Design your own merchandise

CafePress has been around for several years now. The idea is really ingenious: it's a website that will allow you to upload images and then sell t-shirts, coffee mugs, mousepads, magnets, etc. with your image to the public. Just having a site that lets you upload images and have them send you a t-shirt with that image printed would be pretty cool. But CafePress' success has definitely been in taking it that extra step and allowing people to set up online stores. This is all old news. I'm writing about it because I just had my first experience with designing an image in Photoshop, uploading it to CafePress, and having a t-shirt show up in the mailbox. And I must say that I'm very impressed by the quality and price. Obviously, the true test of quality will come five laundry loads from now, but the brand new product looks pretty spiffy. The magnet and pin-on button that I ordered are also of high quality.

If I ever come up with a clever phrase, like Hubbers has, I know where I'm going to market my merchandise.

You want pictures? Yes, I'm aware that I look like a complete dork in these photos. That's kind of the idea.

Single small centered image on the front of the "ringer-t".

And a larger image across the back.

Here's my design. The photo was taken rather professionally by sgazzetti. Jagosaurus found the font. And all the Photoshop work to put it together with shadows and stuff was me. Oh, and Jagosaurus came up with the font and slogan on the front.

More photos of this merchandise available on the blog, of course.