Someone once told me that putting reproductions of art on sweatshirts, or carry-on bags is to bastardize artists' work.
Bastardize!
Last time we met I told you about my
Art Portals.
Phase 2 of my Art Portal project is to bastardize every single of my art works on the Art Portals.
Bastardize is - as you might have guessed - not at all my favorite term for this.
I call it merchandise.
I could not agree less with the phrase bastardize.
I call it to communicate the essence of a good art work to as many people as possible.
So Phase 2 of my Art Portal Project is to create merchandise products based on my art works.
Now I needed a piece of software:
that could help med create merchandise products
that could exhibit my merchandise products
that could allow me to exhibit the merchandise products on my Art Portals
that could receive orders and payment from the customers
that could allow the customers to customize the merchandise product
that could produce the customized merchandise product on-demand (...let us call it
on-demand manufacturing)
that could send the product to the customer.
Until now my Art Portals have dealt with on-demand printing.
My ambition to create merchandise products on-line for sale on the internet presumes
on-demand manufacturing.
I want to create T-shirts, mugs, posters, greeting cards, postcards, hats, bags ties aprons, ties, mouse pads, stickers, bottons etc. based on existing art works.
I have been looking around.
In Europe.
In Asia.
In Australia.
In Africa.
In South America.
And of course I found my piece of software in North America.
In The United States, in San Jose - in Silicon Valley.
This piece of software is made by real computer nerds.
Technically it is second to none.
It's called zazzle.com.
My new name is zazzle.com/lonvig*
The users of zazzle.com are young creative people with a substantial computer background and as far as I can tell most of the users are from north-west United States and south-west Canada.
I can use the technical superciliousness of zazzle.com and make it user friendly by integrating it into my Art Portals.
I found zazzle.com on 13 January 2007.
So far I have made 700 merchandise products and integrated these products into my Art Portals.
My goal is 1000 merchandise products.
No more talk.
Let me show you some samples.
I hope there are no rules aginst using shockwave-flash technique here - so, let's take advantage of being on-line!!!
The PANELs below are the PANELs shown on each of my Art Portals.
The merchandice products in the PANELs are shown with the most popular product first.
You might have seen 5 stars under a motif in the PANELs above - that's visitor's ratings.
If you want to see more PANELs you have to explore them yourself on
Art Portals.
Or you might explore them on an
extended version of this blog entry on my web site.
Thoughts
I know I have to be aware of my own fascination of technically good software due to my past as a software engineer.
zazzle.com is technically good software.
I have to see the software as a tool and only bring is along if it is possible to make it user friendly.
I look forward to see what happens with Phase 2 of my Art Portals project.
Phase 2, which implements merchandise by on-demand manufacturing.
