I'm building a t-shirt website and I want to be all legal and stuff. I want to offer the customers interesting designs, like the ones from threadless.com or zazzle.com.
So the question would be... where and how do I buy designs that I can later sell on my website? I know there are interesting sites like designcrowd where you can get nice designs for your ideas, but what I really want is existing designs that I can sell on my website.
There are a lot of places you can either hire designers or approach them for existing pieces. Hiring them would be more flexible on the legal side for you to use/reproduce the designs however.
For hiring, try freelance sites such as http://www.microlancer.com/, or even look into portfolio sites like http://www.behance.net/ or http://dribbble.com/ to approach someone with the design style you are after.
If you do a search for t-shirt designs for sale you get:
Also, dont forget to check the copyright when you buy designs. You may not be allowed but one print or only for a single use run (IE: 35 shirts at once).
Alternatively, you can buy custom designs, based on your needs from http://www.designcrowd.com .
For a fee, you can post a project requesting any type of design you require with a deadline, receive design submissions for various designers, which can also be revised. They even have a money back guarantee in case you're not satisfied with the submissions.
Accepting a design automatically transfers the copyright over to your name, and you receive editable files in either .psd or vector format, both, or in any form you should request them.
