Every time a new season comes around, trend forecasters drop their fancy fashion reports, and they’re always full of phrases like maximalist sportsware energy or handmade collage aesthetics. And look, it sounds cool, right? But then you actually sit down, you open your laptop, and you just stare at the screen because what does maximalist energy actually look like on a t-shirt? That’s exactly what we’re fixing today. Hey everyone, I’m Elizabeth and welcome to our YouTube channel if you’re new here. After digging through some 2026 design trend forecasts, I picked out three of the biggest t-shirt trends of the year and I’m going to show you how to build them from scratch using Canva. No Photoshop, no design degree, no artistic talent. Seriously, I don’t have any, so you don’t need any either. And stick around until the end because I will show you how to upload your designs to real Printful products. Cuz a pretty file in Canva is great and all, but it’s useless if it actually doesn’t look good in a real t-shirt. Let’s just dive right into trend number one. Naive design. Naive design draws from art brute, which is this idea that untrained spontaneous creation is just as valuable as high art. on a t-shirt in 2026. That translates into slightly childish flat doodles with thick wobbly outlines and bold text that looks like handwriting. So, for our naive design attempt, specifically in Canva, I’m going to look for some inspiration first. Canva actually has a lot of these templates. Let’s say you’re just looking for illustration. I like this doodle. I’m going to paste it in here. This is a cute illustration, but it’s a little bit too polished. I feel like when we’re talking about naive design, we’re looking for messy. So, these are just some things that we have as inspo. One of Kim’s bestkept secrets accidentally, I think, is that if you like something, there is a way to find similar stuff to it. One way, if you see an illustration like this, you can click on the three dots that say more. Go down and click on info. You are either going to get to click see more like this which is Canva looking for similar things on purpose or sometimes things are part of collections. The same artists upload a whole collection of images and in this case we have a collection. So I can click here and I can see a bunch of similar style illustrations right in here that I can also utilize. So, let’s say I’m looking for an illustration that has this kind of watch here. Clicking on it, changing its color. It’s going to be super easy. Make it bigger, smaller, flip it, rotate it, do a bunch of stuff to it. But you have a lot of great material on Canva that you should be utilizing. Now, what I want is maybe a particular theme because in this inspo image, we have this homemade bakery thing. I sort of want an illustration with bread in it. So maybe if we go into this elements tab, you click here, search elements, and I’ll write down bread illustration.
This is actually cute. I’ve taken this cute little doodle of toast. The second major part of naive design is text that is kind of handwritten. So let’s click on text and let’s see what kind of fonts we have in here. What you can do is you can browse this way or you can go into one of these categories at the top. Click through them. I like the handwriting category for this particular choice. Something like that could totally work. And then let’s say I don’t know bread lover. So these are the basics that we want to be designing around. And I want to show you another Canva hack. This text looks great, but I want it to be slightly differently shaped. Now, what people usually do is they click on this and they click on effects and they go into curve and they just make it a very even curve and that’s about it. Which can work, but I feel like if you want more control, you might want slightly different tools. And this is where one of my favorite Canva apps comes in. So, I already have it down here, but if you don’t, you would go into apps on your very left and find it that way. So, if I click on TypCraft and I write in what I want, bread lover, I get to pick a font. And it’s not going to be a one to one of the fonts that you have available in Canva overall and the fonts that you have here, but you can upload your own custom font into TypCraft, which is helpful. So, we have Breadlover in here, and what I’m going to do is warp the text slightly. So, there’s a bunch of different effects here. You can click through them. I want it to be just a little bit warped. Just slightly a little bit uncanny. And you can get this slight warping. If you wanted it to be super warped, you can do this. You could do this. This is actually kind of fun. But I want a slight wave. And I want it to maybe come up like right here. So it looks like handwriting. And then I’ve picked my color, which is just going to be black in this case cuz we’re going to be adding some elements to this later. And then I’ll add this to design. And so you can see the difference here between these two texts. One is a little bit straighter and one is a little bit more curved. What I’m also going to do is instead of bread lover like this, I’m going to separate it into two. It’s all right. Bread. Pick my goi hand font. Pick my warping and slightly adjust it. Add it. Next, I will also duplicate this. Change the text to lover. Maybe slightly adjust the curve and update the element. All right. So, we have two slightly improved pieces of text. And I’m just going to position them where I want them. I want them to curve around the piece of bread. And let’s say this is going to be the base of my design. It is not perfectly centered. It’s not supposed to be. I’m going to actually just make it all bigger. Put it in to here. You can see these purple lines. Those are your Canva guides for where you want things placed. And once I’m happy with the overall composition of things, one of my favorite things uh is drawing on top or underneath whatever illustration you have. So on your left in this bar, you’re going to go into tools and you’re going to pick whatever you’d like. So there’s lines, there’s shapes. I’m just going to click on draw. I like this kind of secondary marker. So this one you can see is transparent which might be a problem for print on demand. And then this one is not transparent. That is what we want. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to find a color that complements your lines. In this case I might go for this like medium brown. See how they look kind of. Yeah. And it’s going to add a little something extra to our design. So let’s make the weight a little bit higher. Up to 40. And what you’re going to do is you’re just going to trace the whole thing, including the text that you created. You could trace it and leave it like this. But what I feel like that creates is a slightly jaggedy edge. We can actually see what it looks like. So you change your draw tool to select tool. Click on this. Move backwards. And you can kind of see that it’s like a little bit jaggedy. Another style that you could create with this type of drawing. Let me close this. Pick the drawing tool and draw lines like this.
