The kind folks over at Zazzle.com, the makers of pretty much any custom print you could imagine, has given us a chance to go through the design process of ordering a custom tee. To see how it went hit the break.

Even though Zazzle offers all sorts of custom options, for this review we decided to stick with designing a shirt. This seems like it would be a simple enough task, but the options are really overwhelming.

We went through the different types of shirts and felt like we didn’t want to risk it, so we went with a good ol’ American Apparel tee. We were then given the task to choose a color.

Our only gripe is that American Apparel literally has the full spectrum of colors available, but Zazzle only offers 11 colors to choose from. We would have liked to have seen more shades of green, red, and blue. Due to our color limitation black was our choice.

Next up was to decide what to actually put on our shirt. We like the paint splash look so we loaded up photoshop and went to work. The cool thing about Zazzle is that they allow you to print with transparencies in your image this means that you have the option to have your design come out in any shape you want rather than a rectangle. We finished up our design, saved it as a PNG file (for transparency), and easily uploaded it to Zazzle.com.

Placement and zoom were absolutely effortless. As you can see it’s as simple as using the directional pad to put your image exactly where you want it. You also have the the ability to add text in a variety of fonts and sizes. Previewing your creation in all sorts of angles with different models is also a snap.

Once we were satisfied with our design it was off to the check out process. Shipping is usually something that slips our mind when factoring in the cost, and as you can see it does add a bit to your bill. Speaking of bills our total cost for a black American Apparel tee with one a one sided print, the cheapest shipping, and tax was $35.04. That’s a little pricey considering you get one tee, but we did go with the more expensive brand.

All in all using Zazzle was a simple and straight forward experience and we recommend their services to anyone looking to get a custom printed item. We’d like to thank Larry and Mike from the Zazzle team for giving us the opportunity to run through this review and share it with our readers.