Zazzle Design Blog: Vampire Skull Leggings and Making Complex Designs

In this post, I would like to show off my new vampire skull leggings made from the vampire Yin Yang skull desIgn I showcased in my last Zazzle design post, but also talk a little bit about creating complex designs in Zazzle's online image editing tool and utilising it to its full effect.

Above I have placed the example images Zazzle generates when you create a product into a gallery for easier viewing as you can see it is a quite complex design with lots of things going on.

Here you can see Zazzle's online image editor it is quite easy to use so I won't go into depth about everything here but I do want to highlight the power of designing with drag and droppable art assets you create yourself or download from free to use image sites such as pixabay.

This Area over to the left is the layer stack and it functions a lot like photoshops layers allowing you to build up multiple images, special effects and lighting glows.

The Cyan glows, gradients and fx fumes files are all images I have saved out at very high resolutions 8000x8000 minimum from photoshop.

The reason for the high resolution is to avoid the dreaded warning sign you get when a layer has been scaled up beyond its resolution which will cause a pixilated low-quality image in the final product so be mindful about scaling and resolution when you are creating art assets for Zazzle.

The main reason to create a lot of individual art assets as apposed to complete images is versatility and editability.

Every potential customer has the ability to open the image editor on every product they view, so if we create our images from individual art assets we allow your customers a greater degree of freedom customizability and personalisation over the final design which would be impossible with a single saved out image.

Another major advantage to creating in this way is the ease of design, it is far more intuitive to see your design update on a live representation of the final product, rather than blindly uploading an image and hoping for the best.

Below you can see we are able to manually position each element and teak their scale, position and rotation to efficiently achieve an aesthetically pleasing, complex and fully editable result that allows for easy variations and product adjustments.

Another advantage to creating images from lots of assets is easy design variations and maximizing versatility across different products.

Products on Zazzle have different guidelines so there is no such thing as one design fits all on Zazzle, so you will need to make tweaks to your designs in order to fit them to different products.

Trust me it is easier to tweak a bunch of images in Zazzle's editor rather than heading back into photoshop to redesign the image to fit a new product every time something doesn't fit right.

I hope this article has helped you in your approach to designing on Zazzle and the advantages of utilizing the layers to not only you but your potential customer's advantage.

Here is a link to the final product if you want to take a look at the editor and play around and see if you can change the design in an interesting way. Click Here!