First, let's decide exactly what types of products you want to design for. Are you only going to design for one type? Are you going to design only t-shirts? Think again. There is no reason to design just for one type of product on Redbubble as any design can be offered for sale on most all of the products that Redbubble prints, and all on the same page. And selling the same design on as many different products as possible is a great idea as a potential buyer may love your design on that t-shirt, but they simply aren't looking for clothes. Maybe, however, they would buy it if it was available as a framed print. And don't think just because your design is not what would be considered "fine" art that someone wouldn't want a type of print that is usually reserved for fine art. If someone offered to buy a print of your comic book style design on a canvas print, would you turn them down? No. Why would you? There is NO reason to not offer your design on all available products. There is no cost to you and only potential gain.
Also, it is good to remember that your beautiful brightly colored design is going to be dulled down and darkened somewhat due to the printing method and the fact that it is being printed on cloth. You may find, as is the case on Zazzle, that white is not printed on any "light-colored" shirts. That includes colors up to a solid medium blue. Do you want your beautiful photograph based design to have all it's white areas replaced with medium blue? If you really want people to see your design the way you meant for them to see it, you might want to offer prints and posters of it as well.
Burning City Studios on RedBubble
That being said, you may find yourself in an annoying position of having a nice design uploaded to the site only for sale as a shirt, which has different file requirements and then deciding to also offer a poster, say. At this point you will realize that you can't upload the same image for a poster that you used for the shirt for a number of reasons including lack of background, sizing of image to sit well on a shirt, etc. And, the chances are good that if you started designing only for t-shirts, that the original file dimensions are too small for the rather large requirements for posters.
Now, you could simply resize your image. But, you're likely to lose pixel data and end up selling blurry or pixelated images without knowing of this poor quality yourself. That is unless you actually shell out the bucks and order a large size poster to check the quality. It would be nice to have copies of your own work to see how the prints actually look. But, needless to say, you are designing products to make money not to spend it. And the cost would pile up very quickly if you ordered copies of all your own work. I guess they might make good presents.
The other option is to start all over. And, after having spent so much time getting your t-shirt design perfected, it begins to appear as a massive waste of time—especially if you want to make sure that your design is uniform across all product types. This is because now, not only will you have to redo your original design, but also you will have to remake your t-shirt design to ensure uniformity. And, as a side note, you absolutely do want to ensure uniformity. Remember the McDonald's model, consistency is everything.
In order to avoid wasting so much time, I suggest that every time you start a design for any online print on demand site, not just Redbubble, always start with a file as big as the largest required size. This will eat up your hard-drive space, but save you an enormous amount of time in the future. You never know if, in the future, you might decide you actually do want to make a poster out of that Galaxy S3 case design. Also, you might find yourself deciding to sell on multiple print on demand sites and find that they're requirements are actually larger than the site you currently sell on. Even though you will most likely need to do some reformatting, you do not want to have to start from scratch every time.
One really important lesson in life is, whenever possible, to learn from other peoples' mistakes. I wasted an enormous amount of time for the first couple of weeks on Redbubble. No reason for you to do that too. Learn from my mistakes. Always design for the largest product available, then work down.
(Post by Mr. Miller as dictated to Mr. Festhalten.)
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