You’re back? Okay then.

In order to get the basic function of the site working, I used three different solutions from three different sources. I’ll be writing about each of them in detail as we go. For today, let’s start with an overview of those three solutions.

They are CPShop, for Cafepress content; the Zazzle Store Builder (ZSB) for Zazzle content; and myPFStore, for Printfection content. Here’s a basic description of their features.

I’ll have more to say about each of these when I continue these articles with a description of what I did – and in some cases, how I did it – as I incorporated each of them into a single site.

There were some challenges. If you remember, I wanted each part of the site to be uniform even though the incoming content would vary, and it was also important that in both large ways and small ones the new pages would look unique to the search engines.

But that’s another story- or, in fact, three of them.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, custom web site, off site, printfection, zazzle, cafepress, ecommerce, pod, customization

The design of a web site is always about several things, and only one of those things is "making it pretty". In fact the way you make it pretty all depends on the decisions you’ve made about what the purpose of the site will be (often not as obvious as you might think), what the content will be, how the user will find that content, and how the user will understand where he or she is within the site – and then be able to get elsewhere with as few clicks as you can manage.

The answers to those questions determine the framework within which you will make the site pretty. That’s because these answers tell you what you’re designing. If you leap off to figure out what it’s going to look like without answering those questions first you’re going to end up with something that (presumably) looks great, but whether it does the job it needs to do is left completely to chance.

So although I didn’t start by making a list that I can handily reprint here (bad, bad me!), these are the answers to those questions for my Retropolis site.

1. The purpose of the site is to create one central location in which shoppers can find all (or nearly all) of the Retropolis merchandise I sell through several Print on Demand, or POD, venues elsewhere on the web. The main components are T-Shirts (and other merchandise) from my Retropolis Transit Authority store (through Printfection); posters, blank books, and other merchandise from my Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design store (through Cafepress, although the primary storefront is already at my own domain); customizable business cards and greeting cards, coffee mugs, and other merchandise from my Retropolis Travel Bureau store (through Zazzle); and other odds and ends, including the archival art prints I offer through Deviant Art and other yet-to-be- disclosed products that I’m not talking about yet. Although some of the existing stores may sell the same type of merchandise (coffee mugs, for example), I will pick just one POD for a product type here. That’s mainly to avoid confusion, but it also depends on how well the products are presented.

2. The content of the site is mostly determined by the above, but there are some other considerations. First off there needs to be a certain amount of supporting content that explains what the site is, what the art is, and where it comes from. Secondly, the presentation of the site’s products needs to include a lot of unique, new content to convince the search engines that these pages are not carbon copies of the original store pages; thirdly, wherever possible minor changes to the incoming POD content should be made, for the same reason. (More on this below).

3. The site is built from content that comes from several sources, and the products are sold through more than one shopping cart. The user will navigate through all of this using a single, consistent, unifying system. Inasmuch as it’s possible the pages within a given POD’s content will look like the pages from any of the other PODs, so that the site feels like a single place rather than a hodgepodge of stuff that’s loosely tied together.

4. The final question – "How the user will understand where he or she is within the site" – is central to this project. Everything in #3 above is true: but in addition, while the site feels like a single place the user must also understand at all times that there are (at least) three shopping carts; that only one of those carts can be used to purchase the products on the current page; and which cart that is.

You often find in the design of a thing that there’s a contradiction between two or more of the goals of the object. So part of the process of design is to find compromises between those conflicting goals.

Sometimes these conflicting goals are as simple as "The device needs to be ready Thursday!" and "The device needs to work!". (A pretty challenging example, when you think about it). In this project we’ve got a dynamic tension between #3 and #4.

That tension – the compromises between those conflicting goals – is the basic framework that everything else, technical or visual, needs to address.

The second most important consideration is how the search engines view the site. I touched on this above.

The reality is that for the most part this means: how will Google view the site? Will it decide that the site is nothing but duplicate content? And since some of the links to merchandise are affiliate links (the Zazzle product links, for example, have a referrer code attached), will Google see this as nothing but a writhing nest of affiliate links, and disregard it?

Both of those issues are about duplicate content.