And what that’s going to create, let us actually go into position layer so you can see how many different lines we have here. And I’m going to grab this and I’m going to drag it all the way up. put it on top. And you can see how it looks way goofier immediately. Now, because it’s going to be the background, I’ll actually take all of these lines. You can hold shift and you can select every single line layer. And I’m going to change the color to be maybe lighter. So, this is just one way to make it look more like a drawing than just an illustration. And what I would do, I quite like this color, especially if it’s going to be, let’s see, on a lighter t-shirt. You know, it looks a little bit fun. So, what I’ll do, same thing. I’ll pick the same color. And if you’re not sure which one it was, you can use the eyropper tool and just click here. And so, we have the right color now. And I’ll draw the same way over all of the text as well. And it does not have to be perfect. In fact, the less perfect it is, the better it’s going to look in my opinion. Make it not match. You know, do that on purpose. So, here once again, we go to the very bottom to get our text, move it to the top, and see what that looks like. So, this to me looks as childish as I can get it. This looks messy. And don’t worry if you don’t like some of this. You can erase things, right? But I quite like this. I can also select individual things, maybe move them slightly. That is also very helpful. So, I have my design. And this is naive design. But I’m going to call this one done. And we’re going to move on. Our next trend is collage design, which is kind of an analog rebellion to anything clean and digital. To replicate that feeling, you’ve got to create as much texture as you can. Paper, ripped edges, mixed media, like combining photos and illustrations and all of that with a bunch of layering. So, let’s get into it. So, what we’re going to do is look for stuff like this, paste it in, and then stay on the page and see what else similar comes up. This is a little bit too clean for me still, just because it’s all a collage of images, right? What we want is mixed media if we can get it. Okay, that is a little bit better. It’s a bit more layered with doodles here. I know this is not exactly what we want, but I do like this kind of cutout of a mouth. So, let’s keep that and see if we can create something a bit more punk inspired or I don’t know, 2000’s pop punk maybe. I quite like this graphic. Let me just paste it in. friends bow. Also see what else we can get that is similar. So this is one of those examples where we don’t have a collection, but I can click see more like this and I will see things of a similar style. I quite like these headphones and I’m just going to go through and paste a bunch of stuff in. I really like this. It’s a little bit cringe in the way that 2014 Tumblr is cringe, but it it is it is my era. It is the stuff that I used to really love. So like Canva first tries to create something that’s going to be of a similar style and then it goes into the same subject matter but in a different style. So let’s see what comes up when we click collage in elements. And you can click on see all to just see the graphics. And so these stars are kind of cool but they’re on this letter paper. What I am wondering is if I can change the coloring of this slightly. Okay, that is actually very responsive, which doesn’t always work with all of the photobased images that you can get on camera, but since this one works, let’s keep it. I quite like these exclamation marks as well. I kind of want a cassette tape as well. This one’s a good example because it is a photo. It’s not really an illustration, which is kind of what I’m looking for here. And then what I’m realizing is that I have quite a few of these photo-based elements, but I don’t have enough of these types of illustrations. So, what I’m going to do again, click the three dots, click info, see more like this, and then we can see a bunch of similar stuff. So, I quite like this. I like this star. I also want one of these, which is kind of like a semi-transparent tape corner. Remember that with these kinds of semi-transparent files where you can see stuff through it, you have to make sure that you put it on top of a solid background. So, I can put it here and print it and it’s going to come out okay. But I can’t have no background behind it once I’m exporting. So, let’s just keep this for now and play around with it.
I like this, but I don’t like the fact that it has this hard cut off edge because if it was a poster, it would be very cool to just put it on here. But since we’re going for t-shirts, I really recommend keeping that outside area of the design a little bit cleaner. So, we’re going to have to find a way for this to poke out of somewhere else.
Let’s grab this. Use it in the background. Grab the cassette tape and we’re going to make it our center piece. If it’s hard to align it because there’s so many different elements that this is snapping to, click on your element, click on position, and then just use align to page. So, center and middle. And then we have this. Let’s put it somewhere maybe here. have this which I’m going to put right on the cassette tape somewhere right here. Move this out of the way a little bit and put it over top to front. Then I love this tape. Actually going to maybe make it a little bit bigger. So, these headphones are cool and they’re kind of light, so they could go over this part of the cassette tape. All of these illustrations should be smaller so that we can have a little bit of focus on the main thing. And let’s say we’re going to put it on here. Let’s make sure that this tape is in the right spot. You can see there’s a lot of layers. So, you can go in here and just drag things where you want them. Then, of course, our mouth element, which I still really enjoy. And you can see that with something like this, I don’t have the color appearing at the very top, meaning that I can’t really recolor it very easily using the tools. But if I want it to be a bit more red, there is a little hack for that. For these kinds of photo elements, I go into edit and I go into adjust right here. And you just get these adjustments of of photos, right? So, this has already been adjusted as you can see cuz it came from a template. What I’m going to do is I’m going to make it warm and red. You can see that this kind of creates a tint over here. So I like this and even warmer so that we can match it to these colors and the stars. We can also do something similar with this tape. You can see that there are colors at the top and you can switch them but they’re not going to completely recolor everything. So this background, this green background, let me actually zoom in is light. I won’t be able to make it super dark, right? None of this will really make it black. But I can adjust it to fit the colors that I have. So this is quite pink, but maybe a little too pink. So let’s move it here. And maybe make it a bit more orangey. Like that. All right. What else do we have? We have these super silver headphones. Once again, it’s a photo, so I can click on adjust and just make the temperature slightly warmer. Now, it’s still silver, but it’s less aggressively silver. And then we also have this hand. We have to figure out where it’s going to be poking out of. I think I can use this tape that I really liked for that. I just need to figure out where it makes sense to do it. It’s a lot of messing around with these individual elements and finding a way that this is actually going to look good.
What I like is that we can see the lines at the top of the cassette tape where you know you would normally write down what you recorded on it. What I will do is I will create some fake handwriting on here as well. We’ll click on text. If we want to lean into the cringe energy that I exhibit all the time, we could do angry girl music. Let’s call it that. Change the font. Maybe something kind of like this. And if I bold it, I think it looks like pen writing. So, let’s make sure that it’s multiple lines. And let’s try and fit it in.
The gap between the lines is a little bit too big. So you could either click on this T with the two arrows to go into advanced settings and make the line spacing a little bit smaller or and this is something that I usually prefer doing is I just make those lines separate elements.
just because you get a little bit more control in placement and you can really, you know, play around with it. So here, for example,
let’s zoom in. I’m going to grab this, hold down control so that it stops snapping to everything. Put it right here. I feel like that looks like it makes sense. And then I want this eye to not touch any of the longer letters. So I’m actually going to once again hold down control and put it right here. What we’re going to do is try to make this blend in a little bit more. And you can do several things with it. You can uh use any of the effects that are there, right? But, you know, it’s not something that is really going to create this written feeling, at least in this specific case. So, what I want to do is I want to make it a little bit transparent, just a tiny bit. And then, as far as color goes, I’m going to make it not a true black. I’m looking for a black blue somewhere along these lines. you’re not like really going to see it that well on your screen, but once it’s printed, I feel like that makes a big difference in avoiding just that straight up black look. So, our last thing that we’re going to do is just make sure that all the colors that we want are in here. So, for example, this is a slightly different shade in the back here than this and this. So, I want a bit more more cohesion. I will take this, click on the light color at the top and adjust it to be whatever I would like. So in this case, I think this kind of very light beige is my favorite. You can see the color code here. And if you click on it, you can also copy the color code down here. Going to go in here also change this to the color code I just copied. And I’m going to do the same thing with this as well. Go into the light color. Change the color to something I just copied. Right. So that is all more matchy. And I’ll go in here, pick the red, and make it a little bit less orange. Just maybe here. Yeah. So it matches the tape
and make it stand out a bit more. just so it balances this tape out because I feel like it’s kind of this very bright bright splotch of color over in in in the corner. Another thing that we can do to counteract that is also edit adjust and then take down uh the vibrance or the saturation of the colors slightly. You know, it’s not going to do a lot, especially when it comes to vibrance, but you could do a lot of damage with saturation. So I’ll just take it down just a touch and then leave the vibrance as is. So I would say that this is my quick attempt at a collage design. You can see that the semi-transparent elements that we have which is this tape and this text are on top of a solid background which is very important when it comes to printing. And it does have this mixed media idea of illustration and photo and paper and texture and tape. So, I actually quite like this. And if it was printed in the middle of this kind of boxy tea, I feel like that is something I would definitely wear. Lastly, we’ve got something called maximalist sport. Over the past couple of years, people have been into wearing distinctly athletic clothes in their everyday looks. We had the long boxing sneakers, big basketball