Wednesday, April 19, 2006
I hate café press.
Every time I see a café press shirt the same story goes through my mind. Someone makes a website on geocities. The kind of site with spinning gifs scattered all about with no thought to layout, content, or copyright laws. Often the designer(s) have no knowledge of html and just use a template like your common blogger. Geocities was basically the blog of the early 90’s. Only instead of telling all of 4 visitors about your day you talk about your cat, girlfriend, or post pictures from the yearbook and get harassing phone calls from your friend’s parents fearing the cyberstalkers are already in their bushes because their child’s photo made it onto the porn hub that is the internet (funny, because now those cyberstalkers will find you with the magic of blogs. No one found a damn thing besides ads with Geocities). At this point, the site has about three and a half pages connected crudely together through a list of links at the center of the main page and someone gets the great idea to “make T-shirts.” These “designers” had no idea how to make a website. How do you think they’ll make a T-shirt? Exactly the same way. Only now it's on a Hanes’ unisex shirt, teddy bear, mug, and bumper sticker.
The story ends and you find yourself once again looking at a café press shirt wondering if anyone actually buys these things. I’m sure some people use café press for reasons that make sense. Like going to weird shirt party and labeling yourself and all your friends so you have an icebreaker. Perhaps you want your peers to read your blogs while afk and post them on t-shirts (I also hate these people). This usually isn’t the case, people think they can make a little money by putting some junk on a T-shirt and selling it (the rummage sale of shirts). But that’s the problem; your shirt has no creative design. You don’t even see the shirt modeled; it’s just a standard +1 shirt with a gif pasted in the center.
Now I sympathize, I know a guy who works on a website and wants to sell some shirts. The profits (if any came about) would cover his domain name and bandwidth costs. It’d also help advertise the site and perhaps even pay for a veggie burger. But he realizes this is one of those things that needs to be professionally done (or he should learn how to do it professionally), otherwise the end result is going to be an iffy product not worthy of his name. Long story short, if you care enough to sell it to others; care enough to sell something you’d use yourself.
The story ends and you find yourself once again looking at a café press shirt wondering if anyone actually buys these things. I’m sure some people use café press for reasons that make sense. Like going to weird shirt party and labeling yourself and all your friends so you have an icebreaker. Perhaps you want your peers to read your blogs while afk and post them on t-shirts (I also hate these people). This usually isn’t the case, people think they can make a little money by putting some junk on a T-shirt and selling it (the rummage sale of shirts). But that’s the problem; your shirt has no creative design. You don’t even see the shirt modeled; it’s just a standard +1 shirt with a gif pasted in the center.
Now I sympathize, I know a guy who works on a website and wants to sell some shirts. The profits (if any came about) would cover his domain name and bandwidth costs. It’d also help advertise the site and perhaps even pay for a veggie burger. But he realizes this is one of those things that needs to be professionally done (or he should learn how to do it professionally), otherwise the end result is going to be an iffy product not worthy of his name. Long story short, if you care enough to sell it to others; care enough to sell something you’d use yourself.
# posted by MaximumTacolord @ 8:22 PM 
