“The uncluttered interface helps even those with no design skill create attractive shirts quickly and easily.” Best for Speed: Rush Order Tees at rushordertees.com “It’s fast, easy to use, and offers a solid range of customizable options.” Best for Mobile: Snaptee at snaptee.co “This iOS and Android app lets you choose from a range of designs uploaded and voted on by the app’s users.” Best for Mockups: Placeit at placeit.net “It’s one of the easiest and best-looking online shirt design tools, with hundreds of attractive templates to get you started.” Best for Free Mockups: Printful at printful.com “Usable for all kinds of clothing, along with accessories, posters, and more.” Best for Professionals: Adobe Illustrator at adobe.com “Illustrator is the ideal tool for creating professional-level shirt designs.” Best Free Design Tool: Inkscape at inkscape.org “The app lets you turn existing bitmap images into vectors via a tracing function.” Best Alternative Free Design Tool: GIMP at gimp.org “It’s just as useful for creating T-shirts as it is for any other graphic design task.” If you are a beginner, an online platform like DesignAShirt at designashirt.com will make the process seem like a breeze. While more seasoned pros who want a free mockup will appreciate a website like Printful at printful.com. The best T-shirt design software will be easy to use and suitable for your needs. After picking the shirt type, style, and color from dozens of options, creating an attractive design is straightforward. Select from the pre-existing clipart or upload your own photo, add text in a huge variety of fonts, customize colors, size, and effects like distress and outline, and you’re set. If you can’t come up with a design you’re happy with, DesignAShirt also offers an affordable concierge service where a product consultant does it for you. Despite the name, T-shirts aren’t the only option—hoodies, caps, polos, and more are also available. With its simple tools, free 10-day shipping, and competitive pricing, DesignAShirt is our top pick for an online T-shirt designing tool. Starting with one of a wide range of T-shirt colors, styles, and manufacturers, the site leads you through a straightforward series of steps so you end up with a design you’re happy with. Adding graphics and text only takes a few seconds, and there are plenty of customization options to help you get exactly the look you’re after. With over 50,000 clipart images to choose from, you should be able to find some great graphics for your design. But you have something specific in mind, you can always upload your own graphics instead. The company’s in-house team reviews each design, correcting any obvious mistakes before sending it for printing, and there’s both live-chat and phone support as needed. Throw in super-quick delivery options (including next day), and Rush Order Tees makes for a great, speedy T-shirt design and printing service. After selecting the design you’d like to start with, the app lets you choose your T-shirt style and basic layout. From there, you can use the design’s existing graphic, or upload your own via your phone’s camera roll, Instagram, and other sources. The interface takes a couple of minutes to get used to, but it’s straightforward and powerful enough for most simple designs. Tweaking colors, effects, fonts, and more are all handled within the app, and once you’re satisfied with the end result, it’s simply a case of sending your masterpiece off to Snaptee for printing. Payment is handled via credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, or PayPal on your phone, and the company, which is based in Hong Kong, ships anywhere in the world for a flat fee. If you think your design is particularly good, you can share it with others and receive a commission when other customers order it. Rather than having a gallery of thousands of unrelated clip-art images to search through, Placeit offers a curated selection of graphics for each section of the template. While you lose some flexibility with this approach, it speeds up the design process and often leads to a better end result. Backgrounds, fonts, and colors are also customizable, and as you make changes to your design, it’s reflected in a variety of lifestyle mockups. Clicking on any of the modeled images yields a larger version, along with several similar alternatives to choose from. You can also upload an existing design if all you need is the mockup images themselves. Any designs and mockups can be downloaded for a few dollars each, or as part of an unlimited monthly subscription. After choosing your shirt style and color, you can upload your own design or create your own using the company’s basic clipart and font options. Somewhat unusually, though, you’re not limited to designing just the front and back of your shirts—both sleeves can have text added, along with an outside label. Once you’ve got your shirt looking how you’d like it, you can send the shirt for printing or download the mockup files to use how you wish. Printful also acts as a marketplace for you to sell your design, or act as a print-on-demand service if you sell your T-shirts elsewhere. The software’s focus on vector images ensures that logos and text can be easily scaled up or down to fit on any T-shirt size without a loss of quality. Your design will look just as good on a business card as a billboard, or anything in between, and if you plan on screenprinting your T-shirt design, Illustrator makes it easy to create the layered, spot-colored file your print shop requires. As with any professional software, there’s a steep learning curve that comes with Illustrator, although Adobe does at least publish tutorials complete with sample files to get you started. Dozens of sites also offer templates, free or otherwise, that can be imported directly into the software. While there are no specific T-shirt templates or tutorials included with the software itself, many designers and other users have stepped into the gap, offering their expertise and files for free to the community. As a result, once you’ve learned how to use Inkscape, it’s easy to apply your knowledge to designing attractive T-shirts without having to start from scratch. Available on MacOS, Windows, and Linux, the app lets you turn existing bitmap images into vectors via a tracing function. This enables you to scale the image up and down in size as needed for your design, and export it in the appropriate format for screen printing. If you do need a raster image format such as .png or .jpg, however, Inkscape can provide that as well. Like other high-end tools, getting a solid grip on GIMP takes some effort. But if you have a reason to upskill yourself in it anyway, it’s just as useful for creating T-shirts as it is for any other graphic design task. As with the other apps mentioned above, free templates and YouTube tutorials are available to get you started, along with paid courses focused on helping you create good-looking designs and export them in an appropriate format for printing. Available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux, and with a vast array of editing and layout options for both text and images, GIMP’s powerful tools let you create almost any T-shirt design you can imagine. Our writers spent 10 hours researching the most popular T-shirt design software on the market. Before making their final recommendations, they considered 15 different software overall, screened options from 14 different brands and manufacturers, read over 20 user reviews (both positive and negative), and tested 6 of the software themselves. All of this research adds up to recommendations you can trust.
