Many people confuse Pinterest as a social platform when really it’s a powerful visual search engine. For many years, Pinterest has served as a reliable source of design inspiration for graphic designers and artists around the world. The platform lends itself perfectly to the sharing of visual ideas and has been a boon for digital marketers.
Companies can post images of their products on Pinterest and then leave a pin, linking customers back to the source, usually their website or online shop. What’s more, Pinterest allows users to share photos they like, helping marketing content go viral.
What makes Pinterest unique, though, is how the search algorithm works. You type in a word that you think will bring up the type of inspirational images that you want to see, and then the platform will then scour its archives for that particular keyword as well as related keywords that you may never have thought of. So, if you want to look at music-themed t-shirts, you just type in the keyword “music tee,” and it’ll return hundreds of related results.
It’s this “related keyword” search that makes Pinterest such a powerful tool. The platform doesn’t have any constraints on lateral thinking: if it feels that a particular image relates to your original search, it’ll display it. Pinterest is like a digital savant – it’ll keep generating innovative ideas hour after hour, speeding the process of finding inspirational source material.
Why Pinterest Beats Other Social Networks For Simple T-Shirt Design Ideas
The marketing potential of Pinterest is what makes it such an excellent platform for inspiration. Companies on the platform want to put their best foot forward, and so the production values for the majority of t-shirt images are substantially higher than those you’d find in a regular Google image search. Firms want to entice people with stunning composition, colors, angles, inspiring them to make a purchase. It’s a treasure trove for artists and designers who need fresh ideas.
Pinterest is also educational. As soon as you hop on the platform, you immediately get a sense of the exceptional standard of the best t-shirt designs of 2019. The models pose with elegance; the images are high-fidelity, the backgrounds beautiful, and the lighting impeccable. The platform is a masterclass for anybody thinking about marketing their own t-shirts.
If you’ve not used Pinterest before, then fear not: it’s easy to use. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you could use Pinterest for createive t-shirt design ideas.
Pinterest Lets You Find Niche Topics
Savvy t-shirt designers recognized a long time ago that they could use Pinterest to search for niche topics. Sure, you might be able to find t-shirts with music, sport, or political themes, but what about those with less common subject matter, such as t-shirts that relate to your local area, video games, or lipstick? It turns out that Pinterest is excellent at delivering niche ideas. You just type in what you think is the relevant keyword, and it’ll provide page after page of results. Even something as esoteric as “bird watching t-shirt” can return dozens of humorous t-shirt ideas, including “Bird nerd” and “stay coo.”
Pinterest Lets You Search T-Shirt Phrases
What’s so amazing about the way Pinterest search works is that you can type in t-shirt catchphrases and it’ll return results which include t-shirts with those very words. Try typing in “bird nerd” – the platform will come back with a plethora of images, including t-shirts, aprons, mugs, and other garments featuring the expression.
Pinterest Lets You See What’s Trending
If you’re trying to market t-shirts on Pinterest, it pays to know what’s trending. Fortunately, the platform provides a host of tools that let you find out.
Go to the search bar and type in the word “t-shirt” The platform will return images as usual and give you a selection of additional search tags you might want to include. Pinterest always shows you the most popular t-shirt designs first from left to right, then top to bottom. So when you click an option like “men’s” or “vintage,” you can see which images are trending for that particular category immediately.
Try it yourself: type in t-shirt in the search bar and then click “humor.” Pinterest will present you with an array of t-shirts with funny messages like “I see no reason to act my age” or “God created the world in 7 days, but it took 9 months to create me, so I’m a big deal.” As a designer, you’re free to take these t-shirt messages and convert them to suit your purposes. You could take a joke and convert it for another topic. This is a genuine Pinterest followers hack.
So, now that you know about the advantages of Pinterest for t-shirt designers, will you start using it?