shorts, and frankly me saying that sportsware is trending is like saying water is wet. But this is a more fashiony take on sportsware. It takes the football jerseys, stripes, player numbers, varsity fonts, and crashes it into unexpected colors, tropical florals, and bold patterns. So, for my take for Maximalist Sport, I’ve actually decided to go for something that’s not a standard t-shirt, but an all over print sports jersey t-shirt. I just downloaded the design files that we have, the the print file templates for the all over print unisex sports jersey and imported them into Canva. So, this is what it looks like. It’s just the semi-transparent image with just sections clear. You can see if I change the color, the clear sections is the stuff that is going to be visible and then the white sections is not going to be visible on your final product. So, we’re going to use this front template and a similar looking back template with just a, you know, a different color to create our jersey. So, something that I’ve been seeing a lot is these very bright, vibrant colors and checkerboard patterns. I really like a checkerboard. So, let us just find a checkered pattern. This one is cool just because it’s not symmetrical. So, if you compare it to this one, it has a center and clearly two symmetrical sides versus this one is a little bit less symmetrical looking, especially if we’re going to apply it slightly at a diagonal. So, let’s go for it. Let’s switch it to a bright color. I kind of want to go for a yellowy orange.
So that’s going to be our base. We don’t want the background to be white. We want something a bit more interesting. So we’re just going to use simple shapes to change the background color uh more easily. You could just, you know, go into position and and find this and change the background color this way. But you can also, and we are going to need simple shapes anyway later, go in to elements, close this search, and then you have a bunch of sections over here. I go into shapes, which is a category, and I pick just a regular basic rectangle. A slight tip, especially if you’re not super new to design tools, you know that there’s always uh different shortcuts for things. If you just press R, it’s going to create a rectangle for you. Similarly, if you want a circle, you can press C and it’s going to create a circle for you. They are going to be uh one by one and then you can change the shape of them later on going forward. So let’s just make a rectangle for first for the bottom part. Just fill in this bottom part and pick a color that is going to be dark like a maybe like a dark brown. Something along these lines like not black but chocolatey. move it to the back and we have a very nice pattern in my opinion. Then I think we can play with the player number idea. Go into text. Just pick any type of text you want. Let’s go for, I don’t know, number 12. I don’t know. Do you have a favorite sports player that is number 12? Let me know. And I’ll actually stick with this light yellow color for now just so I can see what I’m doing and look into something that is going to be more of a varsity font. So you can either go through the categories at the very top right here and look for something that is going to match the idea that we have. There’s the sports section for example. Or you could just type in into the search bar something like varsity and see what comes up and you would get a lot of the same results. But I quite liked the stuff that we had in sport and this actually fits exactly what I’m looking for. There is also this yearbook solid one which is better for this tall long type of number. And then also we have boxing which looks promising. You know what? Let’s stick with this just because it’s not completely straight at the very top and at the very bottom of the one. I like it. I’m going to stick with that. So, we are going to place this in the very center of the page. Once again, if you’re not sure where the center is, look for either the solid purple line or click on position arrange and then make sure that it’s centered on the page. Uh, we are going to be a number 12, which is going to be right here. And I also want some kind of maybe motivational phrasing in here because it’s not going to be a real sports jersey. We can kind of play around with it a bit more. And we should probably go for some extra text. Not necessarily something sports team related, but always picked last could be good. I know this is gigantic. We’re just going to make it way smaller in a second. Or you can just go in here and type up, I don’t know, 70, and it’s going to be way smaller. So, you can see that in the middle there. I just made it all caps immediately. But something that is important to pay attention to is this line right about here. What that indicates is the fold line. So essentially where your torso folds around is going to be right where this dashed line is. So, I would genuinely recommend taking both of these elements and making them smaller and then centering them that way just so you can make sure that it really fits well on the product. I’ll also create a bit more space around that 12 so I can make it a little bigger and, you know, move things around. I don’t like how
starkly pale all of this is. So, let’s see if I can make it a little bit. So, if I just pick the same yellow and move that yellow shade lighter to see if something like this could actually work. Yeah, that could be cool. Um, I also might want uh an outline on this. So I will go into effects, click outline. It immediately creates an outline. And then you can really play play around with the thickness of it all. Yeah, I think that looks good. And you can also change the color of the outline. I think this is a little bit too dirty of a brown, but I also can’t make it the same dark brown, otherwise it’s going to blend in. So we’re going to move it a little bit up. Kind of like this. I’m also going to pick this outline, choose the same color for it, and then make it thicker just so it’s visible. You can see also the little spikes here, which become way more obvious with the outline. I think those are very cool. Can make this a little bit bigger. And maybe make this three lines. Reduce the line spacing. Just make this larger just so we can really see those spikes as well as possible. Something that you can also do that might be fun is creating uh a fake logo. I’m just going to create a fake smiley face logo, especially with this kind of message. So, we go back into elements right here. We write down smiley face
and look into graphics and see if there’s anything that matches. And let’s say we want something fairly symmetrical, be along these lines, but also a little bit more interesting. Sad smiley face.