It’s not that Google hates affiliate links; but when it finds them, it seems to hold the whole page (and maybe the whole site) to a higher standard. When Googlebot sees your affiliate links it sort of raises one eyebrow and says "Oh yeah?"

Why? Well, in some places on the web you’ll find products offered for sale where all of the information about the product is taken from someplace else. The framing site may be different, but the product information is identical. This is almost always an affiliate marketing site – since who else would do that? Google sees this as an uncreative attempt to sell the same stuff, in the same way, that it’s sold elsewhere… just an effort to siphon off some of the sales revenue. From Google’s standpoint the web site owner has added nothing valuable for the customer. So the pages that Google considers the "original" product pages will be ranked much more highly than these new pages, which may even be ignored.

Yet in other parts of the web you’ll find the same books offered for sale through web sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. Google understands that these are completely different stores that sometimes sell the same merchandise.

You want Google to see your site as the second type – not the first.

So the final design consideration for my multi-POD web site is that wherever possible I would not only add new content, but make subtle changes to the incoming content from the POD. This is a technical issue, not a visual one, but it also involves some new visual design.

Is this some kind of a way to trick Google? I’m pretty sure it depends on who you ask. Obviously I’d say "No". Even if I made no effort to present these products differently I’d still be adding value for the user by presenting all of these scattered – but related – things in one place. But experience shows us that Google might feel differently about that.

And the fact is, by addressing those concerns I’ll end up with a better web site, with new, unique content that’s related to these products. Google hopefully gets what it likes to see, users get something more interesting, and I get… well, I get a site that does what it’s intended to do.

Everybody wins! But… somehow, I’m the only one who has to work at it. Oh well.

I won’t return to this issue in much detail until I’m writing about the ways I drew in and modified the product content for each POD. But it’s an essential part of how the site is built and it affects the visual design, too, as we’ll see.

Because what we’re going to look at now is the ways I tried to meet all of these goals in the site’s visual design. Remember what these goals are?

1. To draw in related products from my many POD ventures across the web.

2. To create a unified appearance and navigation for the site despite the fact that the content is coming in from several places, and in several ways.

3. And although it all looks unified, it must always be clear to the user that the products within one section of the site use one shopping cart and checkout, while other sections of the site use their own shopping cart and checkout.

So let’s have a look at what I did.

Figure 1: Overall page layout (links to original)

Figure 1 Notes:

1. The header bar for the site. There are links to the home page, a "Shopping Carts" link, an "About Retropolis" link, and a "Help" link. These are the basic navigation links that a user may want at any time - unlike #8, the footer – and have two features ("Shopping Carts" and "Help") that immediately explain how orders are processed and shipped in different ways. Those two links are important, but they need to display only a small amount of information to the user – immediately. For those reasons I use modal DHTML "pop-ups" here. They’re not what you think of as a pop up window – one that opens in a new browser. They’re small(ish), informative panels that come up "above" the page content without leaving the page. Once they’re dismissed, you’re left exactly where you were, on the same page where you started.

2. The site’s main navigation bar. This isn’t in the sidebar – we’d have a long, wandering sidebar if I’d gone that way, and I had other plans for the sidebar content. This is a four-part horizontal drop-down menu. By handling the site’s navigation this way I’m able to create a visual cue – echoed on the home page, where the top of the page is divided into matching columns – which reinforces the idea that we have separate, related sections in the site. This also gave me the canvas on which I’d use another visual cue, which we see in #3. Finally, the last item in the three main dropdown menus is a link to visit the shop these products have come from. I don’t much care if they do; I’m perfectly happy if users stay right here. But it’s another way to communicate the idea that these products are coming from several distinct places.

3. The "You Are Here" graphic hovers over whichever section of the site you’re in. This is another visual cue that I hope will prevent confusion if, for example, you’ve added t-shirts to your cart (under Tab #1) and don’t see those t-shirts in the cart when you’re under another tab.

4. The Breadcrumb and page links bars throughout the site look as nearly identical as possible. The Breadcrumb always links back to this site’s home page rather than to a separate "home page" for, say, the Retropolis Transit Authority. This presented some problems with the Printfection content, but we’ll see why when we get there. Even when the content of the page links bar changes from a pretty standard layout of 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 to something else, it’s still shown in the same colored and bordered rectangle no matter what sort of page you’re on.

5. The "View Cart" buttons at the top and bottom of the sidebar identify the source of the cart (here, "from the Retropolis Transit Authority") to further show the user that this is a cart for these products, not for every product on the site. This is getting repetitive, I know, but as I explained above this single point is the most important thing the user interface needs to make clear. That’s what these many visual cues are trying to do.

6. The sidebars throughout the site are used to add relevant, unique content to the pages. In some cases this is information the user needs, about the products on that page. in other cases the sidebar is just adding some funny bits and bobs that relate to the products. Apart from being entertaining, this is all part of the plan to add unique content to the site pages that will differentiate them from my original shops’ pages. Where practical this content is different when you’re on a main section, a subsection, or a product page. That became a technical hurdle at times – and I can still do more of it – but I came to see this as a basic tenet for the pages: to distinguish them from the pages in the "parent" sites, and also to distinguish them from one another.

7. Page link bars repeat at the bottom of the pages. That probably seems pretty basic but often they’re not included. In fact, giving the user someplace of your own to go when they’re done with a page’s content is always very important, and it’s an area where I think this site design could be made stronger. I’ve been resisting a repeat of the horizontal nav bar down here even though I think it could be of practical value – I just don’t like the way it would look. Also: directly beneath each POD’s content there’s a fine print disclaimer explaining that items in this POD’s shopping cart can’t be combined with items from another’s.

8. The footer repeats the links we saw in the header, but adds some: "Contact", "Blog", and "Links". these are places the user may want to go, but they don’t directly help me to shake all the loose change out of the user’s pockets. So here, at the bottom of the page, they’re available to those who made it this far without looking at more products or – better yet! – buying something.

These features are common to every page on the site, which sounds obvious, but isn’t always as simple as you’d expect. The fact that the product content is being delivered in three different ways – four, when we include some static pages – made the Breadcrumb and page links areas difficult to manage. But remember: we’re trying to make everything consistent while still showing that there are important differences.

The example in Figure 1 is a "Main Section" or "Department" page. Some main sections have subsections, and those are essentially the same; for the most part the changes we see are in the content of the sidebars as described above in #6,

Product pages, on the other hand, are bound to vary between one POD and another. In fact because of the way Zazzle product pages work, my pages have to link to the product page at the Zazzle site – a big, continuing irritation for me. That’s the one area where my site’s inclusive design falls apart, and it’s simply because of the way the tools work. There are ways to work around this, and I may be exploring them, but that should wait till we’re looking at the Zazzle Store Builder.

In all other cases we continue with the same principles we’ve used so far. Product pages will vary, where possible, from the original POD product pages; they will use sidebar content that’s different from the sidebar content of their parent sections; in some cases, they will use sidebar content that is also unique to a single product.

Figure 2: A Product Page (links to original)

Figure 2 Notes:

1. Product page sidebars continue the convention of using that section’s shopping cart in links at the top and bottom of the sidebar. Otherwise, product sidebars feature content that’s at least slightly different from their parent sections (and sometimes from one another). This may be information about that type of product (as shown) or something completely different. Getting that particular content to appear when you want it was one of the technical challenges I faced here. But it’s worth the trouble.

2. The generic product information areas will be changed, where possible, from the version that comes in from the original POD. This works against a verdict of "duplicate content" for the site. Methods for making these changes differ a bit from POD to POD. More on that later.

So what we’ve seen so far is what I felt were the goals for, and the constraints on, the site’s design – and how I tried to solve the warring goals I was dealing with. I decided on a series of visual cues to help the user understand what was going on in the pages; I provided some informative links that spelled it out in simple language; and I mapped out the ways in which I wanted the site’s navigation to work across sections, and within the sections.

This seems so obvious that I’m in my third draft before I’m adding it – but this is just one solution. I’m not claiming that it’s the only one (it isn’t) or that it’s the best one (no idea!). It’s the best visual solution I came up with this time, facing these problems. The thing you should take away from this is that these are the problems that a site like this needs to solve.

Assuming that I achieved all of those goals, the remaining challenges – as I began to bring in and present the products – would center on keeping visual consistency and satisfying Google’s hunger for the unique, relevant content that would differentiate these pages from the original store pages I’d created at the different print-on-demand companies.

