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If you’re a talented designer there are a number of ways you could make passive income online. Tired of exchanging your time for money and creating designs for individual clients? Why not produce a design once, upload it to one or more of the sites suggested below and wait for the money to roll in? This way of working means you could receive unlimited income from just one design. It also allows you to work on the designs you want to work on, when you want to work on them. To find out how to achieve this level of flexibility let’s take a look at a range of passive income ideas for designers.
Create greetings card designs
Greetings card websites like thortful accept designs from absolutely anyone. It’s free to create an account and upload your designs plus you retain the copyright. Your creator name and bio are even printed on the back of each card that sells! You can create card designs for any occasion you can think of. The most popular categories are birthday, get well soon, friendship, sympathy, thank you, congratulations, new baby, wedding, anniversary, valentines, love, Christmas, New Year, good luck, Mother’s Day and thinking of you. For each sale you are paid around 10% of the sales value, which for a standard A5 card is around 30p.
Create t-shirt designs
If fashion design is more your thing, why not create t-shirt designs? You can then sell them through websites like Teepublic. Teepublic claim that their artists collect the highest earnings of any print-on-demand site at around $20 (roughly £15) per shirt. All you need to do is create your artwork, upload it digitally and choose which products you’d like your design to appear on. As well as t-shirts there are 74 other products including hoodies, sweatshirts, stickers, phone cases, mugs and notebooks.
Create business cards, leaflets and stationary
Are you skilled with Adobe InDesign? If so you could make passive income by turning your designs into editable templates that businesses can personalise and use for marketing. Simply upload your designs to Template Cloud and they will be sold on popular sites like printing.com. You set the price range for your products and are paid every time someone orders some printing using your template.
Publish an art book
Self-publishing has become increasingly popular among authors and artists alike. You can now create your own art book using a website like Blurb then self-publish it directly on Amazon. You can design the layout, choose the printing options and order a single book to proof. Then your books will be printed as and when they’re sold. This reduces up-front costs and means you don’t have to hold stock.
Create your own fonts
Typography is often forgotten about when it comes to creating passive income as a designer. However by creating your own fonts and selling them through websites like MyFonts you could make a significant income. If you think this is something you may be able to do be sure to take a look at each websites guidelines to ensure your font meets their requirements and will pass their quality control. You should consider creating your font in multiple styles including regular, bold, italic and bold-italic. It’s also worth trying to include as many characters as possible as those with more tend to sell more frequently. Normally sites that will sell your font won’t require exclusive rights but they may ask you to keep your price the same on every site you sell on so it’s worth double checking the contract so you’re absolutely clear.
Make use of design resources
When you’re creating designs to earn passive income you don’t always have to start from scratch. You can use svg images as the basis of your designs or to add the finishing touches. Alternatively, you could use stock photographs and layer text on top of the images, create illustrations by tracing the outlines of the photos main feature or manipulate the imagery. Don’t forget that a great font can really make a design. Often a slogan in a carefully selected font is all you need. Remember, you’ll need appropriate licences to use anything you haven’t created yourself commercially.
Combined these passive income ideas for designers could create a regular income and with some hard work you may even be able to replace your traditional 9-5 job. Be sure to check out the money section of this site for more ways to make extra money online.