So you can’t afford the high price tags that come with the paid t-shirt design software?
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Create beautiful designs & professional graphics in seconds. Share your design via any social media, email or text. Download the Canva for Mac desktop app now!
And now, you’re looking for completely free software or app that has plenty of helpful tools and features to help you come up with professional t-shirt designs for your clients, brand, sports team, family, friends, etc.?
- Home Design 3D is a simple but popular app for designing and remodeling your home or house. If you’re looking for something cheap and suitable for total beginners to home design, it’s ideal. It’s easy to use, quick and has an active community of users to share ideas and get feedback on your designs from.
- Pixelmator Pro is a Mac OS app that combines many features and functions of other apps all into one tidy app. Pixelmator features many of the best features for drawing and the standard photo editing functions of other editors. It also features a 'layouting' mode for publishing and graphic design work.
If yes, we’ve got your back!
Below, we have compiled the ultimate list of the 11 best 100% FREE to use apps and software you can use to come up with unique tee designs without spending a cent.
11 FREE T-shirt Design Apps and Software:
1. Inkscape
Compatibility: Linux, macOS, Windows.
This is one of the best free to use tee design apps you can use today if you don’t have the cash for the premium apps.
Despite being an open-source vector-based design app, this tool has the power and flexibility of the paid-for tools.
The fact that this software isn’t limited to vector images means you can use it to work on a wide variety of projects. It presents you with everything you need to create as well as edit your tee graphics.
Some of the top features you’ll get from this software include shape tools, pencil tool, calligraphy tool, pen tool, color tools, font and text editing, color tools, and multiple layers.
With Inkscape, you can turn existing bitmap images into vector images (using the tracing function), scale up/down your images, and export it in suitable formats for screen-printing.
The app also provides you with raster image formats like .png and .jpg.
Although this app comes with no t-shirt templates or YouTube tutorials, experienced previous designers have taken it upon themselves to provide you with free guides (like the one below). This makes the Inkscape learning curve easier for you.
2. GIMP
Compatibility: GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and other operating systems.
GIMP is another popular software for a t-shirt design that allows you to create professional-looking designs without spending hefty amounts of cash.
The open-source software has been around for more than two decades. It has always been regarded as the best free alternative to Photoshop (or the granddaddy of free photo editing and graphic design) by millions of users.
For your tee design needs, this software presents you with plenty of customizable tools, including texts, brushes, arts, etc., to help you quickly come up with fully customized t-shirts.
Just like the paid-for, this app also provides you with free templates and YouTube tutorials for first-time users.
Note that GIMP undergoes regular updating by its team of volunteers to ensure it continues solving your design needs for free.
3. Custom Ink
Compatibility: in-browser designer.
This is an in-browser design, specially made for t-shirts. It’s 100% free to use. It comes with a user-friendly interface, making it one of the easiest to use apps.
When you get down to create your designs, you’ll enjoy using hundreds of images that come with Custom Ink. Keep in mind that these images are organized into categories like animals, nature, tech, people, occupation, music, transportation, etc., so you’ll likely find the image that matches your design needs.
Or you can simply upload your own design with just a click of a button.
It also lets you easily add numbers and names to your t-shirts. This will come in handy when you want to customize tees for your sports team or project group.
Once you’re done creating your designs, this app also lets you easily share them with your friends.
And if you want to order a t-shirt with your customized design, Custom Ink lets you do so. You just create your own design, place an order, and they’ll deliver the tee to your doorstep.
4. Smart Shirt Designer
Compatibility: macOS, Windows, Linux.
If you’re looking for a free to use tee design app for your football jersey design project, you just found the Smart Shirt Designer!
This designer software comes specially designed to help you come up with professional-looking football jerseys, which explains why it comes stocked with a huge list of brand logos (including Adidas, Nike, etc.), shirt designs, and color designs. These free designs will let you come up with your own patterns for your tees.
It lets you create the front as well as back portions of your t-shirts.
Just like the premium software, this designer also gives you the option of using their free patterns or draw and design your own patterns…or upload your own images and logos.
The software will then save your complete design in its own supported format. But it allows you to export the design in popular formats such as png, jpg, and gif formats.
5. Get Paint
Compatibility: Windows.
This is another free to download and use image and photo editing software. It also comes with a pretty intuitive and innovative user interface, which makes it quite easy to figure out for those using it for the first time.
Unlike most of the other t-shirt designs apps and software out there, this app takes your design work higher by making your designs look more realistic.
In other words, it distorts and applies your design, logo, text, etc. based upon the t-shirt surface, just like the final product will look like.
The fact that this software presents you with an ‘undo’ function means you’ll not have to worry about making errors during the design process as you can always erase them.
And oh! Don’t forget that this app has an ever-growing online community, which means you’ll enjoy plenty of help, support, forums, and tutorials easily.