In future posts we’ll look at how I did that, one POD at a time.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, printfection, zazzle, cafepress, offsite, domain, portal, multi pod web site, web site design, several PODs on a web site, ecommerce

Then, to all appearances, I vanished.
Here’s why:

In the annual ramp up to the holiday season – that happy, carefree and yet spiritual time when I turn you upside down and try to shake all the change out of your pockets – I took on a big project that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years.

There are a whole bunch of places on the web where I sell my work, as posters and prints, on the ever-popular t-shirts of the Retropolis Transit Authority and – new, this year – on customizable business cards and other nifty swag at the Retropolis Travel Bureau. The trouble is that although I do cross-link between them, where I’m able, there was no central clearing house for all these different things. A visitor to one would usually not realize that the others existed.

So I’ve just completed that very clearing house: an "Art of Retropolis" site where I combine the products I sell through different vendors so that they’re all available in one spot.

In order to do that I had to combine three different scripts to draw in the products, along with quite a few static pages, in such a way that (I hope) it’s not confusing to the user, and moreover – when the all powerful Googlebot sees it – the site does not look as though someone’s simply scraped existing content from my original online shops. Which is pretty much a death sentence where SEO’s concerned. These two issues were such important and interesting problems that I may write up the project later on.

But for now, IT’S ALIVE!!!!!

If it works as well as I hope it will, I’ll probably do the same thing with my scattered Celtic art shops. Sometime next year.

And Thrilling Tales? I was already aware that creating the illustrations for its first story was taking longer than I’d expected. So its launch – which I’d hoped would happen right about now, or soon after – will be taking place early next year.

Technorati Tags: retropolis, retro future, uchronic, tee shirts, t shirts, posters, business cards, gifts, science fiction, sci fi, retro futuristic, raygun gothic

Two weeks ago I started to set up my first gallery/store at Zazzle; when the powers that be there saw what I was putting on the gallery’s front page they ushered me into the closed beta of their new Store Customization system. I set up a second gallery there this week, and the other night they opened up the beta so everyone could play.

This turned out to be perfect timing for me. I’d had a chance to experiment with a system that was almost ready for release (this means there was documentation!) and which as a result was pretty solid. I’d gone through about a week and a half of trying to figure out how to do the things that just about anyone would want to do and it was all fresh in my mind.

So I wrote up three tutorials at the Zazzle forum, which I’ve retooled a bit and reformatted to post here.

1. Skinning the Zazzle Sidebar

This is a step-by-step tutorial with sample graphics. It shows you how to use three small images, some CSS, and some HTML to change the appearance of your Zazzle sidebar.

2. How to Reorganize Your Zazzle Sidebar

This shows you how Zazzle’s modular elements fit together to build a store’s sidebar, and how you can move those elements around till you like ‘em.

3. How to Add a New, Custom Page to Your Zazzle Store

Here’s another step-by-step tutorial that helps you to create an entirely new page, which comes up in the sidebar like any of the standard pages and can contain your own custom content. It’s much easier to do than to explain!

Technorati Tags: zazzle, print on demand, store customization, gallery customization, skinning, custom pages, navigation panel

In fact (especially over the past two years) Cafepress has been nickel and diming away at its shopkeeper/designers in what’s probably been meant as an effort to maximize profits. Often, by the looks of it, this to make the company’s balance sheets continue to escalate quarter by quarter in a way that will be sweet music to to the ears of investors in the event of a probable IPO. Anyone who’s chased that particular dragon knows that once you start it becomes more and more difficult to pull off the same scale of growth in each quarter. It only gets harder if you do go public.

From the shopkeepers’ perspective, though, it looks as though the company is finding every way it can to monetize not the customers who buy all this merchandise, but the shopkeepers who create it. That impression was reinforced a few months ago when very large Cafepress stores (those with more than 500 sections) were abolished, though existing shops were grandfathered in. Shopkeepers who wanted to bloat their ventures with more merchandise than that were going to have to establish additional premium shops, for additional monthly fees.

This month’s brouhaha is all about the Cafepress volume bonus, a plan through which those shops with a high sales volume are rewarded by incremental bonuses: the more you sell, the larger your bonus. The volume sales bonus has often been named by CP shopkeepers as the reason they would stay with Cafepress rather than moving to a competitor.

