Steve Cooley Fine Art

well, as you can tell from parts 1, 2, and 3 of my comparisons of Zazzle and CafePress in regards to their print-on-demand services on black and dark t-shirts, it was kind of a toss-up as to which one was “better”. Now in part 4, I can show you the effects of one washing in a normal day-to-day kind of situation.

First up is Zazzle, since they were 7 whole days faster delivering my order:

If you click through and view these photos, you’ll see that the solid red color in the “sidescroller” t-shirt is not consistently covered with the original color that was there when I got the shirt. Kind of a disappointment to me. Still not a bad looking t-shirt, but not even close to the quality you would get with silk-screening. The “tea”-shirt (haha) actually fared better, probably because it’s a continuous tone image versus the relative solid color vector image in the first shirt. These shirts are actually being shown after two washes.

And now for the Cafepress shirt:

Uh oh. Now here’s a big problem in my opinion. After ONE wash, every solid area of color is cracking. This is totally unacceptable for a product that I would sell to people. So, at this time, I really can’t recommend cafepress for black and dark color shirt printing. I’m not totally sure Zazzle has the right action going on their game, but at least their shirts (which feel nicer to me, and are tagless) are free from the cracking problem that cafepress’ shirt is doing already… I would expect this cracking to happen even in silkscreened shirts after 20-30 washings, but after only one wash seems to indicate that there’s still significant room for improvement. This cracking problem certainly isn’t going to get any better from here on out, so this really isn’t the kind of product I want to promote.

So, the 2008 print-on-demand showdown winner is: Zazzle.com

* faster order fulfillment
* customizable
* nicer shirts
* no cracking after 1 wash

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.

Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct

So after receiving my order from Zazzle and from Cafepress I came to some very inconclusive conclusions. The chart above outlines my findings. Overall, both services have their plusses and minuses. Next time I need to design a black or other dark colored shirt, I’d probably make a decision based on the graphics, and the number of shirts i was going to purchase, and if they needed customization at all, and what my budget was, and possibly time of the year the shirts would be worn primarily.
zazzle has a pretty nice interface, lots of customization options. They were definitely was faster… 7 whole days faster. Zazzle’s print quality didn’t suck, it just wasn’t “awesome”. They offer customization options and a wide array of garments to print onto. They give you tools to help promote the products you’ve designed, but they were more expensive.

cafepress’ print quality is bordering on awesome, crisp and clean. But the overall color coverage seemed to be less dense. You can set your own prices at cafepress, and the thoughtfully sent washing instructions. If price is a concern when doing a print on demand black t-shirt, cafe press wins here.

Overall, I’m not terribly confident on the longevity of these shirts from either vendor. I think they’re both fine, but they’re probably best as a prototyping device. If you have a client that you want to demo a shirt design to, either service might work fine, I just probably wouldn’t bet my branding budget on these as a final product.

In part 4, I’ll wrap up with a comparison of post-washing results from both services.

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

Well, fully 7 days after my zazzle.com order arrived, my cafepress order finally showed up. Now I have something to compare and contrast to the first order.

So my first reaction was to the relative thinness of the shirt relative to Zazzle’s black shirts. It really does feel like a lighter weight shirt. As my wife rightly pointed out, “if you’re layering, that should be ok.” The second thing that I noticed was how much nicer the quality of the print is versus Zazzle’s output. It looks like a very similar process where they take the alpha value from the png file and print a white ink first, then do a CMYK inkjet print over the top of that… and presumably do some kind of heat treatment to set the inks. I’d have to go back and check my source files for resolution, but its *extremely* unlikely that I would send low res files off to zazzle and really high res files off to cafepress, even on accident. I just don’t roll that way. It’s high res all the time for me. So when I see the nicer quality print from cafepress, it really makes it hard to declare either one of these services as “the winner”.

So on to cafepress’ commission policy. They let you set your commission to any value you want, even to set it to $0… which can reduce the price of the item to a more palatable number. I’ll be honest, zazzle’s prices are kind of a shock considering you’re buying a t-shirt. cafepress isn’t much better, but at least I can optionally set the price for my customer if I want. Cafepress wins here, imo.

