Night of the Living Stickers
Admit it, you've always wanted to have a giant skeleton emerging from your living-room wall, haven't you? No? Hmmm. Wait, I see the problem. Sorry, I was confusing this with my other blogging gig for Fangoria. Skeletons! Silly me, of course you don't crave oversize images of the living dead or alien surfers or giant bitmapped doughnuts (well, maybe that last one). So let's approach this from your perspective, that of a creative type in constant quest for new revenue streams and fresh services to offer your clients.
That being the case, I encourage you to nip over to Larger Than Life Prints!. It's not a great-looking site but it provides a pretty nifty service, that of printing on "patent pending, self-adhesive, removable fabric material" in sizes up to 7 by 4.5 feet. It's going for the consumer market by providing some existing imagery, but with the exception of the skate n' skeleton pics of Felix Laflamme and the bitmapped work of user interface designer Susan Kare, the pickings are currently rather slim. This is actually good news for you.
The site allows customers to create their own prints by uploading files in .JPG format, resulting no doubt in familyesque imagery pasted to walls like some banal moment in a slide show, forever frozen in time. However, if you're good with a camera, and even better are already making money from your images on microstock sites, this might prove to be a new revenue stream. Once you've created a free account, you can upload images to your own branded area, set prices and get paid once a month. You can also upload in .AI, .EPS or .PSD formats, so dramatic, wall-worthy illustrations are definitely something to ponder. The site provides the ability to define "cutouts," so you can create a design consisting of multiple parts. Just be prepared to drive traffic to your area, from your own site or wherever else you can ingeniously promote your work, since I can't see the Larger Than Life Prints! site attracting a large number of prospects.
Don't want to have your work rub shoulders online with clipart images of kittens? Then think of stickers as something you could include in your services to clients: the next time you create a corporate identity, why not provide some stickers of the logo? Or you could create small, compelling custom stickers and send them out to clients and prospects as self-promotional items. Finally, why not do something jaw-droppingly creative and decorate your office with it?
Myself, I still have a hankering for that peppy skeleton.
Chris Dickman
Founding editor, Graphics.com
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