Back in 2002, when I started my first Cafepress shop, it was understood that this bonus was a reward for the promotion a shopkeeper did to increase sales at his or her shop. And as little as I think of the company’s maneuvers over the past couple of years I think that the new program is better suited to that end. Not that I don’t think it’s seriously flawed – but the flaws I see are of another kind entirely.

Here’s the program change, as described by Cafepress:

Sales originated from shops will earn larger bonuses at lower thresholds

Sales originating from the Marketplace will no longer qualify for a Volume Bonus – you will continue to receive your mark-up as your commission

Shopkeepers will no longer pay the 20% fees on affiliate-driven sales – CafePress will pay this fee

The “Sales Source” is being redefined: Credit for a sale will now be based on where the item is added to the cart

The Volume Bonus program will be renamed Shop Performance Bonus

(the whole official description is here, including the tiers and percentages of both the old and new programs.)

The most apparent difference is that CP Marketplace sales are now excluded from the volume bonus (now renamed, in that way that seems more significant to people sitting around a conference table than it does to anyone not sitting around a conference table).

The CP Marketplace is a common ground where merchandise from all participating shopkeepers appears together, outside their own shops, arranged by search relevance or by other factors. The Marketplace is promoted by Cafepress through Google Adwords and other means. While the Marketplace was originally pretty much a joke many newer shopkeepers believe that it’s their bread and butter, based on some combination of reality, CP hype, and a malfunctioning sales report system that has for the past year and a half reported most sales as originating from the Marketplace even though they very often, demonstrably, did not.

That malfunctioning reporting system is the first big danger sign. If marketplace sales are excluded from this program, and CP itself can’t adequately track what is and is not a Marketplace sale – weighted toward “Marketplace” – then it’s clear that the system can’t work fairly, and that where it’s wrong, the errors will favor Cafepress. We’re told that the new system does work correctly. It’s impossible at this point to simply take that for granted, but what the heck; for the sake of argument, suppose that it does.

If everything works properly this revised system will not only better meet its goals (rewarding shopkeepers for their own promotion of their own shops at Cafepress), it’ll also offer larger bonuses, at lower sales volumes, for qualifying sales. It astonishes me to say this, but I think that this is a change in which benefits all parties, except for those who were collecting bonuses on what were truly Marketplace sales – sales that did not result from a shopkeeper’s own promotion, and should not have been rewarded under the volume bonus plan.

People who came in under the old program, and who have been making bonuses based on those sales (or, given the reporting system’s problems, on sales that appeared to come from the Marketplace) are quite upset (login required). Nobody likes to suddenly make less money from the same level of sales. And as the executives at Cafepress look out across the moat and see all those bobbing torches, they have only themselves to blame for telling their shopkeepers that the Marketplace was the source of all good things. There’s some backpedaling going on at the moment, of course, but for the past three years or so the company has been touting the marketplace, and ignoring individual shops, and now they’re paying a price for their hype.

(Fascinating historical note: in the first or second major revamp of their Marketplace, Cafepress redesigned it so that nowhere on their site was there a single link to any shop. I doubt that this was intentional – they were simply so focussed on the wonderful thing they believed they were building that they never noticed that there were no links to individual shops anywhere on their site. To my mind, this is the story of everything they’ve been doing since.)

This week, as they announce that they’re removing Marketplace sales from their volume bonus program, they’ve remembered that shops exist, and they want to be sure we all understand how important it is for us to promote our individual shops. If their latest generations of shopkeepers are upset and confused by this then Cafepress has only itself to blame. It’s a situation they’ve painstakingly created over the past three years.

Interestingly, this is also not the first time the volume bonus program has been changed. The last time was almost exactly five years ago. Changes were made to which products were eligible for the bonus (there were additions) while the amount of the bonus was reduced. In addition CP tried to apply a 5% transaction fee to every sale. They eventually reversed themselves on that single point. There’s a transcript of a 2003 chat with CP founder Maheesh Jain in which he defends this program with the theme “you will make more money once we’ve reduced the amount of money you’ll make”. It’s not a coincidence that any faith I had in the company disappeared on that date, which is immortal in the annals of Doublespeak.

