Hey guys -
Wow, I didn't really expect there to be this many replies here. I was just checking our referring sites stats, saw the number of visits, and decided to check back in on this thread.
Let me answer a few concerns that were brought up.
1. First of all, you're not assigning all rights to us. We are so not interested in keeping anyone's copyrights...we aren't Threadless, we are two people doing this out of their apartment, and we can't pay $2000 for a winning submission. Twenty bucks is nowhere near enough to hand over any copyrights. You're simply licensing the work to us to sell on the site, and besides the initial $20, we give you 10% along the way. We're small and relatively unknown at the moment, so it's a slow crawl to 50 posters at this point, but we're growing, and we're going to be featured in an issue of TimeOut Chicago within the next two weeks, so that should help.
It's basically like another poster here said: If you aren't interested in participating for what we can afford to pay right now, then don't. No big. Or just go ahead and wait until we can afford to up the amount of the prizes.
2. We're not a scam. I don't even know what else to say to this. I mean, it's all laid out on the site in a pretty straightforward way. My name is Bill, my girlfriend's name is Annie, and we love posters, we love Threadless, and we thought this would be a really cool way to combine the two. We each have an arts background (myself, writing, her, theater), most everyone we know is an artist of some kind, and we would love it if eventually PB got to the point where submitting artists were offered other work through the strength of their submissions to the site, much like the way it happens now with Threadless and Deviant Art.
We have a really messy dining room table and a fishtank that needs a little cleaning if anyone wants to get a picture of what our "scam" office looks like.
3. Supertackyman asked: soooo what resolution is your output?
what print process is used?
what file formats are expected?
We do digital offset prints from an Indigo printer. We have a little printing company here in Chicago that runs the prints for us. The file formats that work the best are high-res .pdfs. A few of our submissions (chromeo and obsolete, among them) are vector art, which has turned out some very nice looking posters.
So, yeah. Bottom line: we're for real, and we're enjoying a bit of modest success selling the posters we have at what we think is a really affordable price to a seemingly very appreciative audience. If you want to check up on us a bit more, take a look at this thread over at the SomethingAwful forums:
The Something Awful Forums
You'll read it and see that the people posting over there are submitters and customers. You'll also read that we're trying to perfect our method of shipping posters out. Hopefully you'll read it, feel at ease, and start submitting some work. We could honestly use some more great submissions.
If anyone has any other questions, please let us know. I'll keep a close eye on this thread.
Thanks!
Bill & Annie
posterbored.com