How to get the most out of Cafepress designing. My take on this.

May 24th, 2007 Posted in cafepress, design, tutorial | 4 comments »

Ok this is the first time in my design career such that it is that I am going to write a tutorial of sorts for Cafepress so please bear with me and if I leave anything out I apologize but I will try and cover as much as I can and well as much as I know from my experience.

First in order to really get the best idea of how a design will look on their products it is critical that you have good photo editing software. I personally recommend Paint Shop Pro as it will let you copy and past your design onto a template to see if it is going to fit nicely on the merchandise you choose to display in your store. You can get a free trial here

You will need to set up an account with Corel in order to download the free trial, however it is free to sign up with them and there is no obligation to buy anything to get the trial.

Now once you have the trial downloaded and ready to go then you need to go on Cafepress and download their templates. This is an example of what they look like I will display a couple here.

You will notice there is a dotted line and and a solid line if you want a slight white border then your image should only fit to the dotted line. Images with white backgrounds work best for cafe press merchandise that is white as you can see from visiting my shop. Colored merchandise should ideally have a very similar in color background in the design. Say if you want design and merchandise cohesiveness it is best to sick with a black background for black merchandise otherwise you will have a very tacky looking square around your image.

The reason having photo shop or paint shop pro as you can see by the red box you have to have someway to delete the template. If you open the template in your photo editing software you can copy and paste and cut quickly.

This design looks good on the button above because when it opens in my paint shop program the background is white. So is the template background and there is no edge bleed to worry about. Another thing you need to think about is the image size. As is defined in the next template.

The green arrows on this journal template tell you what image size will look best on the journal cover. Which is 1100 x 1500 pixels or there abouts. If you want a slight border than you can center the image just to the dotted lines.

One thing also to mention is to make sure your images reflect your business adequately. If you run an IT business then a day care related design e.g, would not be appropriate. Need I say it tags are important too. One thing that Cafepress tells you to consider is using a drill down method to determine your image keywords. Like diet,weight loss,humor, t shirts. Cafepress will also give you a calculation as to how often your keywords are used in search by visitors to Cafepress. If you type in Dogs e.g, it will tell you that this term has been searched 1256 times today.

The only draw back is that Cafepress doesn’t offer a very big list of categories to categorize your shop so you really have to make this determination accurately as possible.

For basic members you can only choose one item of merchandise to showcase one design on so it is critical to make sure you choose your design and your merchandise carefully. This is where you also have to make sure your products reflect as close to your business as possible. A weight loss shop wouldn’t sell a beer stein unless they wanted to show a beer stein could be used for a smoothie stein.LOL.

Also you get to have a banner for your shop logo you can see how clean my banner looks. My banners image size is 492 pixels wide by 58 pixels high. For basic members this is all you get a banner and a line or two of text. One day I will have money to have a premium shop then I am sure the possibilities are way more extensive.

Pricing is one thing I have not been a pro at I use the 20% rule for determining how much to mark up my merchandise. I take the base price*.20 + that total to the base price to get my mark up. The lesser priced merchandise won’t give you much of a markup using this method but the moderately priced stuff will and you don’t want to go above a $15 mark up or their is a transaction fee. One reason I choose to keep my mark up modest so I don’t get what profit I may make penalized.

You should also buy your own merchandise too to make sure the quality is going to be what your customers expect it to be. I have done this and am glad I have because I can tell you that their merchandise is top notch. I have ordered my magnet and I love it.

This pretty much wraps up what all I know about Cafepress and the design element aspect of it. I can always do a video conference with anyone wanting to see how to do the image and template items in paint shop pro. I will be honest and tell you that writing directions and tutorials is something entirely new for me and I am a show you how to instead of tell you how to kind of person.

If you have any questions or comments about Cafepress or designing in general I would be happy to help you in any way I can.

Have a good one.

wildheart4vr aka Joe Cheray

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