Dive Inspirations

Your shop name *	Dive Inspirations
Zazzle to me is a... *	Part time job - with part time pay
What is the best advice you have received from a fellow shopkeeper about your shops or designs you would like to pass on to another shopkeeper? *
Do not be afraid to cull your shop of designs that do not sell. It's a fact that some designs just do not sell. Sometimes you have to forget your artistic pride. Don't be afraid to rework a design that nobody is buying. Look at the colors of the design, and see how they work with the available colors of apparel. Check every possible product configuration. Yes, it is time consuming, but there is nothing worse than a customer who happens upon your shop finding a design that does not fit a particular product. Do not be afraid to take a design and re-size it several ways so it fits all the products you want to make available for sale.
What PODs do u currently use or have shops on? *	Zazzle Cafepress Spreadshirt Skreened Greeting Card Universe (GCU)
What did you do with your free time before zazzle or other POD's....and what do you do with it now? *	You mean other than scuba diving or lounging in a hammock with a banana daiquiri? There is not a whole lot of time between designing for my regular job, and designing for my POD's. The designs take a set amount of time, and the lay takes more. It's surprising how much time it takes to post a new design for sale on products.
What programs do you use to make your designs *	Photoshop (any version) Illustrator Other photo-editing software
Tell us more about what you like and do not like about each software you use, what makes it special. *	I use Adobe Creative Suite CS3. I love Photoshop. Illustrator is great, but it takes forever to master. I am still learning tricks all of the time. As far as I;m concerned, they are simply the best image design or altering tools out there. If you start with a hand drawn sketch, and then scan it into your computer Illustrator is the best way to ink a drawing. For those who work on photographs, Photoshop is unmatched in it's abilities. Pixelmator is a good alternative though for quick and easy touch-ups or editing a photo like cropping, straightening, re-sizing, etc.
Will you make custom orders? *	Yes - sometimes free, sometimes fee required upfront
Elaborate on your answer above regarding custom orders... *	I do custom orders all the time. They can be bulk requests, or simply a one off. It depends on the design requested. The design fee, again, depends on the amount of work required for the custom design, and what it will be used for. For example: If I do a design for scuba shop that they will sell in their store, I get a deposit on commission, then the balance on completion. For a one off, or small run (say a small Dive Club) I don't take a design fee. I bump the price of the individual item a bit so I make a larger commission on the sale of each.
List your shop URL's *	http://www.zazzle.com/diveinspirations