I’m really proud to announce that we’ve released our first ever deviantART Poster Series, consisting of five fantastic works of art that you can put up on your wall for just $15 each.

If that’s all you need or want to know, by all means head on over here to pick them up.

However, if you’ve got some questions you’d like answers to… like how these posters are only $15 when our regular prints are so much more expensive, or why only five are available or you would like to know how and why we chose those particular five. Well then, this “tl;dr” journal entry is for you.




Everything in our prints program is produced on demand. Meaning it only becomes a product when someone places an order for it. If a customer orders one of your prints, we print one. If we have orders for five, we print five, and so on.

This method of selling product is called print on demand, and many types of businesses from book publishers to t-shirt companies use it.

The advantage of print on demand is that we can offer millions of prints products for sale (and we do) without having to actually make anything until an order is placed. As a result of this technology any artist can open up shop on our site and offer as many products as they’d like without having to invest a dime.

The one (and perhaps only) downside to printing on demand is that the cost, for example, of producing a Fine Art Print this way is quite high. The inks used by these types of printers is expensive, they print relatively slowly, each image has to be cut down to size one at a time which aside from being labor intensive also means a lot of paper goes to waste, etc…

The end result is that although the quality of the end product is amazing and the selection of art we can offer is virtually unlimited, the end consumer has to pay a premium for having such a vast selection to choose from with the product they choose being digitally printed just for them.

There is a different printing technology that exists called offset printing. The way this works is that you have to invest a lot of time and effort in setting up the printer to produce a particular image, but once you do, you can run lots of them for a very low cost per unit.

The catch here is that you now have a large quantity of this particular print, and although the cost for each one was low, that doesn’t mean anything if you can’t sell lots of them.

Print on demand is about selling a few each of many many products. Offset printing is about selling many of a few products.

The deviantART Poster Series was produced this way which is why we’re able to offer a product similar in quality to our Fine Art Prints for $15 retail each. It's also why we're only able to offer five images to choose from.

Perhaps one day digital printing will offer the best of both worlds, but at least for the time being offset printing is the most cost effective way to produce a meaningful quantity of a single printed item.

By offset printing standards, we’ve done a pretty small run, but this is a new concept and we want to keep the first ever deviantART Poster Series in pretty short supply. So you better hurry if you want yours!




The next question to answer is how and why we chose these 5 particular images.

We bounced around several ideas on how the art should be decided including holding a large scale public vote to pick the finalists, similar to the deviantWEAR Design battle concept.

What we came to realize is that we already have hundreds of millions of “votes” in the form of favorites, comments, prints sales, views and more. We also have over 80 million “submissions” in every possible genre and category imaginable.

It seemed fitting that given we wanted the first poster series to represent the very best of deviantART as determined by visitors and customers of the site, that we use that data to create a selection of 30-40 “finalists” which we then circulated among deviantART staff as well as several industry professionals to help us decide on the final five.

It wasn’t easy, not that I’d expect choosing five works of art from over 80 million would be. However, I’m completely confident in the images we’ve chosen being truly amazing and well worthy of being a part of us breaking ground on this new concept. I’m extremely grateful to `jasinski, `Artgerm, ~garun, `ssilence and `vhm-alex for their enthusiastic participation in one of the more significant projects I’ve involved myself in at deviantART.




I could come up with an answer for this question, but I'd rather ask you. How should we choose deviantART Poster Series 2?