Looking back at the bullet points for the current changes, the bizarre standout is the change to affiliate sales commissions. There’s no apparent connection between that item and anything else on the list. It has nothing whatever to do with the volume bonus program. It stands there, all alone, like the echoing non sequitur of a Tourette’s patient. In some way the corporate mind believes that this change is related to the rest. I can’t imagine how. It ought to be welcome news to shopkeepers, who’ll now retain that 20% they formerly handed over to affiliates who have (possibly) been responsible for some sales. Provided the affiliate sale was made someplace other than the Marketplace, it will also qualify for the new volume bonus. But I’m still scratching my head over this one and wondering how, in some nest of writhing features, it’s related to the other changes. Without going into specifics I’ll say that this one change is also primed to reward behavior that CP has traditionally defined as an abuse of their system.

So, okay. It’s always amusing to watch this company operate, but in this case I think that – provided that they have in fact fixed their sales reporting system – these changes do a better job of rewarding the behavior the system was meant to reward, while not rewarding sales that occurred through the Marketplace – which the old system predates, and wasn’t meant to apply to. I’ve got no problem with that, myself.

Here’s the thing I think is troubling.

Cafepress will now make more money from Marketplace sales than from shop sales. Look at it the other way around: Cafepress will now make less money from shop sales than it will from Marketplace sales.

Cafepress is now competing with its shopkeepers for sales of the exact same merchandise. Whereas they’ve shown before that they believe their marketplace is the bees knees, and they’ve touted it above individual shops – even to the point, once, of making those shops invisible from their main site – they now have a financial advantage in driving Marketplace sales at the expense of individual shop sales. In extreme cases, the difference is 25% of the retail value of the items sold. In a company that seems to be trying, quarter-by-quarter, to increase its profitability by all possible means… and which controls all aspects of distribution and display on the web…

That’s the thing that bothers me.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, cafepress, t-shirts, merchandise, e-commerce, zazzle, printfection

Much is left unsaid about this conversion of an Epson C88 printer into a do it yourself, direct to garment T-Shirt printing machine (for example, what the heck sort of inks or dyes are being used here?) and although it’s unlikely to be much of a production solution, even on light colored shirts…. isn’t it just damned interesting?

The creator says it’s a $150 project, and that plans will be sold in the future as the diyTs T-Shirt Printer. You can see that there’s a custom built carriage, but you can’t tell much else about it. And why is the image being printed sideways? If it were printing the image vertically there’d be no real limit to the height of the design. Apart from the length of the shirt, of course.

Thanks for the heads-up go to to Jean Roth.

Update: there’s a thread about this, started by the creator, at Rodney Blackwell’s T-Shirt Forums.

Technorati Tags: t shirts, direct to garment, inkjet, diy, do it yourself, epson printer, t shirt printing, print on demand

Zazzle

1. Their terms of service (whether through design or error) seemed to state that once you’d uploaded an image to their servers for use on products, that design would remain available there (non-exclusively) forever, even if you deleted both the products and the image. It was possible to contact them directly to have the design removed – eventually – but this was a ridiculous necessity.

2. They didn’t allow you to set the markup on items you sold through their site. If you wanted to sell there, you were limited to whatever profit Zazzle had decided you should make on the products.

These two points have always left Zazzle as a non-starter. Even if they were simply bumbling their way through the first point, the second one was a tremendous barrier to anyone who wanted to actually earn a living through the sale of their work. Zazzle’s markups were not attractive, and you were stuck with them.

But as of this week, these two issues have gone away. (In fact the “we’ll keep your images forever” problem seemed to have been cleared up earlier this year, though their web site had conflicting information about the change.) As of this week designers who sell at Zazzle are able to set their own markups on their merchandise. This is a very interesting development and it comes late in a year when their largest competitor (CafePress) has seemed to do everything in its power to alienate and infuriate the shopkeepers who design the products whose sales line CafePress’ cubicles with gold.

The Zazzle site is in the middle of a revision and it’s a bit wonky at the moment – for example, a lot of important content is popping up in small, non-scrolling windows – but it’s well worth checking out.