This is, I think, exactly what I’m looking for. And then I’m going to switch the color to the same color of our text or the same color of our background, whichever I think looks better. I think this is nice. And then match it to our
entire idea. So that goes in there. Might be a little bit small. We can move things around. We can see where we want everything. You can use these armpit sections here as your guide uh just to see where things are going to be located. So you can imagine that the numbers are going to start right around here. And then we have this smiley face. I want to make it look a little bit more like a logo. So I’m also going to add a circular background behind it. So let me just add a circle. I pressed C just like we talked about before. Make it maybe in this big position. Layers. Move it behind this. Make it yellow perhaps or this kind of same color.
Make sure that it’s centered with the element. And then also maybe give it an outline.
Make sure that you’re selecting outline color. Change the color to match. Change the thickness if you want. And then this is basically a little logo that we’ve created for ourselves. I know it’s not a real logo, but good enough. You can also group it, position, arrange, and make sure that it’s centered on the page as well, just like our other elements are. So, let’s say this is the front, but we are not completely done yet. We also have the collar, the back, the two sleeves. The logic is going to be pretty much the same. What I’m just going to do for this section here, use the two colors that we have in the background, which is the yellow and the brown, and create rectangles. If I go into layers, I have this background layer here that is brown. I just copy paste it and move it to where I want it. So in this case, I think I want the outer edge of the collar to be dark and the inner edge to be light. So I’ll leave it here and I’ll copy another line. And then that is going to be our yellow line. We move all of this to the back behind our template but in front of the pattern that we had right here. So, we have an outer part of our collar, an inner part of our collar, and the whole front of the jersey. We are going to fast forward through me creating the back because it’s going to be pretty much the same. I’m just going to keep that number bigger and in the center. And the sleeves are going to be all colored. So, give me a second. So, I’ve created the the front here. And then the back section as well. Just kind of always pick last never first. That kind of idea. And I’ve also created the sleeves in a similar size right here. And they’re exactly the same. This one is the right sleeve. This one is the left sleeve. I’ve just added the logo in here as well. What you’re going to do next is you’re just going to delete all of the guidelines that you have everywhere. And then you’re going to export these files the way that they are and go into the Printful product catalog. So right now I’m in the Printful product catalog on the all over print recycled unisex sports jersey page. I picked my size and I’m just going to click start designing. We’re going to enter the design maker. It’s going to auto select all of the sizes. I just want the large so I deselect everything. And that is it. And we have just the one. You can also have your choice of stitch color, white or a black, depending on what color your design is. Mine is a little bit darker. So, I’m going to go with black thread. And I’m going to add all of our placements that we created. So, upload or drop your designs here. Yes, we understand all the terms of service. Save and close. And then upload. Once all of your files are uploaded, just apply them one by one. So, we have them. I’ve named them front, back, right, and left. Apply the front to the front placement. And you can see how it lines up perfectly and how it looks on the right. We move on to the back placement.
Apply the back placement. And you can immediately see what it looks like. It might not be perfectly aligned right around the edges, but looks great either way. And you can see that collar worked out as well. And then we go into right sleeve. Apply right.
Left sleeve apply left. And you can see how there’s going to be the smiley face logo over here and no logo over here. So, as you can see, it’s super easy as long as we did the work beforehand because we designed within a print file template. It all fits perfectly. And you can really see how it paid off. So, this is just a 3D rendering on the right. But if you click on mockups in the top right corner, you can also see what it’s going to look like when it’s all sewn together. I love it. Looks great to me. This is how you upload your designs. You can then save them as templates right here or just push them to your store. And that’s it. Three trends, three designs, and we did the whole thing in Canvas.