3 Tips for Your Home & Living Products

Posters and pillowcases and mousepads, oh my! How to design stunning home goods for your Showroom.

Home & Living products make lovely gifts for any target group. Coasters and posters take the guesswork out of giving—no more worrying about the size or fashion sense of the recipient. Home goods such as cups or aprons also make for thoughtful and personal presents for any occasion, so it’s clever to stock these options in your Showroom.

Some products in this category require special treatment. Here are our 3 tips to make sure the products in your Showroom display your designs perfectly.

1. Choose the right product for your design

Which product shows off your new design in the best light? Think about which products your design really fits with.

Let’s talk about cushions. Cozy and dreamy, they lend themselves to themes such as “Home Sweet Home,” cute sloths, dreams, white sand beaches, or encouraging sayings to make getting out of bed a bit easier. Pro tip: choose large fonts with some artistic flair. Floral illustrations or beautiful animal designs can also help bring a bit of nature indoors.

What’s in a cup? Here, too, lettering and animals are popular choices. Don’t shy away from funny pictures or cheeky jokes (dad joke mugs are a thing.) Naturally, themes such as coffee or office life are also a perfect match for mugs.

Go big or go home: posters, coasters and mousepads require large lettering and illustrations to look their best. Abstract, geometric shapes, patterns and photographs also look fab on these products.

Psst, by the way— if you want to publish designs on posters, there are a few more things to consider. You can find out more about publishing posters here.

2. Make good use of the print areas

The majority of marketplace customers are a bit too lazy to adapt a design themselves. Catch their eye with your beautiful product designs—don’t count on the customer to modify your designs after the fact. It’s all about the details: take those few extra minutes to make your design pop and people are sure to notice.

Know and love the print areas of your products! Unlike T-shirts, coasters and mousepads have overflowing print areas. That means no borders, so the sky is the limit. (Well, in this case, actually the edge of the mousepad is the limit.)

Make sure that your design is easy to enlarge and doesn’t look pixelated on the final product. To take full advantage of the printing area, we recommend that you upload the design in the appropriate format: for a square print area, create a square design that you can then fit perfectly into the print area.

Templates are your friend. With this time-saving tool, you can create all products suitable for a specific design, delete all products that do not match the design and save the whole selection as a template. That way, when you upload a similar design, all you need to worry about is the fine-tuning.

3. Activate and deactivate the right colors

Before publishing any product, check the color selection. This example shows black lettering on a  mug. The color black for the background should of course be deactivated.

Another example: White on white. As you can easily see, a white design on a white background is not visible and therefore not printable. (Perhaps it should go without saying, but we swear, people try this stuff.)

By the way, the selection of certain colors can also be saved via the handy-dandy templates.

Follow these 3 tips and you will end up with higher quality products in your Showroom. Creating templates also helps you to simplify and speed up your processes. All in all, it’s in your best interest to publish products in the Home & Living category – with a little effort you can reach a large target group.

Anything missing? What tips do you have for publishing your designs on products in the Home & Living category? Let us know.