Introduction
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Show Me The Website
Here’s how NeonEarth’s website homepage looks…
It’s got a very clean and accessible design. It’s easy to find whatever you need – wanting to buy things, or sell your own art.
The one piece of information that seems to be missing is where the goods will be manufactured and shipped from – this isn’t stated in the User Agreement or Seller Agreement.
Selecting a Product to Sell
After creating my account, I filled in my store details. You can specify a store name, description, and provide links to your personal website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Payments are only made via PayPal, so you need to provide them with a valid PayPal email address too.
To start putting my art on the site, I went to the Create tab. The site has it’s quick spiel on the process, then two links.
‘Create Awesomeness’ is for people doing one-off designs, just to buy for themselves, or as gifts.
If you want to sell your art on the NeonEarth marketplace, click the ‘Design and earn with us now‘ button.
You’ll then be taken to the ‘My Designs‘ section of your profile. As you can see, no uploads yet by me, so click ‘Add My Design‘.
We are taken to a webpage showing all the products on offer from NeonEarth, with filters available on the left.
What Products Are Offered?
Here is the full list of products available at this point in NeonEarth’s beta:
Wall and Surfaces
- Wallpaper
- in six different textures – canvas, leatherette, cavier/cavier, mesh, drip, and ribbed eco.
- Comes in these sizes: 64″ x 81″, 84″ x 106″, 105 x 132, or a custom size, with length and width each being between 12″ and 200″.Â
- Wall mural, also in 6 textures
- Canvas frame
- 3 sizes: 8″ square, 8″ x 12″ rectangle or 20″ x 30″ rectangle
- Poster frame
- 2 sizes, A3 or A4
- Posters
- 2 sizes, A3 or A4
Home and Living
- Throw pillows with insert
- Square, rectangular and round. Square comes in several sizes
- Throw pillows without insert
- Coaster
- Square or circle, set of 4
- Beach towels
- 30″ x 60″
- Doormats
- Indoor or outdoor, several sizes
Clothing and Accessories
- T-Shirts
- 12 different types. 5 for men, including a polo shirt. 6 for women, including a crop top and a maternity top. 1 romper for kids.
- Kids
- Hoodie and short-sleeve romper
- Sarong
- 3 different materials. 66″ x 42″
- Scarf
- 3 different materials. 36″ x 36″
- Tote bags without zipper
- Canvas, 15″ x 14″
- Tote bags with zipper
- Vests
- As in, a men’s wide-strap singlet
- Hoodies
- Three, for men, women and kids. All have pockets.
- All over print
- Unisex vest and unisex tee
Â
Stationery
- Notepad
- A5, spiral bound, ruled or unruled
- Mouse pad
- 7.5″ x 9″ x 3mm height
- Badges
- Round. Two sizes, 44mm or 58mm
Â
I think this is a pretty good product selection. It’s good that they have plenty of apparel options. But it is a strange choice to not have stickers, which I have found are my best-selling product on other print-on-demand websites.
I selected the women’s crop top as my first product to customise.
You’ll see a close-up image and description of the selected product. Click ‘Now let’s customise‘ to…customise!
The Creative Lab
NeonEarth call their product editing screen the Creative Lab.
The layout of the image uploader is very straightforward. Click the ‘Upload Art‘ button on the left toolbar, and then ‘Choose one from my PC‘ to upload an image file. I uploaded my Support Main design.
Acceptable file formats include:
- JPG
- PNG
- GIF
- SVG
- EPS
- AI
…Which makes this site one of the more inclusive in terms of file types. Redbubble, for example, only allows JPG and PNG.
The uploaded image will appear on the garment, and you can drag it to move it within the printable area, and resize it with the handled. Resizing is a locked ratio so you don’t have to worry about skewing your art.
The artwork can be rotated in 15 degree increments, and flipped horizontally or vertically. You can upload multiple images into one design, and change their layering. And you can delete the selected image.
Update 6/5/22: They have also added the ability to change image opacity, and repeat the image – but only in a grid with variable spacing.
These editing features are good, but a crucial feature that is missing is the ability to centre the design in the printable area, as Redbubble allows you to do. You must manually drag the image to where you think the centre is, which is too imprecise for my liking.
Update 6/5/22: Still cannot automatically centre artwork.
The user interface has a zoom feature. As in, zooming in the photo of the lady, not zooming in the artwork. And it had so little effect that it’s not worth using! Only made the image a few dozen pixels bigger.
