The Rumplo T-Shirt Blog

We've decided to stop allowing submissions from on-demand t-shirt printing sites on Rumplo. Why? After seeing a flood of submissions from these printers, it's obvious that the t-shirts they've produced don't live up to the promise of easy, high-quality, on demand printing.

The future wasn't supposed to be this... paltry
On-demand printing, for all its convenience and, well, promise, hasn't produced the kind of high-quality t-shirt runs that Rumplo thrives on. There's certainly a funkiness to these web printing tools -- centering your artwork over the image of a blank tee just doesn't feel very accurate -- but it's probably not the fault of technology as much it is an issue of how great art gets produced. That is, it's clear that the art submitted from people using on-demand printing isn't the same caliber of art that individuals and teams doing their own printing produce, the kind of tees that makes your jaw drop. After looking through quite of a few of the on-demand shirts submitted to Rumplo, it occurs to us that it's just too easy to use on-demand printing. There's no risk, and when there's no risk, when artists don't have to shell out some hard-earned cash for a run of high quality shirts, artists aren't as likely to produce great work. It's an old argument -- that constraints produce better art -- but from what we've seen, it holds just as true for t-shirts and cheap printing as it does for the microwave oven and the culinary arts.

Microwaves, the future gone lukewarm
The microwave oven was supposed to be the appliance of the future -- it'll cook your dinner in two minutes flat! But of course it's hard not to cringe when one sees a microwave in a nice restaurant, and I always feel a bit lazy nuking a frozen burrito for dinner. The microwave, for all its futuristic magic and convenience, doesn't make good food. It has become a symbol of hastily-made, tasteless TV-dinners -- something no foodie would be caught dead using. It's probably true that the microwave's sub-par results are more a fault of its technical shortcomings (what, I can't microwave my fork, too?) than of the culinary aspirations of cooks. So, mixing the metaphor with t-shirts isn't perfect, but even so, I can't remember seeing anyone try to cook something decent in one of these contraptions. In other words, the microwave oven is really only useful for reheating leftovers and a few other basics, just as on-demand printing is a tool of convenience, not something skilled t-shirt craftsman seem to find useful.

Fading fast
So we're tossing the microwave of printing presses out the window. Or, more accurately, we're following the lead of great t-shirt artists and shops everywhere when they threw on-demand printing out. It's a practical position in the artist t-shirt community, and we mean to serve that community. If you can prove us wrong and show us some brilliant shirts from one of these on-demand printers, we'd be happy to reconsider, but for now we're going to stick with the hundreds and thousands of small, brilliant, independent shops around the world that print their work with gusto, hard work, and genius. If you're an artist who wants to print great shirts, we'd like to suggest that you try printing a few by hand or in a shop and see what you come up with.

Thanks for submitting!
We'd also like to thank everyone who submitted their work to Rumplo from any of the on-demand printers. We really, really appreciate your enthusiasm and the attention you have paid to us, and we hope you continue to enjoy browsing Rumplo and submitting any tees that you print yourself or that you spot elsewhere on the web. The t-shirts you've submitted will remain on the site, at least for the time being, but will be pulled down from the front page.

Update
None of this is to say that we think artist using on-demand printers are any less talented than independent shops. Though we think the differences in style and quality that have emerged from these two different environments are interesting they are not the reason we decided to stop accepting submissions from on-demand printers. We're not accepting submissions from on-demand shops because we want to maintain our focus on shops and artist printing their own work and setting up their own shops. CafePress, RedBubble, and other sites like them already have many of the tools Rumplo offers at their disposal, and to some extent they already have a community of their own on those websites. Independent t-shirt shops and artists don't, and our focus has always been on serving them, helping them get exposure, and helping them solve their unique problems.

Thanks again,

The Rumplo Team

Rumplo is three things:

1. A place for you to find your new favorite t-shirt, whether it's the pink godzilla tee you saw in Japan, something hillarious, or something awesome and black and white.

2. A tool to let you subscribe to your favorite designers, tags, or topics. Love clever infographics? You'll want to subscribe to The Shirt Project's work -- they're incredible. Dig typography? subscribe. Right now the only way to subscribe is via RSS, but we're working on an awesome email system that'll bunch all your subscriptions into one convenient email, too, so subscribe away!

3. A community built by you, and lots of other folks like you. People and t-shirt shops from all over the world submit shirts to Rumplo, and soon we'll have the largest, most eclectic collection anywhere. That is, we couldn't do it without you, so thanks! We hope that Rumplo will make it easy for designers, incredible t-shirt shops, and their fans to hang out together, and build something awesome. If you haven't tried submitting a t-shirt yet, go for it! If you're a t-shirt shop, what have you got to lose?

We're brand new, and we'd really appreciate any feedback you might have, anything from "your choice of font is lame" to "this feature is cool, but would be cooler if..." Contact us any time here.

Thanks again for dropping in, we hope to see you around rumplo in the next few weeks as we introduce some new stuff. We'll let you know about it right here, on our blog.

Cheers,

Saha and Ian