What do Neo Rauch and spreadshirt Marketplace designers have in common? Correct, they both create artwork and offer them up for sale! Given, the commissions on the Marketplace don’t usually rake in $1 million of Brad Pitt’s money, but rather “only” £1.43 on average. But don’t give up on the Marketplace just yet: compared to Rauch’s work, these designs can be sold more than once, namely 23,131 times (the current record holder “I heart” design). That’s how the top 100 Marketplace designers are still able to earn an average of £540 per month. Take that Neo!

But how do you make it into the top 100 and become the next Damien Hirst of the spreadshirt Marketplace? continue reading ‘How do I become a successful Marketplace designer at Spreadshirt?’

Every so often we have customers who ask us if we can help them create a design or if we can provide them with some tips on visualisation. They have specific ideas in their heads which they don’t really know how to implement. This is basically where the Marketplace and T-Shirt Designer searches provide boat loads of designs and products for every imaginable occasion.

Nevertheless – sometimes the exact product they want isn’t there to be found. So, we would like to make it a little more “personal”: if you have an idea which hasn’t found its way onto the Marketplace yet, either because you don’t trust your designing skills or don’t really know how to implement the idea, then tell us about it! We would like to lend a helping hand to those who can’t find exactly what they are looking for. From all of the suggestions we receive, we will select 3 ideas which we will design and then send those selected a shirt with that very idea on it.

As there might be a few Marketplace designers reading out there, here is a little inspiration for you. The search terms below were entered a number of times into our search bar in the last few months – without success. Perhaps you have an idea how to visualise one of these ideas on a shirt. (This doesn’t mean you have to use one of these terms for your shirt idea.)

• s
• netball
• heartagram
• cougar
• edelweiss
• rollercoaster
• rhodesia
• fanny (ahem, not sure what they were looking for )
• obamanos
• miata

This was proven by our latest Design Battle in the Spreadshirt Forum. Within the group of finalists there were 82 votes for vampire designs and 54 for Viking designs. This would also explain the results of the 14 finalists – in order of their total votes:

The surprisingly simple winning design came from one of our Norwegian partner xconnectx, second place went to our deluxe designer romibello and third place was grabbed by Vorsicht-Tellerrand. Big thanks go out to all of those who participated in the battle and subsequently improved our Marketplace with some great new designs. We also broke some records with this Design Battle: 98 submissions from 36 designers! Keep your eyes peeled for the next battle!

The 10 best ice cream shirts on the Marketplace! Madrid 37°, Rome 34°, Paris and Berlin 32°, London … well, 25° isn’t that bad – certainly warm enough for an ice cream cone (or two)! And ever since writing about the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, I couldn’t get the thought of caramelised bacon covered ice cream out of my mind. If only Manhattan weren’t so far away - how about a day trip?

We may not have an ice cream van making its rounds (at least, I haven’t heard him yet), we surely have some ice cream shirts! By ice cream shirts, I don’t mean ice cream stained shirts, nor do I mean ice cream shaped like shirts. Namely, I mean these:

Robert made his prophecy and today it has come true: we have updated our font selection and they are all available starting today!

This means that you now have more quality and variety when it comes to fonts. This also means, however, that some of the fonts will be discontinued on September 1st.

Relying on a trustworthy phrase: “Don’t panic!” As Robert assured: “This doesn’t mean that any of your current designs we will be butchered by the arrival of a new font. Even the ability to edit your current products will still be possible with a font that is deactivated.”

You can get a great overview of our font offering by perusing through our Font Book.

Give the new fonts a try in the T-Shirt Designer and watch your text’s metamorphosis. If you are looking for more information or inspiration about fonts, I would certainly recommend some of these blogs: continue reading ‘Word to Spreadshirt’s New Fonts - Released Today!’

Many of you have probably uploaded a vector graphic at one point or another in your Spreadshirt life. If this much is true you might have also received a short e-mail in your inbox at one point with the following text:

Hello {FIRSTNAME},
Unfortunately, we cannot accept your uploaded design “{DESIGN_NAME}” (Design ID: {DESIGN_ID}) for the following reason: […]

A description of one of the 11 rejection reasons would follow with a short explanation of how you should rework your design so that we can print it. Sometimes this information didn’t completely clear up the confusion (let alone the frustration). So, we thought we would dig deeper into the reasons for rejection and stick this content into one of our more popular FAQs: “My design for plot printing has been rejected. Why?” This article also fits in well with our video of Micha and Klaus and is also linked in our rejection e-mails.