6. Fat Paint
Compatibility: online design software
This is another excellent, free to use online design software, so you don’t have to download or install anything to start using it. Just make sure you have adobe flash installed on your browser.
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The free software comes with plenty of helpful design functions to help you come up with stunning t-shirts. These include up to 900 fonts, thousands of vector clip arts, and even 3D templates, which are sure to make your t-shirt come alive!
You can also upload your own photographs and images, and then use FatPaint to crop or resize them according to your requirements. You can also easily combine your designs with other images and texts.
The only problem you’ll experience when using this software is the advertisements that keep popping up. If you find these ads annoying, you can simply subscribe to the pro version for ad-free design experience.
7. Krita
Compatibility: Windows, Mac, and Linux
Interior Design Apps For Mac
Krita also made it to our list of the best free t-shirt design apps. It’s an image and painting app that offers excellent competition for commercial apps such as Photoshop.
One of the key features you’ll love in this app revolves around the different brush settings. You can easily change these settings using toolbar controls to meet your design needs. You can easily adjust aspects like size, color, blending mode, and opacity.
Just like Photoshop, Krita also allows you to create shapes using paths!
If you want to use pre-made images, then this app lets you easily import it by dragging them onto the canvas. The app has plenty of filters that you can apply to your pictures or layers to make them look even more amazing.
Mark you, Krita was developed by like-minded designers who have even prepared easy-to-follow tutorials to make it easy to use for everyone.
Imagine getting all these design editing features and functions without paying a dime? This is precisely why Krita makes our list of the best cost-free platforms for you!
8. Flash T-shirt Design Software
If you want to start your own t-shirt printing company but don’t have the money to invest in high-end software like Photoshop, then this design software will be a great alternative.
The free to use features a user-friendly interface plus a bunch of high-quality features to enable you to come up with professional-looking t-shirt designs for your clients.
When you access the Flash interface, you’ll be thrilled by the multiple fonts, clipart, and colors that you can use to make t-shirt designs of your liking. The vector clip arts, in particular, will match your t-shirt colors…and you can always change the colors to suit your needs.
9. Free-T-shirt Maker
If you’re still looking for an easy-to-use free t-shirt design too, this software will also make an excellent choice.
It has such a simple and interactive interface that you even a beginner will quickly get the hang of it. You’ll easily figure out what button or control does what within a few minutes of playing with the interface.
The t-shirt maker is generous with hundreds of clip arts classified into animals, education, abstracts, flower, heart, sports, technology, and more. The software lets you modify these clip arts, resize, and even rotate them to meet your unique design needs.
As with the other t-shirt designs apps and software, this free to use tool also lets you import your own images to create t-shirt designs of your choice.
Design Apps For Macbook
10. Tee Designer Master
Compatibility: online-based software
Here comes another cool t-shirt design software you can trust to meet your t-shirt design solutions. Being an online-based app, you don’t need to do any downloading or installation to start using it.
You directly run in on your browser, which is easy as ABC.
This is the perfect software for those who wish to design t-shirts as well as other garments like a hoodie.
Despite being a FREE software, it lets you design both the front and back sides of your t-shirt. And in the preview option, it shows you both sides of your t-shirts together.
Customizing your designs and artwork has never been easier, thanks to the multiple editing tools this software provides you with. These include the paintbrush to let you change your t-shirt color, ability to add texts, logos, images, etc. to your design.
Its library stocks over 20 different types of images that you can use in your design work. Alternatively, you can upload your own images from your PC.
11. Alma mater Store
Compatibility: online-based tool
Last but not least, we have this Alma mater store online tool. Like all the other software featured on this list, this one too lets you come up with awesome t-shirt designs.
The website lets you easily create your own designs, save them, and share them with your friends without spending a penny.
Alternatively, they can print the t-shirt for you and send it to you if you chose this option. They offer you all the possible shirt sizes to help you chose one that suits you best.
You’ll enjoy using the many included tools like the text, brush, art, name, note, number, and many more to help you come up with truly unique designs.
What’s more, the tool will let you easily create design print on the back, front, and sleeves of your t-shirt.
Pro TIP: Take Advantage of FREE trials!
If you want to experience the powerful t-shirt design that comes with industry-leading software and apps, you can take advantage of the free trials. These will give you enough time to come up with t-shirt designs without spending a dime.
For instance, you can take advantage of the Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, both of which are products of Adobe a leading industry standard for image editing. Both software offers you a 7-day free trial, which is more than enough time for completing quick t-shirt design jobs.
Verdict
See, you don’t need to pay those large sums of money to get a professional-looking t-shirt design. In this list, we have just outlined some of the best free t-shirt design software and apps that you can use to come up with customized t-shirts for your clients, group project, sports team, etc.
