Maybe you noticed already: In July we introduced smartphone covers with flexible print areas. What’s new about this, and why these so called Soft Boundaries offer a major improvement – our expert Alexander will explain.
Who are you, and what are your tasks for Spreadshirt?
I’m Alex, and as a member of the product management team I’m responsible for the Create Your Own area. This means: My concerns are what options, to design and edit products, can we provide our partners and customers. In recent years I organised and implemented the final steps for the Flash version of our T-Shirt Designer, and with my team I’m currently working on developing the new JS/HTML5 Designer.
Talking about Soft Boundaries: What made you think of this concept?
The printable areas have always been rectangle at Spreadshirt. For T-shirts, hoodies, bags and other products this is not a problem, but we have recently introduced a few new product types for which this solution was not good enough any more. So we thought of something new to tackle the issue of ‘round corners’ and ‘Cut outs’ with smartphone and tablet covers.
The idea for Soft Boundaries – which means flexible print areas – has been around for a while, but we never saw sufficient reason for its implementation. The aforementioned covers now make it necessary to think of a change.
Soft Boundaries are masks that are put across rectangle print areas which conceal some parts of the print area to simulate cut outs and rounded off edges in the actual preview that the customer sees when using the T-Shirt Designer. So the customer knows exactly what he’s going to get.
What advantages do flexible print areas hold? And what potential use does Spreadshirt gain from it?
This is clear to see, virtual product pictures look much more realistic so that the customer gets a sound impression of what he’s going to get. Partners don’t need to fuss about with different templates for every individual cover as they can use the same graphics for all covers. Smartphone and tablet covers are already quite popular, and we hope that this is going to improve even more.
How much of a developmental effort did you put into it?
Well, there are about 5 people (including our colleagues from quality control) who worked on it for a total of 2 weeks. This was necessary since Soft Boundaries have deep access to our existing system, and that made extensive testing necessary.
Which products from Spreadshirt’s range have been affected, and in how far does this have a bearing on other products?
So far we only use Soft Boundaries for the smartphone and tablet covers we have available. In addition to those, there will be new premium smartphone covers as well as flip-flops.
For existing products, the images were all exchanged automatically. And special templates for smartphone cover varieties are no longer necessary.
Hot tip: Photos are perfectly suited for smartphone covers, give a few pics a go in the Designer! And a tip for all other pixel graphics: patterns, surface areas and other structures should have the right resolution.
