Photo Places in Virtual Spaces ….
Tuesday in class we went over a lot of things at a breakneck speed. In particular, we talked about all the cool online services to make cool things like t-shirts, cards, stamps, canvas prints, panoramas, to name a few. We wanted to put some more details around them so you can get cracking on making cool things of your great digital photos.
Caps, t-shirts, cards, mugs, calendars and other great gifts
Zazzle.com has some of the nicest quality cards and stamps with the fastest turnaround ( 1 day + shipping time ) of any vendor who sells into the one-off specialty market. They have a very nice website and have a lot of products. Close second in speed, but first in customer services is cafepress.com. You can’t go wrong with either of these two.
Books
It seemed like there was a bit of excitement around this as a real possibility. Lulu.com is 100% DIY and geared toward the self-publisher, so expect to have the finished product ready before you send it to them. Mypublisher.com, though, is by far one of the more mature companies in this realm for the consumer, photo market. They have a nice tool to help you layout, upload and pay. Pricing can be very good and they run 50% off promotions from time to time. They also sell the monstrous, 12×16 ( 12×32 fully open ) books! Blurb.com is relatively new, but they have a really nice book making software, though they currently ( and disappointingly ), only sell 8×10″ books.
Stationary and other paper products
Vistaprints.com sells everything stationary under the sun, from letterhead, envelopes to a variety of cards. WARNING : once you buy from them you’ll receive special deals and promotions to get you to make more stuff! Mpix.com is now also making cards and paper products on a variety of paper types, so they will soon be a viable alternative.
Photographic Prints
While there are a number of online photo printing sites, these stand out in terms of popularity, price, quality and service.
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