print away from the chest and down to the abdomen, as seen on the left of the example below.

Of course, this choice is up to you, but from feedback received we’ve received into our customer service department, we’re seeing our customers tend to prefer a nice, high print around the chest area. So, providing your design doesn’t fill the entire printing area, you can drag your design to the top of the available space and then use the horizontal centring tool to make sure it’s aligned correctly.

Skirts

To help cut down on the amount of time you spend re-uploading your designs, we’ve worked hard to make it easy to enable your existing designs on some of our newer products. In most cases, in your shop, all you have to do is edit the work and click “Enable” to make it available on a bunch of products straight away.

Make sure the file you upload is 2152×2502 pixels for pencil skirts.

However, with  products like leggings and skirts that have a wrap-around print, you might need to put in a little extra work to make sure they look as good as possible. Below is a design that show some common issues that arise when migrating existing designs to leggings and pencil skirts.

With the skirt shown here, the default image doesn’t quite match the width requirements, so using a wider image or matching the background to the image’s color would be required to fix the issue.

Matching the background color

When uploading a work, there’s an option to fill in any blank space with a chosen color. The default is white but if you have the color code you wish to use you can get specific with the exact color you want to use. Using the eyedropper tool in Photoshop or a similar program like Pixlr, you can select the color you want to use in your background and  check the selected color’s properties.

Using the color code (i.e. #476f6d), you can match the rest of the skirt with the image background. This allows for more freedom with product placement.

Once the background color has been selected, it fills in any gaps and we’re left with a much better-looking skirt. Now we can see the entire design, even with a hip-length top. 

Leggings

While the leggings below look great from the front, you’ll notice that the design doesn’t wrap around the backs of the legs. Here’s how we fix that.

Make sure the file you upload is 4350×4032 pixels for leggings.

Tiling

Tiling your design is a great way to cover the entire product. Or, to get even more specific, you can use our leggings template for designing your work specifically around this product.

While choosing to tile your image will cover any gaps, this may not look right depending on the image you’re using. If this is the case, use the leggings template to edit your work around how the material is cut. This is a great way to make sure your work is sitting exactly how you desire and covering all the areas that should be covered.

You can import the template to your image editing software and create an image specifically for leggings by using the guides. Then edit and upload the file for just that product.

Once the changes are applied and saved, we  see we’re left with a much better looking, pair of leggings with zero white gaps.

There’s more information on designing for products on this blog and in our help center.  If you need additional advice from our Artist Support team, open a ticket.

Share your tips in the comments.