While the roost is still ruled by Cafepress, print-on-demand designers have lately benefited from quality-oriented competition at Printfection, a much smaller (apparel only) rival*. These changes at Zazzle mean that CafePress is about to have a big competitor that has almost everything CP offers – with a slightly smaller and different selection of products, but essentially the same.

The last big feature that CafePress has exclusively is their volume bonus, with which designers get an additional tiered bonus based on their amount of sales. The volume bonus is so important to some successful CP shopkeepers that it’s the only real thing holding them there, lately. If Zazzle were to adopt a similar volume bonus, we would see a completely level playing field between them. And that would be a very good thing.

Like any monopoly or near-monopoly CafePress treats its designer/shopkeepers as though they have nowhere else to go. That hasn’t been completely true for some time now, but at this point even they must see it. This can only be a good thing for those who use these services. It’s called competition, and it means that you have to do a good job and offer good service.

Or not, of course. But as of this week, “Or Not” has really big teeth.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, cafepress, zazzle, printfection, t shirts, tchotchkes

*Printfection rocks, actually. But in this context, they’re a smaller player whose products are limited to shirts, coasters, and cutting boards.

And as soon as I’d wrapped up the new Saga Shirts site, I wanted to use them with another kind of design that’s near and dear to me – my “Future That Never Was” of Retropolis, a land of personal rocket ships and Faithful Robot Companions – the sort of future that once seemed inevitable to us because we were reading too many Buck Rogers comics and pulp magazines, reinforced by the fact that industrial designers were now streamlining everything – from locomotives and airplanes, where it makes sense, to clocks and refrigerators, where, just possibly, it doesn’t. I love that stuff. Especially when it doesn’t make sense.

I had an existing body of designs from my Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design site – where I sell light colored shirts, along with posters, prints, greeting cards and mugs – but of course something new was called for. For one thing, Printfection gives me a much larger printable area than I’ve had in the past, and I wanted to take advantage of that; for another, I’d lately concentrated more on things other than shirts at the Celtic/Retro site, so what I had on hand wasn’t as recent as I liked.

So I worked up eleven new shirt designs that felt much fresher to me – some really fun ones, in fact, like I Still Want My Flying Car and Ask Me About My Death Ray!. I fleshed out the offerings with a group of retouched magazine covers which I’d done for my vintage graphics site. And I built a new shop around it, and there it is – the Retropolis Transit Authority.

Here’s how it explains itself:

“The future’s just not what it used to be.

Once upon a time – while we were exhausted from the Great Depression, vulnerable to corporate propaganda, riding a wave of technological change, and reading comic books and pulp magazines – we excelled at dreaming wonderful things into the days just ahead.We had to. Times were just about as bad as they’ve ever been.

And despite how terrible those days were we had plenty to be optimistic about. Electricity was beginning to power even the remotest of rural areas. First the telephone, and then the radio, tied us together by voice, while of course the automobile was now a common sight on the roads. We were beginning to see almost daily advances in technologies that genuinely did make our lives a bit easier. As a little girl, my grandmother loved to read Jules Verne – and later in life she said that she’d lived to see those books come true.

So by now, according to our dreams for the future, we ought to have our own flying cars and faithful robot companions. We should be filling our retro rockets at Interstellar Gulf’s hygienic and modern filling stations. Every now and then we ought to be having a furious ray gun battle with the forces of evil. It’d be clear who they were because they’d be green, with the wrong number of eyes, and they’d be clutching shrieking, politically undeveloped space women in tight-fitting outfits.”

There’s more, of course, but you get the idea.

Technorati Tags: t shirts, retro sci fi, science fiction, retropolis, retro futuristic, futurism, printfection, print on demand, ecommerce, retropolis transit authority

At a million dollars apiece I doubt that you or I will be setting one up in the basement. The machines are intended for use by libraries and retailers, who can offer inexpensive but commercial quality books to you, on demand. Because there are already large collections of public domain digital books – more all the time – it’s possible that in the future no book will ever need to be unavailable. “Out of print” may become a meaningless phrase.

Machines are already in place at the library of Alexandria in Egypt (nice touch!) and in Washington DC, at the World Bank InfoShop. Another has just been installed at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library. More are headed to libraries in New Orleans, San Francisco, and other cities in the U.S. and Canada.

