Design Great Stuff: How to Make Merch with Draplin

Aaron Draplin's sixth Skillshare class trades his usual logo-and-branding territory for the physical side of design: pins, patches, posters, hats, and the mess of vendors and files behind them. The course follows a real project end to end, a poster called Cumulus Collected that started as a dream about cloud patterns, then got turned into a patch and a pin. That through-line gives the class a spine that a lot of process-based design courses lack, because viewers see one design mutate across formats rather than watching isolated demos.

What actually gets taught

The most useful stretch of the course is the file-building work. Draplin shows why a single vector graphic cannot just get shrunk down and handed to a patch maker or pin stamper as-is: embroidery merrow needs extra space between color fields, and pin stamping softens sharp points, so shapes have to be rebuilt and manually adjusted, cloud by cloud, to survive the production process. He walks through the actual keyboard shortcuts and scaling percentages he uses in Illustrator to nudge shapes apart, and explains why a "do not alter, do not stretch" note on a handoff file exists in the first place, using an old sharpie order that a promo company mangled as the cautionary example. This is genuinely specific, tactical content that a designer moving into merch would not otherwise know to worry about.

The vendor research section is thinner. It gestures at searching for promotional product suppliers and evaluating minimums, pricing, and the physical quality of a blank item, but it stays at the level of general advice rather than naming a repeatable evaluation process. Viewers get a sense of Draplin's taste (he favors items with real character, avoiding what he calls the cheap and forgettable), but not a checklist they could apply to their own sourcing.

Stories versus instruction

A significant portion of the runtime is given over to what the course calls "Tales of Merch," personal stories about specific projects: the Space Shuttle patch that turned into a 22-item product line, an ill-fated yardstick that was too expensive and fragile to ship, and site visits with his patch and pin manufacturer Sean, where physical samples get compared round over round. These segments are entertaining and do carry real lessons, particularly the yardstick story, which is a clear-eyed breakdown of how shipping and packaging costs can kill a product idea that seemed cheap to make. But they function more as war stories than instruction, and someone hoping for a dense, skill-per-minute tutorial will find the pacing loose.

The course also assumes comfort with Illustrator. Screen recordings move quickly through panel selections, alignment tools, and color palette cleanup without pausing to explain the basics, which matches Skillshare's stated recommendation but undercuts the "all levels" label. A true beginner will follow the concepts but lose the specific software steps.

What the course delivers well is a realistic picture of what running small-batch physical merchandise actually involves, including the proofing back-and-forth, the naming conventions for file versions, and the discipline of printing a design out at actual size before committing to an order. It is closer to a documentary of one designer's process than a structured curriculum, and it rewards viewers who already have design chops and want the merch-specific knowledge layered on top.

What you will learn

• ·How to develop a merch concept from a rough idea or sketch into something worth producing
• ·How to research and evaluate promotional-product vendors and pick the right base item for a design
• ·How to adjust a single graphic for different production methods (screen print, patch embroidery, pin stamping) by rebuilding shapes and adding fudge space
• ·How to build a print-ready file with correct dimensions, spot colors, and do-not-alter instructions for a vendor handoff
• ·How to read and act on physical proofs and manage revision rounds with a manufacturer
• ·How to think through the hidden costs of merch, including shipping, packaging, and fulfillment labor