The ArtSpaces journey

When I first started my Print on Demand online store back in 2016 selling canvas prints, it didn’t take long before I discovered that people, for one reason or another, just didn’t have the perception of size one would assume they do.

The problem

As someone involved in the industry, I hear the sentence 10″ x 10″ or 50 cm x 50 cm and I immediately draw a mental image of how big that art print is and how much space its going to occupy on a wall. Apparently, and as I have learned the hard way, that doesn’t apply to everyone.

We even had an inside joke with our delivery guy where every time he delivered a 120 cm x 120 cm canvas print to a client, he would report their reaction when they saw the print for the first time.

Now, I don’t have the statistics, but after years in the industry, I can safely say that, more often than not, clients had a complete lack of perception when it came to art prints sizes. More often than not, they weren’t expecting a 120 cm x 120 cm art print to be “that big”.

The pain

Needless to say, we have had our fair share of return requests where clients would want a bigger or a smaller size. While our TOS clearly stated that we don’t accept returns due to wrong sizing, we usually don’t turn clients down when they reach out to us.

It always bothered me, and I have always wanted to add mock-ups of the artworks on wall showcasing them in different sizes.

The issue was that we have 1200+ artworks on our website. Each artwork had 3 standard sizes and 4 framing options. All in all, 12 variations.

Exploring options

It will take forever to produce an image of each size of each artwork. Yes photoshop actions will probably make the process much easier, but our artworks come in so many different sizes and aspect ratios it would still be a nightmare to achieve this.

Also, our website performance would definitely take a hit with all the extra images. Think about it, just by introducing 3 new images of each artwork, we are essentially introducing 3600 new images to our website.

Lets not forget that even after creating all these images, we still need to map them to the correct variation for each artwork. One could use some kind of a plugin to bulk import products from an excel sheet that hold all the products data, but that is still a long process that’s prone to errors.

There exists some 3rd party services like Printiful, or FineArtAmerica, that give some of the tools that will make your life much easier when it comes to generating those mock-ups.

However, most of them didn’t cover what we needed and all of them force you to use their printing services in order to get access to the tools they provide.

I know I had to find a better way than just create those images and serve them statically.

The idea

I knew we needed a solution that will satisfy all of the following:

• Dynamic solution: No need to manually create all images.
• Lightweight: Can’t afford to bloat our website with thousands of images.
• Accurate: Gives our customers a solid and an accurate view of artwork size.

After a little bit of research, some brainstorming sessions, and a lot of coffee, we finally got the inspiration to create the ArtSpaces Widget.

We even took it a step further and made the widget so the end customer can view our artworks in a space in any size through an interesting and interactive experience.

We figured, since we will be building the widget, we might as well make it a standalone widget that other POD stores, artists, and photographers can use too.

Meet the ArtSpaces widget

A simple, lightweight widget that simply solves all art print size-related issues. No need for manual work, no need for thousands of extra images, and definitely no need to worry about 3rd party services getting you into a vendor lock.

Also, take a look at this Woocommerce demo site to better understand how ArtSpaces would fit within your WordPress / Woocommerce site.

After visiting the demo site, click on any product to see its ArtSpaces widget button, the widget dynamically grabs the featured image of the current product.

What does ArtSpaces have to offer

We have created the ArtSpaces widget to be as flexible as possible. It can be integrated to just about any website out there. WordPress, Shopify, React.js, you name it.

Not only that, but the integration process is quite easy. You just add our JavaScript library to your website, then you place our HTML markup where you want to display the widget. That’s pretty much it.

Perhaps the most seemingly difficult part in integrating our widget has to do with feeding image URLs dynamically. Though, its actually quite easy.

Lets assume you are on WordPress, and you want to include the ArtSpaces widget in every single product page where every product is one artwork.

Ultimately, on every single product page, you want to pass the URL of that particular artwork to the widget.

Our WordPress integrations docs explain exactly how to do that, step by step.

We are currently working on publishing more documentations to cover all major platforms. We encourage you to join our newsletter to receive the news once we do.