My Products
On the left tool bar, if you select My Products, you can see the current product selected, including its colour, size and quantity.Â
Clicking ‘Edit my picks‘ lets you change those options.Â
Clicking ‘Add another colour‘ brings up a very similar dialog box. Make your colour, size and quantity selections, and another product will appear. The image you had on your first product will be copied over to the new product.
Templates
Templates are available for you to use. Untested by me yet. If you click one, and haven’t yet saved your current design, a warning will come up. I like that feature, it stops you from accidentally overriding your current artwork.
Word It - Adding Text
NeonEarth lets you type and include text in your designs. The text will appear as a wide rectangle across your page. If you put in a long piece of text with no line break, it’ll extend past the edges of the printable area.
They offer several options of customising the text:
Font face (see below)
Color
Style. This includes bold, underline, italics. These effects apply to the whole text box – you can’t, for example, underline just one word in the box.
Justification. You can change text alignment between left, right, centre and justify.
Size. This is changed via a slider.
Spacing. This is the space between characters. Also controlled by a slider.
Arching (see below)
Font Face
There are 79 font faces available. But unfortunately, they’re listed just by their name, all in the same font. So it’s all guesswork how the font will look unless you’re already familiar with the fonts by name.
Arching.
This turns the line of words into an arch or circle, depending on how much text you typed. The crappy part of this is, if you exceed a certain character length, the text just overlaps itself. There’s no way to adjust the angle of the arching effect.Â
Add Elements
You can also add clipart to your design. There are dozens of categories, but each category only has about a dozen images in it. And they are quite simple and sometimes dorky designs, giving the feel of old Windows clipart.
Leave Us A Note
I’ve been complaining quite a bit, haven’t I? Well, NeonEarth embrace that! There’s a feedback module built into the editor too! Really pleased to see that they’re willing to listen to critiques/requests.
Other Creative Lab Notes
- There are undo and redo buttons. A simple idea, but very much appreciated! Redbubble doesn’t even have that!
- You can add images to the front and back of the crop top, and presumably, many other items as well.
- If you edit content on a 2nd product, like the grey crop top I showed before, and then go back to your first product, the design will have copied over to that one too. No need to redo the design on every version of the crop top, phew!
Saving and Uploading
When you have completed your designing, go up to the top right corner of the screen and click the Save button.
You’ll be given three options.
- Submit the design to be approved for sale in your shop.Â
- Buy the design for yourself, bypassing approval.
- Saving as a draft (another appreciated feature!)
​I selected Send for Approval…
…and this is the popup that appeared. The work needs a name, description and keywords, as well as filters.
Regarding keywords, you can’t just paste in a comma-delimited list of keywords, like you can with almost every other print-on-demand website. You have to enter them one by one, which is a bit tedious.
The site doesn’t state a limit on keywords. I entered over fifty without getting any warnings.
The filters on the left side can be expanded, giving you more product options.
Moods
It isn’t made clear what moods are. Presumably a buyer can select a mood they’re looking for when filtering products. But the text saying ‘Go crazy and pick them all’ sounds like bad advice, and may result in people spamming moods that don’t suit their art, just to get more people to see their product.
|
|
Style
|
|
Pattern
|
|
Design Color
This is the only Filters section that is mandatory.
|
|
Mood: Illustration, Vibrant
Style: Kids, Vibrant
Pattern: n/a
Colors:Â Blue, Yellow
Once I’ve filled in all my details, I’ll click ‘Send It For Approval‘.
While awaiting approval, you are still given free reign to edit your title, description, keywords and filters, which is great, as I realised I put a wrong date in my description.
After Being Approved
This is one of the biggest downsides for me. After an artwork is approved and published, you CANNOT edit it. So if you realise your artwork is the wrong colour or something, you have to upload a whole new product separately. This is tedious and annoying, considering Redbubble, Threadless and Society6 all let you change your art even after a product is published.
Earnings
You get an email at the start of the month telling you what your earnings were last month. I never made any sales, so my emails would say ‘no earnings’.
I didn’t do much promotion of my NeonEarth product, and apparently NeonEarth didn’t promote it much either. Makes sense, since I only uploaded one product.
Conclusion
NeonEarth has some good ideas with building your artwork in the Creative Lab. It’s reminiscent of Zazzle’s editor. But the wait for approval, the inability to replace artworks, and low market share, ultimately make me not want to pursue this platform for print-on-demand. I will continue to put 90% of my effort into Redbubble, followed by Threadless, Society6 and Zazzle.
I hope this blog post has helped you make an informed decision on whether to use NeonEarth’s website or not. If you have any experience with using NeonEarth, or want to recommend another PoD site, leave a comment and we’ll all chat about it.
Peace, love and sunshine,
Share ThiS Post on Pinterest
