databent posters! my art on your wall

one part of the bad taste pantheon of sites that we don't mention much is the bad taste shops at cafepress. i initially set them up years ago, simply so that we (bad taste artists and management) would have some merchandise that we could buy for ourselves. i didn't expect that anyone else would ever order anything, and indeed so far i'm the only one who's ever placed an order (though i have bought several items for other people, buying in bulk to cut down on shipping costs).

but now that could change, as i finally realized something very cool that i could create on cafepress: databent posters! cafepress has a line of paper products, including posters, postcards, and stickers. so i uploaded six images from my rr8 databent image gallery and created some small-size posters and postcards that you can buy online.

cafepress has three poster sizes: "mini poster print", "small poster", and "large poster". i had to upsample my images simply to make them big enough to fill the mini and small sizes, so i haven't set up any "large" posters yet ("large" is standard poster size: 23"x35"). i wanted to buy some of the smaller posters and see how good they looked before coughing up the change to buy a possibly ugly larger poster.

i received my order today and everything looks great! i got one "small" poster (this one) and it's hella cool. if you look really closely you can kinda see the grains, but it's not that noticeable, and with art like this it might not even matter that much. i also got some mini posters and stickers and stuff, and they all look really nice. they will look great on your wall, as well as mine.

also new are the "recycle" bumper stickers, based on the popular t-shirt design. i bought two and they're pretty slick. one of them is going on my car. i'm sure someone in the crew will want the other one.

all the old, original cafepress bad taste merchanside is still there if you want some of that... the thongs are even made in the usa, so if you like the thought of having the stAllio! name pressed against your pubis as much as i do, you can buy them knowing they were only touched by american hands (or maybe immigrant hands on american soil).

the cafepress t-shirts aren't really that great. sure, they're full color, but they're pricey, they fade, and worse, some are subject to a weird warping wherein one corner of the image will start to bend and the rest of the image stays still. (at least, that's what they were like a couple years ago, when last i bought any.) if you want a shirt, i would prefer you buy a "recycle" shirt from the awia shop (and you'll get a better deal, too).

but that doesn't mean all the old merch sucks. i've always been a fan of the animals within animals mug, which is really pretty handsome. the mousepads are kind of nice, too, though mine has had so much ash and soda spilled on it that it's just kind of a dark gray now. the please sample coaster also looks great (and reminded me to create stickers with that image).

so yeah, there's lots of stuff worth buying there. there are actually six shops (because you can only have one of each item in a shop when using the free service), and each shop has posters and postcards featuring a different databent image (as well as some other stuff).

the stickers are marked up $0.50. posters, postcards, and bent mousepads are marked up $1. that's how much i will make if you buy one. nothing else there is marked up at all. the cafepress base price is high enough already on most of that stuff. (although if a bunch of people start buying mugs or coasters, i might have to mark them up slightly so that i'll get a taste of that money).

http://www.cafepress.com/bad_taste ... easy enough to remember?