In part 3 I will outline a chart of some of the pros and cons of each service.

One note about cafepress’ print on demand for thing like this bib… they’re using a heat transfer process that does not use transparency data in your graphics… so the first time something like this bib gets dirty and you send it through the wash, the un-printed-on portion of the transfer absorbs some color and it becomes apparent that it’s a heat transfer… which sucks. I think they’re using a newer process to print directly onto light/white shirts that doesn’t employ this technique… which is good. This old method really blows. Cute design, though! Baby’s first turntable!

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

My brother in law Justin is working on a short film. I just got the green light to post it, so here it is.

Eden (4th pass rough cut) from Justin Kane on Vimeo.

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So I did some user testing at my brother in law’s company and got paid properly, so I ordered a few of the t-shirts that I’ve been designing over the past 5 years or so but haven’t had a chance to actually purchase. Since black t-shirts are the best thing since sliced bread, that’s pretty much all I’m designing for anymore. Several companies are offering up print on demand t-shirts now. Recently, there was some magical improvement to print white ink onto dark garments as part of the process (thank you, alpha channel), and then just industrial-ink-jet-print as usual, and probably some kind of heat-setting process to lock it all into the fibers of the shirt.

So! part one of my research will cover Zazzle.com’s quality. In fact, I can tell you that that Zazzle already has one thing going for it over cafe press: I ordered t-shirts on the same day, early in the day, from both sites, and my zazzle order showed up today. No cafe press shirts so far.

While I’m waiting for my other order to show up, let’s take a look at how Zazzle did.

Overall, I’m happy with the quality of the print. When I look at the results from a north-american-personal-space distance away, the print resolution looks fine. When I just look down at the shirt while wearing it, it’s very pixelated. I know for a fact from over a decade of professional experience that my graphics are *not* low res… so I’m guessing that due to the sheer volume of work that their printers are subjected to that they have an automated process of de-rezing everyone’s graphics. Probably especially people like me, who intentionally load the absolute maximum resolution image size the system would accept. So, all in all, acceptable.

Once I wash these I’ll report back to see how well they handle it.

Price is one of the ways that Zazzle and Cafe Press differ. Zazzle says “hey! thanks for designing something with our system! Someone bought one of your things,so here’s a tiny tiny tiny commission.” They do give you a “discount” to buy your own stuff, but for some reason it calculated the discounts unequally when I ordered one of each of these two designs. I don’t know what the story is there, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. No doubt these shirts are sort of a luxury because they run near $20 each with shipping, so it’s sort of a big commitment.

I’ll cover how cafe press handles price and commissions… when my order arrives.

Technorati Tags: cafepress, design, printondemand, zazzle

Back in 2007, I did a painting I ended up titling “balance/imbalance”. I also photographed myself painting it at 1 frame per second as I painted. Here now, in full vimeo glory, is the video I’ve been sitting on for over a year.

timelapse of me painting balance/imbalance from stevecooley on Vimeo.

The general rhythm is “mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, paint” over and over and over.

Technorati Tags: painting, stevecooley, timelapse

I have a small show called “through the prism of San Jose” in the windows of Works/San Jose while it is preparing for an upcoming members show. Check it out!

Check out higher res photos and more of my artwork on flickr.

Technorati Tags: stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose

As of version 0011 of the IDE, you can now allegedly program arduino boards like the modern device bare bones board via the ICSP pins. This is way cool. Now you can supposedly forego the FTDI cable and just get a programmer box like LadyAda’s USBTinyISP, AND get the benefit of being able to program other AVR chips and circuits if you get beyond the Arduino.

I haven’t tried this out yet, but it’s exciting news! Here’s the link to the instructions for setup. And here is the forum topic where I got the confirmation.

Technorati Tags: arduino, ladyada, moderndevice, USBTinyISP

map() - similar to the processing.org function

analogReference()

interrupts() and noInterrupts()

degrees() and radians() (do not exist yet)

Support for uploading sketch using a programmer

Technorati Tags: arduino