Spoonflower design challenges

How to improve your entries and boost your sales

Spoonflower design challenges are one of my favourite things to talk about! Not because I have mastered them (far from it!) but because I truly believe entering these challenges regularly at the start of my surface pattern journey was the single biggest accelerator to my creative career.

Entering the challenges week by week pushed me to improve faster, think more commercially, and hone my skills in a way that designing in isolation never could.

If you have yet to submit an entry to the challenges, or you have started to but are not yet ranking where you’d like, I hope this post will give you some practical suggestions to improve your entries and by doing so, boost your sales and enhance your portfolio.

(And I promise to share some of my own design challenge highs and lows as we go through!!)

What are the Spoonflower design challenges?

Spoonflower is a print on demand site, allowing surface pattern designers to upload their patterns and receive royalties when customers buy products featuring their design.

Every other week, Spoonflower hosts a design challenge, which is open to all artists on the platform, where it produces a creative brief and artists can submit one pattern to the challenge. All entries are submitted to a vote (anyone can vote!) and after the voting period, designs are ranked according to votes received.

The 'top ten' is a coveted place to be with monetry prizes given to these artists, and the 'top 100' get featured on the challenge page along with an 'award winner' badge on their design when it show up in a customer search.

Why take part in challenges?

Before we dive more specifically into how to improve your entries, it's worth mentioning some of the benefits to taking part in the challenges if you are still wondering whether it is for you!

• Designing to a brief builds industry skills. Each challenge comes with a specific theme and product focus. This mirrors exactly how the design industry works and gives you a real focus for your art. Each challenge helps you to think creatively about what kind of pattern you’d like to make, how it fits the theme and what kind of customer it will appeal to. This is an important skill to learn if you hope to license your patterns in the future.

• You can use your entries to build a relevant portfolio. Spoonflower structures the challenges around current market trends and what is searched for on their site. This means what they are asking you to create is something that customers are actively looking for. Designing consistently for the challenges is a great way to build a relevant portfolio of styles and motifs that are trending now.

• Entering each challenge helps you to hone and improve your design skills. If you are consistently entering challenges, you will quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. As the designs are voted on by other artists, you will get immediate feedback on the design and you can use this to help you improve.

  Over time, you will notice patterns in your rankings: which colours perform best, which styles resonate most, and what layouts earn the most votes.

• Your individual designs can help you build trending collections. You can use your individual challenge entries as the basis for a collection or mini collection of patterns. Often your challenge entry will be a hero style design, but you can add a secondary print and a couple of blenders in the same palette which can strengthen your portfolio and also appeal to Spoonflower customers who often like to buy a slection of prints in the same palette and style.

• Your entries can boost your sales on the Spoonflower platform. When people vote on the entries, your designs get an immediate boost in the algorithm as they will be favourited by other artists. A favourite doesn’t necessarily mean a vote, but all interactions with your design will push up its visibility on the platform. Even designs that don’t reach the top ranks benefit from increased exposure on the platform.

6 ways to improve your challenge entries

As I said at the beginning, I am certainly not someone who has mastered the design challenges, and I am by no means an expert! I am still using the challenges as a learning journey and I am seeking to improve my entries each time. But I have been entering challenges regularly for almost three years now and I have the benefit of being able to look back over my entries and sales and start to notice some key patterns.

Here are some top tips for entering the design challenges and how you can strategically use the challenges to maximise your sales.

1. Read the brief

The challenge entry page always has very clear guidelines on the theme, the style and often colour suggestions.  The voters are very savvy when it comes to whether the design fits the theme and even an excellent pattern won’t get as many votes if it doesn’t fit the brief!

Spoonflower does also disqualify patterns that are clearly nothing to do with the theme, so it's important that you take the time to read the instructions and have a firm understanding of what you are being asked to design.

If you are unsure, do some research! If it's an artistic style or technique you have not come across before, do a quick search on Pinterest and make a moodboard. I often search for and pin relevant artwork that fits the brief that I can take inpsiration from as I am designing.

2. Focus on the scale of your design

In the design brief, it will always say how your pattern will be presented to voters. Most often this is either on a fat quarter of fabric, or on a wallpaper panel.

Knowing how your design will be presented to viewers is crucial information and not understanding this correctly is where many designers can lose votes, even when their pattern is strong.

If the design is going to be shown on wallpaper you will want to design your pattern at 24x24 inches (or if you are designing at 300 DPI like I do, you can make it 12x12 inches and Spoonflower will automatically scale it up when you upload it). Designing at these specifications will mean your pattern shows fully across the wallpaper panel.

If the design is going to be shown on a fat quarter, you can design at this scale, but voters will only be shown an 18x18inch square of your design, so if you are designing at 24x24 some of it will be cut off. Sometimes this doesn't matter, but it can be frustrating if you will want the whole pattern square to be shown to voters.

This is how I deal with this problem: I always design at 12x12 inches at 300 DPI which is perfect for the wallpaper entries. If I design a pattern for a challenge that is going to be viewed as a fat quarter, I will often resize my pattern to a 9x9inch canvas in Procreate at 300 DPI after I have created it.

