One of the easiest ways to earn money is through submitting your design ideas to print-on-demand platforms such as Zazzle and Society 6, as described here on this post.
However, if you’re like me, someone who likes to design things ourselves but not really ‘talented’ or ‘artistic’ enough, you’re likely to feel ‘ugh’ whenever you hear people earning money from their mediocre design skills. Like, they can do it, why can’t you?
Below are 4 ideas on how to make money on your mediocre design skills:
1. Simplicity Sells
Often, without design skills, you can play with words to make them sound catchy or funny. You can print the words using Canva or Picsart and sell them as posters, calendars, T-shirts, bags, etc like these ones:
2. Use Free Online Design Tools
Some print on demand platforms like Zazzle have free design tools that you can use to design your own creation. It can be as simple as a hammer, combined with a few clever words like “Hammer Time”.
Canva is also one of the most popular free online design tools. As you’re not able to remove the white background created under Canva’s free account (you can only remove it if you’re in paid account), you can remove the background using a free background removal tool such as OnlinePNGTools or Gimp.
Another easy to use free online design tool is Photopea.
3. Improve Your Design Skills
Even if you don’t currently have any design skills, you can always learn it from scratch. There are numerous free tutorials on Youtube. Learning how to manipulate pictures (like removing the background) is one of the most important basic skills needed. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use Gimp, a free alternative to Photoshop. A video of how to remove background with Gimp that I find easy to follow is from Logos by Nick.
4. Do Your Research
First, choose your niche. For example, you want to sell t-shirts with designs and wordings that relate to Engineering students.
You can then find out what sells the most. For example, you can type “Engineering shirt” on a search box (e.g. Google, Ebay, Etsy, RedBubble, etc). The result of the search is usually based on the algorithm that tells you which products are popular.
Use these popular, most selling t-shirt designs to inspire you with the designs and wordings to create your own designs for Engineering students.
