Print on Demand (POD) is a print-to-order service in which designers can upload digital designs, and customers can order a physical product, such as T-shirts or coffee mugs, with the designer’s work printed on it. This is a great way for digital designers to sell their work and earn money without having to invest time and money into the printing process.
Some examples of Print on Demand services are Zazzle, RedBubble, Printful, Amazon Merch, and Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
In this article we will cover the following topics:
- Using files from Creative Fabrica on POD
- Why it's not allowed to upload graphics and crafts as-is
- How to differentiate your design for Basic POD Usage
- Using patterns for Basic POD Usage
- Creating your own pattern using graphics and crafts for Basic POD Usage
If you would like to learn about using basic POD graphics and crafts, please check out this article.
Using files from Creative Fabrica on POD
At Creative Fabrica, we do allow customers to upload designs that include Graphics and Crafts from our site to POD sites, as long as the design uploaded meets our license terms regarding Print on Demand usage for Basic POD.
It’s important to note that products from our Needlework category are excluded from any POD usage.
Fonts can always be used for POD to create flattened, static designs (e.g., PNG, SVG). You may not upload the font file itself to any POD service in a way that allows a customer to type their own text using that font, as this is a form of prohibited embedding.
Please make sure that your design is compliant with the terms of use of the POD site that you are uploading to - different POD platforms may have additional requirements for your product to be accepted
Why it's not allowed to upload graphics and crafts as-is
As stated in our license terms for Basic POD, it is not allowed to upload Graphics and Crafts as-is, without your own complementary design elements, to Print on Demand sites. This would be simply reselling another person’s work, which would not be fair to the original designer. For this reason, you are always required to make significant modifications to the design or use it as a complementary element to your overall design.
How to differentiate your design for Basic POD Usage
If you are planning to create a design to be sold on POD sites, you may include Crafts and Graphics as an element in your original design. If you are planning to upload the design to a POD site in which you only can place the design on top of the product (For Amazon KDP usage, read under 'Using graphics and crafts in books and low-content books for Basic POD Usage (Amazon KDP)') the new design needs to be vastly different from the original design. You need to add several distinctive new design elements to differentiate your product from the original.
In the example above, the other elements (tree, bench, sun, etc.) should be your own original designs. It is not allowed to combine multiple downloads without making any modifications to create a ‘new’ design, as the individual designs would still be comparable with the original design.
Using patterns for Basic POD Usage
Uploading a pattern as-is is not allowed under our license. The reason is because a pattern often is hard to modify. But if you want to use a pattern on your POD design, you need to modify the pattern so it's vastly different from the original. In the visual below you can see an example.
As you can see in the image to the left, it's not enough to simply take the pattern, and add a word on top of the pattern - this does not count as vastly changed. The pattern is still too similar to the original. In the image on the right, new elements have been added and the pattern is used to create a new unique design.
Creating your own pattern using graphics and crafts for Basic POD Usage
You are allowed to create your own patterns using images from Creative Fabrica and sell this pattern on Print on Demand sites, as long as you make sure that the pattern is:
- A new unique design
- Not just multiple images combined
Since it's not allowed to combine multiple designs to create a ‘new’ design, the same also applies to creating a pattern. You can make sure that your new pattern is unique by adding your own distinctive elements, or changing elements in the original designs. Below you can see a visual to illustrate this.
If you are unsure whether your design is different enough from the original, please send us a message with examples and we will happily provide individual feedback.
If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us at hi@creativefabrica.com.