24 Hours to Create the PERFECT T-Shirt Design - Can AI Beat a Pro?

Today we will put expert designers head to head with AI on the mission to see who will create the best T shirt design. And the judge will be you. The challenge will be divided into two stages. Starting with the easiest stage, both contestants must create a minimalist design based on a design brief we will provide. And the second stage will be more challenging as both contestants have to create a design using a specific theme. And in the end, my Discord community will vote for the winner without knowing who created each design. I'll represent the AI and try to create everything using tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT. And on the other side, we will have two top rated designers who will create the designs based on creativity and many years of experience. So keep watching to find out whether the new technology can potentially replace years of experience with a few clicks or not. So to get started with the first stage, we need a brief that explains the design. And here's the first one. A minimalist floral design in boho style. The design should feature hand drawn elements with a pink touch to add some colors. And based on my experience, midjourney is very good at generating these types of illustrations. So I don't think we'll have any issues with that. But let's meet our first expert designer and send him the design brief. A top rated seller with a 4.9 star rating based on 500 reviews. According to his profile, he's a full time graphic designer with over five years of expertise. And here we can see some of his work which I think looks very professional. So I've hired him and sent the design brief. And all we need to do now is wait. And while we wait, let's see how we can use AI to create the same design. So I started by looking at similar designs just to get an idea of the style we need to create. And I've also started collecting keywords related to the design like hand drawn, floral, boho style, etc. All of these keywords will help us write the prompt and generate the image in midjourney. So by understanding the design brief and using the right keywords, I was able to generate this illustration. And in my opinion, it looks very nice and you can't really tell that it's been generated with AI. And besides that, it only took me about 15 minutes to do the research and generate the illustration, which is definitely a time and money saver. And here you can see the final design generated using AI Back to our expert designer. I placed the order at 11am and I got the delivery at around 6pm which means it took him about seven hours to finish the design. On the screen you can see the design process. It all started with a sketch and slowly turned into a cool looking drawing. The design process is definitely more fun and creative than AI, but if you look at both images side by side, can you really tell a big difference? That is what you will know by the end of this video as my Discord community will now begin voting to decide the winner of the first stage. But we're not done yet because the final stage is more challenging and our second expert is one of the biggest designers on the platform which is with over 19005 star reviews and years of experience in this field, I don't think the challenge will be that easy. But before we get into what we should create and how everything went, let me answer one of the most asked questions on my channel which is how to print my designs on shirts or other products and sell them online. Well, the best way to start with the lowest cost possible is by using a print on demand platform like Printify. So they'll handle all of the printing, packaging and shipping of your products, ensuring that your customers receive the highest quality possible. So let's say you have this design and you want to list it on Etsy and sell it as a T shirt. First you'll need to sign up for a Printify account. There are different plans, but if you're just starting out, the free plan will be more than enough. After that you will have access to all of the products. As you can see, Printify has a huge product catalog with a lot of options to choose from. So after creating your Printify account you need to connect your Etsy store. All you have to do is click on Add New Store here on the top and follow the simple steps. And you may have noticed that apart from Etsy, you can also use Printify on other platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. So once you've successfully connected your store, you can move on to the last step which is publishing your products. First, pick the product you want to sell. Lets take this unisex T shirt as an example. You'll see that Printify gives you a list of suppliers and you can choose the one based on rating and other criteria like shipping, time and location. Then simply click on Start Designing and upload your design. Here you can adjust it and ensure it's in the right place. You can also choose the colors or add text if you want. And when you're done click on Save Product. After that you can edit the product information such as the title, description, and most importantly, the pricing. I recommend the profit margin of at least 60 to 70%. To do that, select all variations and click on Edit Price. After that, you can edit the profit margin and set it to 70%, for example. After that, when you're done, click on Publish. And just as simple as that, you've successfully published your print on demand product. Now, when someone orders the product from your Etsy store, the order is automatically sent to Printify. Printify then makes the product and ships it straight to your customer. That way you'll only pay when you make a sale and you don't need to invest upfront in bulk products and now let's get back to the video and start the final stage in this battle. We have the following Design Brief Universe Mysteries we need to create a design featuring creative creatures that show the universe's mysteries, and we should also include a typography that said, what's out there? Apparently this one will be more challenging because as you know, AI is still not good at generating text on images. So in this case we'll need to finish the design ourselves. So first I placed the order and sent all information to the expert designer and then started to think about how we could use AI to create this design. So again, I can do the same and look at similar designs on different platforms, which will be a good starting point. But in my opinion, here's where ChatGPT can become really handy. I simply copied the design brief and asked the chatbot to give me T shirt design ideas for our design brief. And as you can see, it has generated five detailed ideas. Each idea has a description that will be helpful in generating the image in midjourney. It also gave us suggestions about the text, such as the font style and where to place it on the design. The first idea got my attention, but I wanted more options to choose from, so I generated similar ideas. And I really like number seven. Two friendly alien creatures sitting side by side on a hilltop. So I've generated the illustration and added the text to the the design and here's how it came out. But I have to admit the expert's design story was much more creative. The Collectors the design is about alien creatures who collect small stars and planets from a pool that is attached to a turtle's back. The turtles are cruising through space and behind the collector is his spaceship. But not only the story, even the design process was way more creative than simply writing a few words to generate images. And to get to that level, you'll need real skills. Now you see all of the images on the screen on the left are AI generated designs and on the right are designs created by professional artists. What do you think? Does AI have the potential to compete with expert designers? Well, I've posted both designs on my Discord server and asked the people to vote on which one they like more. So by the time I'm recording the video, here are the results. Starting with the first stage, the AI generated design got 70 points and the design made by the expert got 40 points. Which means AI won this round. Moving to the final stage and as expected, the expert designer got 68 points and the AI generated image 30 points. And I think the expert designer definitely deserved this win. So my final thought about this experiment is that you can definitely use AI to make simple designs and start a print on demand side hustle. But if you want something more personalized and unique, you should definitely hire a professional to help you. And I'm not saying AI generated images are useless because there are so many ways you can use AI to make money and save time. So to answer the question, can AI really replace years of experience? Well, I do not think so. That was the end of today's video. Don't forget to check out Printify using the link in the description. You'll also find the designer's gigs in the description as well. Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon.