Get advice to help you create your t-shirt graphics. Discuss t-shirt design software, special effect techniques, or other topics related to creating a t-shirt design on your computer. If you'd rather hire a graphic designer to do the work for you, please post in our Referrals and Recommendations section here.
I love t-shirts and have a great idea for a line I would like to produce and sell, however; I have very little time and poor/slow design skills. So, I was looking to partner with a designer to help me. Basically, I would supply them with the clip art, and they would alter/modify it, to make it a little more "hip", along with not resembling the original.
My business questions/concerns are this:
Should I pay the designer per design, and then I keep the rights? (I have very little or no capital so not sure if someone would do it for $5 - $10 per design)
Should I offer pay through partnership, where they will get a % of each sale? (concern here is that they will eventually break off and claim these designs there)
$5-10 is an insanely low amount of money for any kind of design work. If it's simple modifications only you may find someone desperate enough to do it, but you're probably going to have to offer more - if all you have is percentage of sales then I guess that's what it'll have to be. If you can only pay $5-10 per design though, where are you getting the capital to run a business? Even something like Cafe Press could really use some money for advertising if it's going to go anywhere.
I have several $$$, but I intended to use that for the site creation and marketing. The reason I thought I could charge so low, is that I already have the clip art, and so, all they have to do is just add some effects/alter it to make it look more hip, retro, stylish.
If it's that simple you might be able to find a design student to do it for you. There are some freelance websites (the links are floating around in the forums, I can't recall them off the top of my head) where people bid on projects - if you have enough designs to make it worth someone's while (for example 20 designs at $5-10 each = $100-200) you may find some interest.
You could also read through tutorials and just do it yourself - there are effect filters for Photoshop to give things a distressed look for example, so most of the work is done for you.
You are also asking that person to do the work for a product and sign over all rights to it. So if the design they had a hand in takes off, and all they got paid was $5, I think they would feel slighted.
If you're getting the designs printed through a screen printer, I would ask them to have their inhouse art department make the changes you requested before they run the job for you. That would cut out a middleman, and you wouldn't have to worry about image rights.
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