How to Make a Gif to Promote Your Shop

You gotta love Gifs. Whether you’re sending them to friends or staring at Hamilton Gifs over and over again to feel like you’ve seen the show (tested and approved), Gifs are fun little loops of endless possibilities; including being great advertising tools. If you’re wondering how to make a gif to advertise your stuff, check out exhibit A: our graphic designer Katie Lukes’ Artist Shop Gif: Katie’s Gif does a great job highlighting her designs, apparel, and Artist Shop in a sweet and simple Gif. And the great news?Read more

9 Ways to Get Your Art Noticed

“How do I get people to see my art?” – that is the question. Because let’s be real – there’s a lot of art out there. Not all of it is good, buy-worthy art, but the whole artistic industry is pretty saturated, and it’s easy for art to get lost in the fray. So how do you make yours stand out? Here 9 ways to get your art noticed: 1. Posters for Local Events Try starting local! If your town has a regular FarmersRead more

How to Launch and Grow Your Artist Shop

With e-commerce making it easier to reach a global audience, actually setting up an online shop shouldn’t feel like a virtual Rube Goldberg machine. That’s why we created the Artist Shop platform in the first place – to make your online store as easy as possible so you have more time to make awesome art and less time spent doing this: Artist Shops aim to make e-commerce as easy as scrolling through “confused John Travolta” gifs on Giphy. But as easy as it is to set up a shop of your own,Read more

What Rewards Should I Offer for My Kickstarter?

Kickstarters, Indiegogo campaigns, and all those great crowdfunding tools are fantastic ways of garnering some funding and attention for your passion project, and have proven to be super successful! Setting these up is super easy…but deciding and planning what rewards to offer your backers? Surprisingly hard. So if you’re wondering, “damn, what rewards should I offer for my Kickstarter?” here are some tips. .     .     . Video or printable tutorials This is a perk that LoishRead more

How to Network With Other Artists

Imagine this – you’re waiting at a bus stop with a couple other folks, super tuned into your Spotify playlist, and as you look toward the direction of the bus, you spot a person doodling in their notebook as they wait. You tap them on the shoulder, compliment their style of illustration, get into a conversation about your favorite illustrators, and this conversation carries onto the bus. Cue the business card swap as they get off the bus at theirRead more

How to Show Product on Your Homepage

One of the most important things we think about when adding cool new features to Artist Shops is that we want your shop to be super customizable, and that the actual process of customizing is super easy. Because that’s the whole point of Artist Shops – to make your lives a little more hassle-free so you have more time to make great art! One thing we kept hearing is that people wanted to be able to customize their homepage a little more, like being able toRead more

How to Make a Transparent PNG

Knowing how to promote your online store, use social media in a creative way, etc. are all important parts of an eCommerce business. But sometimes it’s good to just start with the most basic of the basics in apparel design. So let’s start with a tutorial on how to make a transparent PNG of your design. We touched on this a little bit in our post, “How to Get Your Designs Print-Ready,” but if you’re a visual learner, sometimes it helpsRead more

How Google Analytics Can Help You

“Google Analytics” is kind of one of those terms we throw around a lot, but still don’t understand. Kind of like the Cloud. We all talk about the Cloud all the time, but do we really know what it is? Before showing you how to sign up for Google Analytics, let’s talk a little bit about what Google Analytics actually does and why it’s an important tool. WHAT IS IT? Google Analytics is very basically a tool that gives you moreRead more

How to Support a Political Movement with an Online Store

Online stores like Artist Shops can be used for a lot more than just an artist selling their personal work. You can get creative with them by opening an Artist Shop that sports team apparel (see what I did there) or sells designs that support a cause. And one of the clearest examples of that that we have in Artist Shops is “Bernie Threads.” You no doubt recognize the design of the “Not Me, Us” Bernie Sanders poster design thatRead more

How to Deal With Trolls

The saying “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is sooo 20th century. Because nowadays it’s more like, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, open your computer and say it online.” The internet can be an awesome place for people to connect, share ideas, and get traction for their product. But be warned: here be monsters. When it comes to social media, you want people to happily, helpfully, constructively comment on and share your stuff, toRead more

Sagely Advice From Artist Shop Artists

They say if you want to write, read a lot. If you want to draw, draw all the time. If you want to become a Jedi, go to the swamp planet Dagobah and seek out a small green elf-ish man (creature?) for lessons. The point? Sometimes before you start your shop, create your social media channels, or grab that lightsaber, the best thing to do is to pause and look to those who have done this before, and learn from them. We talkedRead more

Pricing: How Much is Too Much?

What’s the price of pricing too high or low? Because on the one hand, you want to charge low enough that people won’t look at your price and go, “pssh I could use that on beer instead.” On the other hand, you don’t want to charge $5 a t-shirt and end up making negative moneys. Much like internship experience, you can’t pay for food with negative moneys. You could risk it and price too high or low, but at whatRead more