Libraries – like bookstores – have limited shelf space. And although it goes against my own idea of what a library should be, they commonly discard books that aren’t popular. A system like this one can ensure that books can be made available even if they’re not kept on the shelves.

On the commercial side, a bookstore could use these machines to produce public domain books on demand and even copyrighted books, under license, so that any book could potentially be available at any time. It’s a pretty exciting thing.

This reminds me of an idea I had about fifteen years ago – although that thought was about clothes, not books. If a retailer had a large selection of patterns available and a 3D scanner you could walk into a shop, have your body scanned, and pick the clothing style and material you wanted. Tailor-fit clothes could be then made for you at a nearby – or distant – workshop. No kind of clothing would ever have to be unavailable, and anything you bought would fit you perfectly. You could get a pair of custom fit khakis and a nineteenth century frock coat at the same place, at the same time. I’m still waiting for that one.

But when it comes to the books, anyway, I think this is a terrific development. The only snag I can foresee is that in the decades to come, any book that’s been published in electronic form with DRM may not be easily reproduced even after it falls into the public domain – because DRM, unlike copyright, is forever.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, publishing, books, public domain, library, bookstore

In fact when I was young I always believed that I was going to be a writer. It just didn’t work out that way.

I started using traditional Celtic knotwork designs in my drawings and paintings back in 1980. During the 80s I continued that and eventually began to invent new patterns of my own. Then at some point in the early 90′s, I stopped. I think it was because I was getting so typecast as “the Celtic Art Guy” that it was annoying, and I figured I ought to show my chops in some other kind of art. But also, I probably wanted to explore something a bit different just to suit myself.

But by the end of the 90′s, or so, I was back at it, at least part of the time. It’s something I think I do pretty well, and after a bit of a hiatus I think I was able to use it differently, and even better. And the Celtic art I sell through my web sites has done well for me, too, so I think other people feel the same way about it.

I made a big change in my life in 2005. I dropped out of an industry where I’d been working for about 17 years and settled in a little harbor town in northeastern Ohio – the sort of pleasant but inexpensive place where an artists ought to be able to concentrate on making art. And I figured I’d try doing one or more large projects to better make use of my time.

One of those was an idea for a book of Celtic knotwork patterns, for other people to use: part clip art, part source book, it would present my original designs in a modular form that would be easy to use. Artists could build out their own borders in whatever size – and in many of the shapes – that they needed. That project lost out at first, and it was over a year later that I got back to it. But now it’s done, and as it turns out – after all these years – it’s the first book to have no one’s name on it but mine. I’m pretty proud of it.

You can see an example here of how it works. For each of the patterns, I’ve created modular sections for corners and straight sections and arcs, in different numbers of repeats around a circle. Half of the designs include branching sections that you can use to subdivide a frame into more than one area. And in every case, I’ve provided the sections in several sizes, though of course you can enlarge or reduce them to suit your needs.

Once the book was finished I also designed a series of paperback blank books with borders on every page and full color covers; they’re available in versions with either lined or unlined pages. And finally, I built a web site for them, which is a sort of sub-site for my “Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design” shop.

I’m probably not done – I’ve got more than enough patterns roughed out for a second volume – but I’m not working on that just yet. It’ll take up to six months to finish another volume, and I need to let the first one find its legs first.

Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections (Paperback) $19.95

Tanglewood Celtic Art Blank Book (Unlined) $15.75

These are amazing days for artists. When I started out, printing – especially in color – was expensive. Typesetting was a cult ruled by a high priesthood who demanded sacrifices. These days we have wonderful freedoms in publishing and distributing our own work.

Every post I’ve made in my blog about the ways I’m offering my work online is a good example of what I mean. It’s easy to overlook in all the hoopla about the Internet, but as a result of the kinds of businesses that are possible online, and nowhere else, individual artists and writers can do damn near anything, as well or poorly as they’re able, and make their work available to anybody, anywhere. Without any use of traditional publishing models, distributors, or an investment in inventory.

This has never happened before. Ever. Anywhere. And we are just so very lucky that it has happened now.

Technorati Tags: celtic art, deltic design, celtic pattern, knotwork, interlace, book, blank book, clip art, pattern book