Design resources

After landing on a design idea, get designs ready to apply to your products and prepare promotional content. You don’t have to be a design professional to create products for your community, and there are tons of helpful tools online, as well as expert designers who can help. Below are some helpful tips from creators as well as some step-by-step guides.

Quality of design is important. You want to launch something that will excite your fans, not just the idea, but how it’s visually represented as well. But don’t let that scare you, it’s super easy to create or source a cool design and It’s ok to keep things simple – slogan and typography-based designs are all the range at the moment.

Free design tools

We’ve listed the most popular tools used by creators to come up with effective designs. Whenever purchasing pre-made artwork or a design element, you should research the design’s license limitations to ensure your design complies with IP laws. See our guide for selling purchased designs here.

Placeit: Create designs within seconds using Placeit’s 10,000+ on trend templates. UYou can also use Placeit to create lifestyle mockups to share with your community on social platforms. Spring creators have access to unlimited features at a discounted rate of $12 a month. Click here to learn more. 

Canva: This popular app is amazing for creators to choose from premade templates, stock photos, cartoon images, shapes, icons, and more when creating a design. Similar to Spring’s text tool, Canva also has a text generator with over 100 different fonts to choose from. Canva is great for creating designs for digital products.

Creative Fabrica: This platform offers a full license for creators who want to use purchased designs to sell on products. It’s not uncommon for people to purchase design elements instead of creating a design from scratch.

Video tutorials

Spring creator and leading YouTube art channel Jazza [5.43M subscribers] created a really helpful video offering tips and tricks for creating designs using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Jazza covers useful topics such as how he comes up with design ideas and a step by step guide to creating files ready for print.

Another creator who makes incredible content focused on graphic design tutorials specifically for products, is Charley Pangus. Spend some time checking out the full range of useful and insightful tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/charleypangus/videos

Here’s one of our favourites:

Specific Spring resources

Specialty product templates

Follow the video playlist below for guided tutorials on applying your designs to specialty products. Download templates to start using once you have access to the product here.

Once you’ve unlocked specialty products, you’ll see them in the launcher. Find design templates here to help you create product designs and check out these video tutorials for tips. 

Free AOP patterns

Take advantage of these free design patterns all creators can apply to all-over print products such as leggings, phone cases, blankets, pillows, and more. 

Inspiration from the Spring creative team

Our creative team here at Spring have kindly shared with us their 2021 Pinterest board, which houses an ever-growing collection of different design styles and pieces of inspiration for you to help inspire you. Check it out here.

Collaborate with 99designs 

Providing you an extra layer of support, Spring has partnered up with 99designs. This service allows you to collaborate with world-class designers, to create designs for products beyond your expectations (without being a design guru). With this design sourcing service, you will now be able to transform your vision into a fully-fledged design, simply by submitting a brief and letting the 99designs algorithm match you with the best suited designers. 

• You have the safety and comfort of knowing there is a money back guarantee if you don’t receive the design you’d hoped for. 
• Transfer of copyright. Any designs you have created are now yours to sell. 
• 99 designs have collaboration tools in place allowing creators to provide feedback easily as well as work closely with the designer seamlessly. 
• All for a price that won’t break the bank 

Spring’s design services

In addition to our partnership with 99designs, Spring also offers a free in-house design to any new creator with over 100,000 followers on any social platform. To apply for our design services, please fill out the form here, and our support team will be back in touch soon. 

Social media tools 

As a creator, you’ll know how important it is to get your social media platforms looking flawless and consistent with your branding. As well as this, the promotional content you share with your community linking to your products and social store should catch your fans’ attention. We’ve collected a few easy, straightforward apps for doing this.

• GifLab is perfect for creating .gif videos and it’s super simple. Use it to show off all color options for your products, or highlight all products available in your newly dropped collections. 
• Layout is a great collaging app. It’s integrated with Instagram, so you can share the image directly to social media. 
• Splice enables you to create videos quickly and easily, with a unique zooming function too. Generate close-up shots of your products creating amazing promo videos and showing the details of your products. 
• Videoshop is another great app that offers a variety of features to create quality videos. You can combine photos and videos, add slow-motion edits, create animated titles, and more.  
• Legend is ideal for creating animated text. You could use this tool when sharing special promotions and discounts for example. 
• PlaceIt enables you to choose from thousands of stunning, professionally designed ad templates to promote your products across all social media platforms. They are ridiculously easy to modify and you can download images formatted correctly for just about every platform.
• Canva makes it easy for everyone to create professional-looking graphics. There are hundreds of templates available with beautiful layouts for text editing. Each template is designed for a specific purpose like sharing on Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter, or Snapchat in newsletters, etc.  
• Creative Fabrica: This platform offers a full license for creators who want to use purchased designs to sell on products. It’s not uncommon for people to purchase design elements instead of creating a design from scratch.