Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

All those artists who try and try again to get their work noticed and printed over at other t-shirt shops can finally see if their designs are saleable at Bountee, a new online web 2.0 social-thing-a-ma-doodad for t-shirt artists. The site’s barely a week old, so the current batch of designs is neither extensive nor mind-blowing, but I guess that’s where you come in. Sign up, design some shirts, and get selling.

It’s pretty Web 2.0 (heck, it comes complete with a Beta disclaimer in the logo, tags, and RSS feeds!), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing — I took a stab at creating a shirt design and it was easy as pie and looked pretty slick.

I haven’t seen any printed samples, but I think this could be big if only because they seem to get user experience. Once the masses get involved, though, it’s hard to say how easy it will be to find the good stuff amidst all the inevitable crappy designs that will surely make up for a lot of the site’s content. All the tagging and star-ratings in the world mightn’t be able to do that. I’d like to eventually see at least some sort of quality control in the form of editor’s picks or something, otherwise I doubt I’d ever just browse the site to shop.

And although you only earn the mark-up above each shirt’s initial $17, making it difficult to charge a fair price and make more than 10-20% of each sale, the terms and conditions seem artist-friendly, with no sneaky wording and no attempts to claim ownership of your work. I have to get behind any contract that contains the phrase “sit on it!”