In order to get your t-shirt design ideas put onto plastisol transfers, you must send the artwork to the screen printers in a digital format. And you do that by either creating your own designs, or by hiring a graphic designer to create your designs for you.

I love this business because you don't have to know how to draw ... You don't have to have an artistic eye ... And you don't have to know how to use any of the advanced graphic design softwares like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

There are graphic designers out in the marketplace that are far more creative than most of us will ever be. All you have to do is come up with the idea and let them turn your ideas into a masterpiece.

For example, my 14-year old daughter at the time sketched out the following design ideas on a piece of paper ... We posted a project/contest on the Freelancer website, and a graphic designer from Freelancer took her ideas and turned it into the following designs:

The service is very easy to use ... You essentially post a contest. When you post that contest, you write up a detailed description of what you want and envision for your design.

Like my daughter did, to better communicate your ideas, you might have to sketch it out and submit the sketch with the contest post. This way, there's no confusion.

And for the contest, you award a prize ... So, for example, the prize may be $50 dollars.

Once you do that, you submit your contest, and then the details of your contest is broadcast and sent to all of the graphic designers in the Freelancer community.

Those who wish to participate will start creating your t-shirt design idea. Their goal is to hope you like and choose their design so they can win the $50 prize money.

Many of these designers live in foreign countries where their cost of living is very cheap compared to the U.S. cost of living.

So you're essentially tapping into some of the best and top quality graphic designers in the world, and getting artwork done for cheap.

For that $50, it's not unusual to get 50-100 submissions of your idea from multiple designers.

This was another skateboard t-shirt idea my daughter came up with ... We ran this contest on another website called DesignCrowd. 

From the contest at DesignCrowd, we ended up getting over 84 design submissions from their community of graphic designers.

My daughter ended up choosing the following design as the winner... Freelancer and DesignCrowd are the only 2 services I use for getting artwork created for t-shirts. 

If you're not already a graphic designer, now isn't the time to learn how to become one. This takes a lot of skill and years of practice. Most of these graphic designers eat, sleep, and drink graphic design.

For the cost to hire someone to do this for you, it just doesn't make sense to learn this. The learning curve for these high end softwares is ridiculous. 

It takes a creative eye and brain to know how to manipulate this software to create and design amazing works of art.

It makes more sense to lean on the expertise of these designers and let them create your masterpiece.

If you still insist on trying to learn this yourself, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are the 2 main softwares used by graphic designers.