All the tools we have features on this list are 100% FREE to use — no subscript need. You simply download/install them and get down to making your customized t-shirt prints.
Despite being free to use, the tools come with powerful features that you’ll find in the paid software as well, meaning they’ll help you create professional-looking t-shirt designs.
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App Designing Websites
Technology is here to help the designers too. With clothing design software, they can come up with patterns and designs and get their 3D previews. This is much better than the old school way of sketching the designs with paper and pen because they give you the exact idea of how a particular design will look once you are done with it. Here are Top 10 Free Clothing Design Software for Mac users.
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1. Fashion Toolbox
With Fashion Toolbox, you can design clothes, textiles, and accessory designs. It has many CAD tools and design export options. You can even trace the design from a photo and create new designs from it.It has a fabrics clip art gallery and design specs workbook which will guide you through the lessons for casting and fitting of your designs. The trial version can be downloaded and then upgraded to the complete Toolbox version to benefit from all the features.
2. eDraw Max
eDraw has a straightforward and flexible software experience to offer for fashion designers. All the templates are vector so that modification can be done easily. There are many skin tones and other accessories that can be chosen to go with the clothing designs.With drag and drop tools, the designing is very easy even for beginners. You can also choose sub-element fashion and change the color or design. And apart from this, there are many templates and sketching tools to choose from.
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10 Best Software to Create Fabulous T-Shirt Designs
3. Digital Fashion Pro
Digital Fashion Pro comes with a training guide so that you can get familiar with the software without seeking much help from anywhere else. You can also download the trial version. In this, 200 different templates can be customized and redesigned.About 110 digital fabrics can be chosen as the raw material for the clothing. And the software has a unisex approach to keep up with the latest trends and presentations. Still if you find the software difficult to use, there are training videos with step by step illustrations.
4. Cameo Apparel Pattern Software
Cameo Apparel Pattern Software is a complete package for designers. You can buy the entire package or get different modules. There are separate design software modules for children’s clothing, men’s clothing and similar design suites to select. So depending on the type of clothes you design, you can get the perfect software.You can get models of custom sizes, make plans and drawings and other specifications on the design. With support for printing, you can print or save the design readily once you are done.
5. Designer Pro Apparel Edition
You can draft designs on 3D models with Designer Pro Apparel Edition. A 3D preview of the design can be seen. The created models can be exported as PDFs with added password security.Latest designs and all color combinations and customization can be done either by using the templates or by creating new designs on your own. You can calculate the price of the materials and get estimations of the finished product.
6. FashionLab Studio
FashionLab Studio is a fast tool for designers. It has all the resizing and rotation/transformation tools. You can also draw patterns with lines and curves. The software is also suitable for making custom T-Shirt designs.The finished design can be imported as an image (JPG and TIFF) or in PDF format. The software has basic vector design tools but is not suitable for advanced designers.
7. Dress Assistant
You can catalog the entire wardrobe on your laptop and see what models fit the best. You can upload photos from other devices and see what they look like. The software has a very intuitive interface. There are 12 wardrobes with six each for men and women.You can save the designs and sync them with all your Apple devices using iCloud support. The software has many items, outfits, and events that can be associated with multiple wardrobes. You can duplicate outfits and sort them manually or automatically.
8. Optitex
Optitex is a brilliant software with 3D designing and creation suites. It can also be used by sewn product manufacturers and designers alike. It has a straightforward and interactive interface with marker making suite and cutting room optimization suite.The software is powerful with such features that it is worth the money spent buying it. You can also get the trial version. The finished design can be downloaded as an image or as PDF.
9. eTelestia
eTelestia is a CAD program with which you can create and modify fashion and clothing designs. It has easy to draw design tools which use AB Fashion Design template. There are zoom and measuring tools in the working area so that you can create the designs with details and perfection.Technical drawing and virtual fitting are just a couple of other features of this product. You can create your style library and work on multiple designs simultaneously. There is help with examples for beginners, and it supports multiple languages.
10. Browzwear
The simulations using Browzwear software are so realistic because they make use of many factors such as weight, mass and fabric type to come up with the previews. It has V-Stitcher for designers to create new patterns, V-Styler to attend to the colors and designs andV-Viewer for merchants to see the different finished apparels. All of these are integrated to make your work easier. They can also be used with other software packages such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Bottom Line
These clothing design software will be of great help to students and fashion designers. You have the freedom to create the designs from scratch or use the templates and add modifications and enhancements. The design ideas in your mind can be converted into products or be shared with others for reviews and appreciations.Virtual studios can cut your costs as you can see the previews of your designs with originality even before you manufacture them. For students, who cannot have a fully functional designer studio at their early stage of learning, such designer software will be of much help. Even if you are not a professional designer, you can get some of these trial versions and create that one lovely dress for a special occasion.