This is super simple in Procreate – when you have finished designing your pattern on a 12x12 canvas, swipe three fingers down and tap ‘copy all’. Then create a new canvas at 9x9 inches and tap ‘paste’. You can now upload this resized version so it doesn’t cut off any of your pattern in the thumbnail the viewers will see.

If the talk of sizing and DPI is confusing, take a look at this recent blog post which should help to clear things up!

3. Prioritise creativity

This may sound obvious, and is surely something we are all striving for, but sometimes the designs that reach the top spots aren’t overly complicated, they are just original and interesting!

Take for example these block print fish I designed for the block print challenge in December 2023. This came 14^th place and was a really simple design.

In contrast, I spent hours perfecting this bird and blossoms print for the accent walls challenge in January 2025, but it didn’t even reach the top 100.

Often a unique idea, executed really well can capture people's imaginations in the voting stage and mean your design does well in a challenge.

4. Use colours strategically

I am convinced that the colours you use are just as important as the design itself and can be key in getting you the votes.

If choosing colours is something you find hard, take some time to study the winning entries of the previous design challenges and analyse the palettes that are doing well. Often a very limited palette can be the most striking.

Also ensure the background colour you use provides enough contrast with the motifs in your pattern. You want the pattern to stand out from others in the voting lineup!

Colours come in and out of favour, like anything else, so it’s wise to pick them carefully. I have a blog here on how to create your own colour palettes if this is something you find hard.

5. Study the winning entries

It’s important to ensure that you are learning from others as you go. When the results come in, take a good look at those top 10 entries and try and break down what the designers are doing well. Think about:

-              Their composition

-              The scale they have used

-              The colours

-              Their use of texture

It’s not about replicating what these designers have done, but about looking back at your own work and trying to figure out how you could level up your design for next time.

If you just improve on one thing each time, think where you’d be in a year!

6. Add details and texture

This was my very first entry to a design challenge back in March 2023 which came in at 197th place.

Whilst I still like this pattern (and it still sells in my shop!) I think my style has evolved a lot since then, in particular with the addition of details and textures. You can see in this pattern the motifs are very simplistic and flat.

Below you can see the first of my entries that made it to the top 100 and you can see that the detail on each of the flowers has significantly increased from my first entry.

Moving on a few months and I started to use texture in my work. At this point I began hitting some much higher rankings. This elephant print ranked 19th place.

Of course, there are some anomalies to this, but I have found that adding details or texture can significantly elevate a design. All the textures I use in my patterns these days come from my texture overlays pack and are very simple to use if you design in Procreate. They can add immediate interest and a professional touch.

My design challenge highs and lows

Here are a few of my highs and lows of the last three years and what I have learnt from each of them.

You can see below my highest ranking design so far and it has also been my best selling design. After the challenge ended I added two alternative colourways for this pattern and they all sell equally well. I think it sells because birds and flowers are always going to be desirable to customers! Whether it’s on fabric, wallpaper or home decor, this pattern is very versatile.

Below you can see my second highest ranked design, which I think did well in the challenge because of its simplicity and interesting texture. I think the limited colour palette also contributed to its success. However, I have only ever sold this pattern once! It is such a niche design and doesn’t have a wide appeal for wallpaper or home decor. It's worth remebering that just because a design is in the top 10, it doesn't mean it will sell well.

Below you can see my lowest ranked design over the last three years which was one of my very earliest entries. Although it was fun to get all those flowers to fit nicely together, it doesn’t show a lot of creativity, there are no details or texture and it is just not very special! No surprises that I have never sold this design!

Below you can see a design that just missed the top 100 but continues to sell very well in my shop a couple of years later. The design brief was to create a pattern for retro sportswear, and I think I majored on the ‘retro’ element rather than the sportswear which is why it didn’t rank so well in the challenge.

However, this style of pattern is very in demand and people are often looking for retro floral type designs. Sometimes you may miss the top rankings in votes but it doesn't mean all is lost, you may still get good sales from it!

Below you can see my highest ranking design from the past few months and I think this print did well because it has a very striking palette and a simple but flowing design. I teach you how to make a symmetrical design like this in my Procreate Patterns Class if you’re interested in learning more about this technique.

Below is my lowest ranked design from the past few months and I think this one missed the brief! The theme was country retro and I don’t think this really matches the aesthetic the voters were looking for so I’m not surprised it didn’t rank very highly!

Mindset

I have a very low pressure attitude towards the challenges these days. I use them as a fun way to design something to a brief that I know is in demand on the platform.

I'm delighted if I do well and know that a design in the top rankings will often bring in sales. And if my entry plumets, I have a little laugh to myself and try and work out how I could improve for next time!

I also love designing collections around my entries and find it produces a real focus for my work.

I hope this has helped you if you haven't entered a challenge yet, or if you haven't been hitting the rankings you'd like. As with everything in this industry, it takes time, effort and perseverence to reach your goals, so keep going!

If you have any questions or comments or want to share your highs and lows of the Spoonflower design challenges, just leave a comment in the comment section below and I'll get back to you!