Learning How To Use The Design Tool

For the digital designs, I have decided to put them on platforms where customers can edit and download online (compared to customers downloading a photoshop PSD file).

There are a few platforms on the market that can do that: Canva, Corjl and Templett are the most popular ones. There are some pros and cons in each option.

Although Canva is the most powerful and popular tool among those options, I didn’t choose it mainly because of their abundance of ready-to-use templates in their own system. Users can browse and use thousands of quality templates once they subscribed to Canva Pro. For a business, I want customers to return and purchase from me, instead of being distracted by the thousands of other designs on Canva.

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So I’m choosing between Corjl and Templett. 

Both of them are great options, and from what I can see, about the same amount of Etsy sellers use each of them.

I ultimately chose Corjl because they have a cheaper plan to start with (starting from $7.99 vs $29 per month), and people say it has fewer technical problems compared to Templett (slowing down, crashing, etc).

One way that I use to get myself familiarised with the tool, other than watching tutorials by Corjl and on YouTube, is try to replicate a simple design. 

Analysing Successful Shops

There are a lot to learn from successful shops. I try to look for patterns of what works and get them right.

Some of the things I noticed from label designs that sell well:

• The designs have rather standardised sizes. There are two reasons for that. First, the sizes can fit containers customers can find on the market. Second, the sizes can fit the label sheet available on sites like Online Labels and Avery.
• The labels have space for brand name, product name, ingredients, use directions, etc, which are the information that customers would want to put on their products.
• The product name is usually not a ‘placeholder’ name like ‘product name’. Instead, I find most sellers make up realistic product names like ‘Pure Lavender’ so that customers can better envision their products with the design.
• The label designs are showcased on product mockups like this so that customers can see how it will look when it's put in the real world.

All of the above points have some points in common: They focus on how the customers will use the product, and encourage customers to visualised how the design can improve their brand. I kept them in mind when I created my products.

Think For Your Customers

One of the biggest things I’ve learnt throughout my Etsy journey is that: think for your customers.

Any successful business needs to help customers: either by improving/transforming their lives or by eliminating their pain/problems.

I put a lot of effort in considering what my target customers need in the label design. So that I can make their lives easier in terms of branding and packaging.

For example, when creating the dropper labels, I think about what customers would like to put on the labels so that they can sell more products. Many label designs only include generic information like ingredients and volume. I went a step further to include social media icons, benefits of the product, etc that will be attractive to my target customers (because they potentially can help them sell more products).

I also link to the correct sized label from online printing services like Avery and Online Labels, so they don’t need to worry about where they can print out the labels.

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How I Find Design Inspirations

The main source of inspiration for me is Pinterest and Dribbble. They are great resources for design work. I also use a website called Color Hunt for inspiration of interesting colour combinations. I also pay attention to real life products in supermarkets and pharmacies and see how different brands differentiate their products.

There are hardly any truly original designs anymore. As long as you put your own spin on an idea, you won’t be in trouble for copying other designs.

One of the methods I use, is breaking down designs that I like and analyse the different elements in that design.

Try separating elements like layout, colours, font choice, graphical elements and more. Once you analyse more designs, you should have a bunch of elements that you can mix and match for your own designs.

Creating The First Batch Of Products

Now it’s time to actual make the products.

From the popular designs, I came up with a list of elements that I need to include in my templates, like brand name, ingredient list, etc. In addition, I added extra elements that I mentioned before to help my shop differentiate from the competitors, like social media icons and more colourful designs, etc.

To speed up the design process without compromising the design quality, I chose the approach where I use mostly the same text for all the templates and only changing the design (colours, font and other graphical elements).

In other words, I keep the text like ingredients, use instruction, benefits and brand name more or less the same for all the designs.

That way I can focus on the designs that can differentiate my shop from others.

These two dropper bottle labels use the same 'base' design. I change the colours and product name to make two different styles of designs:

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