How I Get Design Ideas for the Canva Templates I Sell on Etsy 💻 9 tips for creating Etsy listings

in the last four months I've created 23 listings for my Etsy shop and as I've been sharing my progress with my Etsy Shop a lot of you have asked me how exactly I designed the stuff so I thought I would make a video with tips on how I get design ideas and just tips in general for how to design the actual product so before I start you might be wondering if I have had any graphic design experience from school or from a professional career and no I haven't I am not a graphic designer I have never worked in graphic design but in the last four years as I've been self-employed I've actually used canva a lot just to create things for my own business like Instagram posts and different kinds of documents and I would also say that because I've looked at a lot of social media in the past four years and I look at a lot of Graphics I can say I kind of have an eye for things just because I've looked at so many things and I know what stands out to me what doesn't stand out to me so as I'm designing things for my Etsy shop I honestly literally just use my own eyes to tell if things are good and I don't use any Frameworks or anything I use some rulers and I just use my own judgment on what looks good and what doesn't and I would say the products look pretty good to me so I'm saying this because I know a lot of you who want to start an Etsy shop selling templates who don't have graphic design or any kind of design experience and that's okay you don't need to have that experience if you spend a lot of time looking at things or if you just practice by yourself a lot and create a lot of different things you will get better so you can still sell templates even if you aren't a graphic designer but that also means that you might have to spend some extra time maybe watching more YouTube videos learning some things about canva playing with canva yourself and maybe also asking some friends if you're really not sure if the designs are good or not so my first tip is to look at what your competitors are doing this should kind of be included in the market research that you're doing anyways but when you're looking at your competitors things like really look at what stands out to you which one of those products or which competitors stuff actually looks good to you and what do you find aesthetic about them but of course don't copy your competitors it's also good to see what kind of things they include in each product just so you aren't missing like a certain important thing that certain type of product must have you kind of have to find a balance between looking at your competitors stuff and not looking so much that you kind of have their designs imprinted in your head and you subconsciously copy their designs so this is tricky for me as well because I don't want to be influenced by my competitor's design but it's still wise to check out what other people are doing just so you make sure you include the most important elements in your product and in general it's just good to see what stands out to you personally in their products and can you do something that will make your product stand out as well my next tip is about how to actually start the product if you're just literally starting from scratch so maybe you've looked at competitors stuff and you kind of have an idea of what are the things you need to include in your template but you don't know where to start because you literally have a blank page in front of you so what I found that's really helpful for me to get inspiration of what design I want to create is to go look at canvas slide deck templates the ones that I already created and I'll look through a lot of them I'll make a document saving all of the slide Decks that I like and that I think I could use as inspiration like maybe I just really like the text like the font of something or maybe I like how they position this photo this photo this photo or like certain elements together so I look at those slide decks and get inspiration other than slide decks you can also look at Instagram posts and marketing material templates like proposals or stuff like that it depends on what design you're creating but I find that for me I like looking at the slide decks also I think canva just has a lot of templates for slide decks in general so there's just a lot more variety in the stuff that I can look at for inspiration so when I start a template I will pick and choose from different templates that I like from canva and I'm not going to copy the whole thing but I'll take elements that I like maybe I like this block plus this photo plus this other block and maybe I like a color scheme from another template and then maybe I like the font pairing from another template or maybe I like this font from here and this font from there and maybe I'll put it together into my own thing so I kind of have like a page of things to look at and then I pick and choose what I like from the different templates and then I just put it into my own and it basically becomes like a new thing by the way if you're liking this video so far give it a thumbs up my next step is to search in Google for blog posts on how to create a XYZ the thing you are creating because a lot of the times you can look at what's out there on Etsy you can look at your competitors but there's also a lot of resources on Google and also YouTube videos on how to create that specific thing and if you watch a couple of videos read a couple blog posts some blog posts might also have like a free template that you can download and take a look at so that's another place where you can take a look at what other people are doing it also helps you to make sure you're not missing any important elements for example like a contact page or a blurb about something specific for that thing you're selling my next tip is if you are really stuck on the design what might help is if you just do it on paper like just go old-fashioned do it on paper and literally like you might have an idea in your head what it can look like and it's it takes a long time to actually put things together in canva but if you just do it with pen and paper it might be faster for you to sketch out the template with the different elements that you need to include my next tip is to take your old templates and just move things around maybe you can change the font a bit maybe change the colors a bit drag things around and see if you can come up with like a new design I think it's always easier to start from something and then change things up rather than starting from scratch and you add each single element it's always easier to move things around my next tip is if you know know people who will actually use your Etsy products say maybe your friends who own a certain business and they might need that product you can ask them for their feedback send it to them this is also great market research to find out what exactly they want in a product like this and then when you finish the draft of your template you can als