I finally got around to spending some quality time over on Finerworks.com. I’d seen one of their prints when I was visiting a friend in the city…about the same time I came across Imagekind’s work on a fellow artist’s wall. I’d never heard of either Imagekind or Finerworks till then, and, after all the fuss and bother of uploading images to Imagekind, I didn’t bother to pursue an acquaintance with the Finerworks website. But the print was very well done, equal to Imagekind’s work, of very high quality, and the artist was pleased with the color match.

Roll on some ten months and…

Burnt by Imagekind after spending a year there fighting their servers, their interface, their Verisign glitches that led to lack of fulfillment, along with slaps in the face from some of their “care” employees, never mind finding out that the whole marketing and “featured” member thing was just another insider club, I wasn’t about to pursue more POD experiences. If Imagekind didn’t measure up, I figured, none of them would. I was reduced to doing it “the traditional way,” using printers I knew, then spending the time and effort to complete the process myself to ensure satisfaction of the art buyer.

I’m still doing it that way…right now. But that may change.

Come the summer of 2008…

When Imagekind was bought by Cafepress, warning bells went off, so I looked for another online POD…just to cover my bases as I develop my digital art strategy. Got out my notes, saw Finerworks, did a Google search, and, yep, they were still in business.

And?

So far, after uploading a handful of images, I’m impressed with Finerworks.

Very impressed.

There web presence isn’t as pretty and professional-looking as it could be, and it doesn’t have a useful way of presenting its member artists, but it’s an excellent experience for the artist looking for a good fine art giclee POD, overall,…despite a couple of browser issues over on their forum when using Firefox. (Use IE7 on their forum.)