New Ventures and Disappearing Reindeer

I’ve spent many enjoyable hours recently setting up shops on Zazzle as an outlet for my photography and a chance to do some designing and experimenting. The whole process was really enjoyable. Never heard of Zazzle? Where HAVE you been? Zazzle is a really popular site for buying gifts and more which can be customised and given the personal touch. But it is also an outlet for an army of designers, artists and photographers who create products for sale with their own designs. The designer decides whether to allow the buyer to customise the product or not.

Getting away from the camera and just playing with Adobe Sketch was great fun and resulted in Poppyfield, which is now one of my favourite collections on Zazzle.

A caveat for those who fancy putting their work on the site – colours are handled differently when printed on various products and may not come out with quite the same nuances you can see on your monitor.

This is where the disappearing reindeer come in. One of my Christmas designs is produced from a picture of two rather cute alpacas with the words, “Are the reindeer coming yet?” and behind them is a stable with antlers just visible in the opening surrounded by magical stars. In the description I encouraged the readers to see if they can see the reindeer because they are already here. They were easy enough to pick out on the original, but on the Zazzle products the antlers have disappeared into the background and the only clue to the presence of Santa’s magical reindeer is a cluster of stars on the stable opening.