Show HN: SnapPrint – Design your t-shirt in less than a minute

gerry_shaw · on Sept 28, 2016

I was frustrated that I work on a T-shirt printing platform but had no way to easily design shirts for myself so after pitching the idea and a couple of months of work we managed to ship this fun app.

It procedurally generates SVG based on parameters defined by themes and was inspired by the many typography tools used to generate Instagram posts.

Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this.

Thanks for taking a look.

fizzbatter · on Sept 29, 2016

Heads up, i was unable to purchase a shirt, seems /checkout is giving a 500 response:

    POST https://snapprint.com/checkout 500 (Internal Server Error)

Note that i also saw no UX changes. No error message on the page, etc.

Hope you get this sorted soon, can't wait to order my shirt :)

gerry_shaw · on Sept 30, 2016

Thanks for the patience. We've been printing shirts for a year but this is the first day this app has seen production so a few little hiccups. Glad to see it's all sorted.

BoomWav · on Sept 30, 2016

Can you do baby stuff? I really want to print some crazy stupid clothes for my kids.

gerry_shaw · on Sept 30, 2016

I know we are trying source baby clothes and your post will help me make the argument stronger. Check back later and we'll have more styles on offer.

shafyy · on Sept 29, 2016

Really cool. Think about adding common umlauts like ü, ö etc. so more people can use it :-)

gerry_shaw · on Sept 29, 2016

I know! The special characters are limited by the fonts we selected. Amazing how many fonts only support a-z.

Thanks for the suggestion.

freedompop123 · on Sept 29, 2016

I tried a bit of experimenting. Do any of the fonts on the website have support outside alphanumeric?

gerry_shaw · on Sept 30, 2016

Honestly I haven't checked. When I did some testing I didn't seem to get anything working reliably other than alphanumeric.

It's a shame so many fonts don't implement at least extended ascii.

R3dat · on Sept 29, 2016

Good job, really liked the text effects. I think the printing will be via DTg? and what's the brand for blank t-shirts?

gerry_shaw · on Sept 29, 2016

Correct, printing is done via DTG mostly through our own print factory (CanvusPrint.com).

Cheaper shirts print on Gilden, the premium shirts on Next Level or Bella Canvas.

Thanks for trying it out.

fizzbatter · on Sept 29, 2016

Appreciate having the premium option. I'm buying a shirt now just for kicks, mainly to test out the quality of the shirt.

If i like the fit/etc, i imagine i'll buy a few more. Thanks! Sidenote: If you can manage this awesome UX for more complex stuff (images? designs? art? w/e), would be really cool.

gerry_shaw · on Sept 30, 2016

Some of the themes have images. We have tried an earlier take on this app with user uploaded content and more control of the design and the results were not pretty. Everybody asks for images and I have a few ideas about how we can do it but we need to get some traction before more effort can be justified on it.

Thanks for trying it out.

fizzbatter · on Sept 30, 2016

Yea, and i can imagine image quality is a big issue. I want images, but at the same time i'm scared to even use my own, because i don't want just a ugly boxed image. It feels like it would require an artistic hand... which i don't have.

What i love about this app is an unartistic fool like me can make a shirt in a few minutes. So while i want images, i can't imagine what the UX would be like.

Anyway, appreciated!