Design Trends and Inspiration for Marketplace Designers

When creating designs, have your finger on the pulse of trend. It’s a bit like with the early bird and the worm – you just want to be sure to catch it before the others do. In the next few weeks, we’ll help you get your chances of selling up to speed with trending topics, design ideas and occasions to get you inspired for success.

Seasonal trends and holidays

We’ve put together a list of topics across the year, sorted by country and date. You can be sure that these topics will have folks looking for designs to meet the occasion – and that’s where you come in. Publish your designs with sensible tags to help people find them in Marketplace searches. We’ve already suggested a tag for each topic to make it easier.

You’ll find a list with current topics in the “Marketing“ section of your User Area. Moreover, we’ll also fill you in on new trends with our list page topics on the blog.

Fast-paced design trends

Seeing a trend the very moment it emerges is one of the biggest challenges for designers. Fortunately, there are quite a few handy tools you can use to be on the track of new trends. Google Alerts, blog posts, competitor analysis and personalized news feeds help you be hot on the Internet’s trail. Then it’s up to you to get a move on, and to publish your creative take on a trending topic online pronto. To assist you in doing so, we’re currently working on speeding up the clearance period.

Fresh graphic trends

The topic is not the only decisive factor when it comes to creating a palatable design. Seeing that artistic delivery is probably equally important, we’ll provide you with tips and tricks of how you can create appealing optics. The following tools, techniques and aesthetic traits are strong in demand at the moment:

Double-exposure effect

Layering two images on top of each other results in a new and many-faceted image. Combine contrasting images (think animals and landscapes, etc.)  for artistic effect to generate surreal designs.

Handwriting with a digital brush

Scripts and handwritten messages have been trending for a while. When using digital tools and devices like graphic tablets and Photoshop, the paint brush tool helps you create neat handwriting designs with saturated colors. We’ll predict this trend to last all the way through 2018.

Superimpose

When you superimpose comic illustrations on photos, you can produce surprisingly artistic compositions to create one-of-a-kind T-shirt designs.

Tip – creating trendy graphics for seasonal topics will go a long way for you. And don’t forget that sharing your designs is improving your chances of selling. Keep posting things your followers are interested in and adding a link to a design of yours is a subtle way of creating interest.

How do you come up with new designs? Please share your experience and exchange with the community!