CafePress, Zazzle & Spreadshirt Showdown

Rick over at MacMerc has just posted an excellent overview on the three main online print-on-demand t-shirt printing shops: CafePress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt. For artists considering using one of these services, this is a great in-depth review on the similarities/differences between all three shops and their printing methods, as well as the pros and cons of each service and type of printing. Included are samples of shirts from each company, as well as magnified images of the printing.

The review is a companion blog post to his video segment on The Lab with Leo Laporte, which is included as a Google video clip on the post as well.

Rick’s opinion overall is that Spreadshirt is the way to go. Personally, I use the Zazzle service for my cartoon art t-shirts, and have not seen samples of the other services so I can’t compare. I have only seen samples of the light-color shirt printing from Zazzle, and thought it had pretty good quality for the printing technology. I need to order a dark shirt and compare quality.

Spreadshirt has one feature not offered by the others: plot printing. Plot printing is basically like a vinyl sign print, and therefore is limited to flat colors only, and three colors max. While this eliminates blends, gradients and the like, one could still make some exaggerated halftone dots in plot-printed designs. James Dempsey has a great Adobe Illustrator tutorial on creating halftone dots, and Vonster has another excellent halftone dot effect tutorial over at Illustration Class. Note that plot-printing with Spreadshirt requires elements to be a minimum width of .061″.

Overall, an excellent resource for anyone wanting a comparison of these services.

by George Coghill -
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