More tips for Art Life Collective custom shirt designers

Sorry for the hiatus. Holidays have been busy for Art Life Collective with a number of new custom t-shirt designers signing up.

We are now up to around 140 artists with more than 600 designs on the site. It also appears that, at long last, we have most of those bugs worked out with the upload issues.

Still, here are a few hints and tips for getting around the site that are worth mentioning.
First off, we offer customers a bunch of options for the color of the shirt they want. I worked around this issue easily when doing some of the text designs for the ALC shop by creating different contrast outlines around the text and creating text effects that will make it stand out on any color.
This is a little harder for people working with art. I have seen several of our new artists uploading multiple designs, different ones for dark or light shirts. That's a great idea and one that works well.
Of course, if your work is framed with a white boarder -- no transparency -- there is also no problem. But, I realize many designs don't look good that way and transparency is essential. Again, the fix here, unless you want to upload different versions, is to put a light boarder (white works best) around dark designs and a dark (again, black works best in most cases) around light designs.

Also, with regards to uploading t-shirt designs with transparency, I have found Photoshop CS or later works best for this. We think we have most of the issues resolved with older versions of PS, but, if anyone has a problem with their upload, email me a graham@artlifecollective.com, and I will either upload the image for you or help you with whatever problems you are having.

Thanks for everyone who is either contributing to the site or just taking part in the Art Life Collective artist forum. It's great to have you aboard.

Also a quick reminder to everyone to post artist bio information and and artist statement on your page, plus any links to outside sites hosting your work. ALC exists to help artists promote themselves.

Have a safe and happy holidays.
Peace,
The ALC team

Aaaah, for all our shirt designers, be aware, new software

According to one of Art Life Collective's t-shirt designers,
"Adobe Photoshop CS3 has just been released. It's still a trial version. A download is available for a month and if you already have CS2, you can download the trial version of CS3 forever."

That one from the Art Life Collective artist forum.
Becoming more of a online artist resource every day. Carol get the props for today's tip.

Christmas sales and new ALC shop

OK, for all of our contributing artists, it's the holiday season. That means some really (and we mean REALLY) offensive holiday shirts at the Art Life Collective shirt shop. I appologize for these ahead of time.

Also, the press is installed in its new location in Orlando and Blair is finished with the upgrades. While our custom designer t-shirts have always looked very good by any standards, the new software and ink-delivery system should step it up another notch. If anyone has any suggestions about other ways to improve what we are trying to do, let us know at info@artlifecollective.com

Just a head count, we are up to 127 t-shirt artists as I am writing this and are closing in on the 600 designs benchmark. We are always happy to have people joing the ALC project. The more the better -- for everyone. Part of the reason for creating Art Life Collective is to foster more diversity in the art community. Anyone browsing our t-shirt design gallery can see we have done just that. And for our artists, that means more people with different tasts will be attracted to the site and see their work.

Again, we hope everyone is happy with both the site and how their work is turning out in print. If you are experiencing any problems, let us know. Occassionally, we will have so many uploads at once that the server buffer will fill up, causing delays. We are working with our coder to fix that bug, but it's a minor one and has only happened a couple of times.

Also, Jules has been busy digging up art news and interesting artists and posting the links in the Art Life Collective forum, so check it out. The forum is open to everyone, not just ALC artists as a clearinghouse for right-brainers to share ideas, so check it out.

A reminder, this is the season when lots of people are out shopping for unique gifts. It's a good time to promote both your onsite and off-site work and maybe sell some of it. Best of luck.

Happy holidays
the ALC team

Just what are those new windows at Art Life Collective?

A few of our contributors may have noticed on the artist admin page, where you upload your t-shirt designs to Art Life Collective, there are some new little tabs down at the bottom of the page.

That's all part of some new code Blair has added that will notify shirt designers and artists what and how many of their shirts have sold at ALC. Also, since it's suck cold right now, we are looking at adding some winter -- read long sleeve -- shirts to the inventory. Maybe in black or white only, depending on demand. Check out the t-shirt forum at Art Life Collective for the latest on this.

On another note, WALC, our shoutcast station, is down at the moment while we upgrade our Internet connection. Seems, since the move from Miami to Orlando, there is not enough bandwidth to support our stream with any sort of quality. That should be taken care of soon and Disco Super Chocolate will be back on the air.

Peace