This new-and-improved FAQ now has a listed overview of the types of rejection for vector designs, sorted according to frequency. Smack-dab at the top is the first commandment “Thou shalt not create lines which are too thin”, a.k.a the 1.5 mm rule, followed by the “Thou shalt not leave curves open” and “Thou shalt not use too many anchor points”.

What’s also new is that we show and explain exactly what would happen if we were to print such a rejected design on a shirt. We’ve added some graphics to illustrate this point, which hopefully makes it clear why we can get pretty strict about the plot printing requirements. Here’s to fewer rejections!

For more information and answers to your vector and pixel graphics questions, check out our aptly named category.

“I shot the Serif, but I did not shoot the deputy.” I haven’t been able to get this song out of my head for the last few weeks, and for a good reason. We’ve taken the time to reflect a little on our fonts. I’ve since occupied myself with font characteristics like serifs, weight, slope, width, optical size, metrics and proportions, in addition to our internal statistics for our current font offerings. Which fonts are successful, which fonts are rarely used or seldom make it onto your shirts? Which fonts are used for which season (big surprise here, HoleHearted at the beginning of February, Halloween in October), as well as which fonts are ineffective regardless of season? The results: 52% of your ideas make it on shirts with only 6 of the 25 fonts we offer. Other fonts only make it onto your products 0.01% of the time.

Long story shirt short – spring summer cleaning for our font assortment:
Starting with about 200 fonts we filtered, discussed, deleted, replaced, plotted, weeded, reordered, re-discussed and finally put together a new set of fonts. Soon you will be able to get a fitting font for your favourite quote from the best Spaghetti Westerns of the last 50 years, just like you will have the right pixel font for your personal tribute to retro gaming. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but be patient, wait and see – it won’t be much longer before you get your hands on these gems.
continue reading ‘I Shot the Serif - New Fonts at Spreadshirt’

You may have followed it on Twitter. Perhaps you have already seen the news on Tee-Junction or on Hide Your Arms – but you will read it here too: laFraise has launched its new redesigned site with a big bang. Our strawberry-loving colleagues at laFraise have worked hard giving the site a make-over and thought it none better than to mark the event with one of the biggest prizes in t-shirt competition history.

This special contest is the second edition of the 15K contest, but with a big new twist. Instead of awarding 3 designers with €5,000 as they did last year, there will only be one winner to lay claim to the big bag of cash filled with €15,000. This lucky talented designer will have their design printed on 2,000 shirts and go down in t-shirt history.
continue reading ‘laFraise Relaunches with a €15,000 Special Contest’

The complete selection of Amorphia Apparel’s designs is finally available for us t-shirt wearing Europeans. So what’s the big deal, you ask? Faster and cheaper shipping for fantastic shirts! Amorphia designer Jeremy Kalgreen has been making waves in the North American market for quite a while, continually expanding upon his at times ironic, enigmatic or witty approach to design. From its conception, the Amorphia family has now grown to four separate lines, each with their own niche-like target. There’s a little something out there for animal aficionados, (dis)believers in intelligent design, science buffs and pretty much anyone with a good sense of humour. Find the links to the shop with photos and design examples after the click. continue reading ‘Amorphia Apparel extends its reach - “Hey Europe, what’s up?”’

While some of you might have started learning German to understand our original Design Service video, we went and got a voice over for it. Michael from Design Service and Klaus from our Test Lab give us a glimpse at things behind the scenes. We show what happens from the point when your design is submitted to its plotting and weeding.

Michael first introduces us to the two most common reasons for the rejection of a vector graphic and how he checks to see if your designs meet our requirements for vector graphics. Then we head down to the Test Lab in production where Klaus plot designs with lines that are too thin and curves which are not closed just to see what happens! The results are eye-opening and they certainly convinced me that the strict vector design requirements are there for a very good reason.