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 (more details about Amazon KDP below). 

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

• Using graphics and crafts in books and low-content books for Basic POD Usage (Amazon KDP)

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.

Fonts can always be used for POD, as long as the font file itself cannot be extracted or uploaded to a 3rd party site/platform/app.

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 our 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, we always require you 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 our 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.

Using graphics and crafts in books and low-content books for Basic POD Usage (Amazon KDP)

If you are planning to use Print on Demand services for self-publishing, such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, you are allowed to use Crafts and Graphics as-is, in or on the cover of a book, as long as the book also contains content that you have created yourself. This applies to novels, children’s books, and low-content books such as planners, journals, notebooks.

Below you can see more specifics on different types of books that can be published via a self-publishing service/site:

Novels and Children's books: When you have written a book yourself that contains your own artwork and content, graphics and crafts included would be considered complementary to your overall design. The graphics and crafts are not the main design in this case, and you are therefore allowed to use the graphics and crafts as-is, as they are part of your design and therefore follow the rules in our commercial license.

Low content books: When you create a low content book you are allowed to use the Graphics and Crafts as-is, as long as there is other content within the book that you have created yourself. For example, in a planner, you might have some pre-written text which the end-user later can use to fill in/plan their day. This also counts if you, for example, have illustrated images in the book yourself.

Lined books: As long as you have created the lines and templates within the book yourself, this counts as content created uniquely by you. So the designs that you use in or on this book will be a compliment to your design.

A blank book without any pre-written content or images: Since this isn’t a book that you have created any content within the actual book yourself, you would then need to modify the designs in order to be allowed to use them. See the regulations for Basic POD usage in our license here, or like described above under the headline How to differentiate your design. 

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.