What to ask for: six prompts that print well on a t-shirt, and why
Drawing is free here, so people try a lot of prompts. After a few hundred of them we know what tends to make a shirt someone wears, and what makes a shirt someone admires on the screen and never orders. The difference is almost never the drawing. It is what was asked for.
One subject, doing one thing
Every prompt in the picture above has the same shape: a subject, and one thing it is doing or one odd detail. A fox reading the morning paper. A whale carrying a lighthouse. An astronaut watering a plant. That is not a style; it is the size of an idea that fits on a chest.
A prompt with two subjects and a background — "a fox and a rabbit having tea in a forest at sunset" — draws fine and prints as a grey rectangle of small marks. On a shirt, from across a room, nobody can see the tea. One subject, drawn large, in dots, is what survives the distance.
The odd detail is the shirt
"A corgi" is a drawing. "A corgi in snowboard goggles" is a shirt. The detail is what makes someone smile and then ask where you got it, which is the only marketing this shop has.
The detail works best when it is physical: something the subject wears, holds or stands on. Moods and adjectives ("a happy corgi", "a dreamy fox") are hard to draw and harder to print. Goggles print.
Say the place, not the style
You do not need to tell the machine how to draw — the dots are the house style and every drawing gets them. Words like "minimalist", "vintage", "vector", "line art" mostly fight the dots and lose. Spend the words on the subject instead.
A place, on the other hand, is worth saying. A sauna in the snow is a whole scene in five words, and the snow gives the dots something to do. Brutalist Tallinn at dawn works because the buildings are shapes. "A city skyline" does not, because it is nobody's city.
Ask for four, then pick
Every prompt gives you four takes, drawn one after the other: the same idea from a different angle or at a different moment. The first one is on the shirt in about ten seconds. Look at all four before you decide — the one you wanted is often the third. "Another one" is the button.
If none of the four is right, change one word and ask again. "A cat DJ" became a cat DJ at a small party that way, and the party is what made it.
What we will not draw
A few things come back as a note instead of a drawing: a real person named in the prompt, a brand or a character someone else owns, and anything we would not print on a shirt we have our name on. The note says why, in your language, and the words stay in the box so you can change them.
If what you want is a particular person or dog, there is a better door anyway: upload a photo. The machine redraws it in the same dots, and that is the one way to get a likeness that still looks drawn rather than printed.
Then the dull part, quickly
The shirt is a Gildan tee in eight colours, printed to order in Germany, posted with tracking, €34.90. Pick the size from the printer's own chart on the page — the drawing you buy leaves the shop with you and is never sold again, so there is no change-of-mind return, and a wrong size is the one mistake we cannot undo.
Try one of the six above, or write your own. Drawing costs nothing; the shirt is only for the one you love.