We’re adding a bit of special “cat content” to our platform. In fact, it’s a very famous cat – a lazy, sarcastic and funny one: Garfield! We’re happy to present you a range of designs featuring the popular character from Jim Davis’s smash hit TV cult. continue reading ‘Get it! Official Garfield Designs at Spreadshirt’

Queen Elizabeth II will be celebrating 60 years of reign this summer. As with most traditional royal events, there will be plenty of excitement among souvenir sellers and collectors. We are also looking to get some great designs on our platform and into our marketing campaigns so you and others can create their own souvenir. This huge event is a perfect backdrop for a design battle.

What we are looking for:

We are looking for Pro and Contra monarchy designs – a hot topic often surrounding royal events. There are no limits to your creativity (aside from copyright and personality rights/laws). And to get you started, we’ve gathered some links that should get some inspiration juices flowing:

• The official logo, which may be used but not altered at all
• The official Brittish monarchy website
• A shop with some examples
• A democratic alternative
• Anti-royalty blog

The rules:

continue reading ‘Design Battle: British Monarchy Diamond Jubilee’

We are all licking our lips with anticipation of the two main sports events this year. In June, the 14th European Football Championships will be held in Poland and Ukraine, and the Olympic games will be hosted in London. But before you start creating new designs to honour the events, we would like to (again) direct your attention to the legal side of things. It is a bit tricky, so please ensure that your shop does not violate any copyrights.
continue reading ‘2012: A Year of Sports – and Designers Beware’

We made some changes to our design upload limits a couple of weeks ago. The changes are designed to simplify the upload process and give new partners a base to work from. Here are some more details on what this means for you:

Design Upload Limits Have been Raised

All Spreadshirt Shop Partners can initially upload 50 designs to their account. Once this initial 50 has been reached, Standard Partners can upload 5 more designs per day and Premium Partners can upload 50 more designs per day. There is no longer a difference between uploading vector or digital designs, each design upload counts towards your upload amount.

There is also no longer a correlation of upload limit to sales for Standard Partners. Standard partners had to rely on a number of sales to allow them to upload a further set of vector designs – and this simply wasn’t very productive. Our new automatic vector check robot is to thank for making this all possible. Digital designs uploads were unlimited for all partners, but now they are included in the daily and initial limit.

What are the advantages then of being a premium partner?

Premium Partners still have some great advantages over our Standard Partners. They are able to open a Designer Shop, send newsletters to their customers and open many shops from one account.

But, doesn’t this allow for more “junk” on the Marketplace?

This question is certainly valid, but these new limits also go hand in hard with our new Marketplace Guidelines. These guidelines will help ensure that the Marketplace is free from spammy designs (designs that aren’t suitable for the Marketplace, but are certainly valid for a Shop Partners shop).

So, now’s the time to start getting those Christmas and Holiday designs up on the platform!

Christmas is knocking on the chimney and we expect (hope for!) an onslaught of designs. To ensure that your creativity can stand on solid legal feet, we wanted to explain a few things.

When using “word marks” you should generally make sure that:
- they are not standing alone
- they are not in the foreground of the design

Let’s assume that the word “Snow” is a word mark (don’t worry, it’s not one … yet). If the design consists of an image and word mark, then this should be integrated into the image design. In other words, the version on the left is the way to go to get around this imaginary word mark.
 
The version on the right is not the way to do it and this design would be rejected by our Legal Service team for infringement on the word mark. This is because it doesn’t follow the two points above: the word is standing alone and can be seen in the foreground of the design.

In order to research word marks and other protected material, use the following links:

• German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA)
• British Intellectual Property Office (IPO)
• French Patent and Trademark office (INPI)
• Trade marks and Designs Registration Office of the European Union
• World Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO) – for international brands

We’ve already done some (legally non-binding, of course) research on Christmas word marks and surprisingly (and happily) didn’t find too many. Your creativity has almost no bounds, at least with the main keywords like Christmas, Merry Christmas and and and.

Feel free to contact us if you have any general or detailed legal questions!

Many called for new guidelines, now they are in place. In the future, the Marketplace will be more fun for our customers and easier to browse. 
Along with some minor updates, a few new fundamental guidelines for examining uploaded designs will be put into place soon. Here are examples of what is no longer accepted:

Photos, e.g. holiday pictures or snapshots

Personal content (e.g. URL, emails, birthdays)

continue reading ‘New Marketplace Guidelines – For Better Marketplace Quality!’

We Want More Variety

We’ve got a lot of fruit on our Marketplace and customers have certainly searched there for their favourite produce. Perhaps they were hungry, but we’ll go out on a limb and assume they wanted to have a fruity shirt shirt with fruit on it. And just like any smart fruit and veg seller, we want to offer our customers a wide variety of designs. That’s where we need your help.

Which topics (fruit aside) do you think we need more variety? Post your ideas in the comments below. We’ll select a few topics and let them loose in the Forum for you to add your new designs. Looking forward to your ideas!

An example to prove our point: construction vehicles and equipment. We have a few excavators and cranes (there could certainly be more!), when it comes to jackhammers or cement mixers, customers go away empty handed.

Our Design Service team takes a good, hard look at every single vector design you guys and gals upload. Imported, perused, fine tuned for printing, exported – all by hand!

Sometimes they get the feeling that every second design we see is a “I Love xyz”. A fine looking heart in all shapes and sizes with a bold “I” smacked in front, meant only to find its home on a white shirt.

But the reality proves to be different, especially when we take a look at our archive. We come across a huge variety of ideas. There is hope!

Company logos, modern forms, and sometimes some real treasures (which are sometimes sadly only for Digital Direct), love and hate designs, hobbies, sports, … the list goes on. Pretty much anything you could imagine – they’ve seen it. One common thread through it all is the love of comic characters and animals.

We’ve pulled out a couple of our favorite designs from the last two months, so you can also have a look at what our design community is up to. Perhaps you’ll even find some inspiration. Enjoy the show!

We recently asked in the blog and forum to present your best and coolest PRO or ANTI Christmas designs. We were happy to see that more than 150 designs were submitted! Unfortunately we had to bring those submissions down to a final group of 12 designs, which you can vote on in the EN Spreadshirt forum. Every vote counts and there are already some favourites starting off strong. Vote away!

Like I said, choosing 12 designs from the lot was really difficult. Below are some designs which sadly didn’t make it into the final voting, but I thought deserve an audience and a round of applause.

Some hate it, some love it and others simply don’t celebrate it. But in the end, it comes once a year. That’s a fact. What does Christmas mean to you? We are looking for the coolest and witty designs for “Merry Christmas” and “Anti-Christmas” for our latest Design battle. You have until next Monday to enter your design into the competition. We’ll then run a poll to decide which of the best designs will be presented on our homepage! Get more information and check out the designs that have been submitted in the forum. (Even more designs can be found in the German forum).

Above are two examples of for/against Christmas – but there’s certainly more fun to be had! Show us (and the Germans) what you’ve got!