If you haven’t heard of it yet, Nuzart.com is a new print-on-demand service for artists and photographers that is based out of Madrid, Spain.
Like the popular print-on-demand services Imagekind and RedBubble, Nuzart offers artists an easy way to sell prints of their artwork—it does not allow sales of original artwork. The difference is that Nuzart focuses primarily on selling to a European market instead of the US (which may be of interest to some artists).
Here’s a rundown of what Nuzart.com offers:
Pricing and features
Nuzart.com costs nothing to join if you sign up for the free account, and 9€/month if you sign up for the Pro account.
The Pro account comes with several perks, including space for 100 images rather than just 20. Artists who sign up for the Pro account will also receive “featured artist” status on the home page and in search results, and inclusion in Nuzart’s weekly newsletter.
Whichever account you sign up for, you’ll still receive your own profile page (located at yourname.nuzart.com) and have the ability to set the amount of profit you’d like to make on your prints.
Of course, Nuzart will always take a base amount for each print sold—but you decide how much you want to mark up the price of your prints beyond that base price.
If you’d rather not sell your art, but you have an image that you’d like to print and purchase for yourself, you can do that too. In that case, Nuzart will only charge you the base price for printing the image.
Nuzart.com design and layout
Nuzart.com has a mostly white and gray design, with a bright orange navigation bar and logo. Getting around the site is simple, since there are just four main navigational options: Home, Buy, Sell, and Create. (Plus the official Nuzart.com blog.)
The image thumbnails are quite large, which is nice, and when searching for art there are a lot of thumbnails on every page. This speeds up browsing time considerably.
When visiting individual artwork pages, I noticed that viewers could comment on, favorite, or rate the artwork. Artists were also able to “tag” and categorize their work, but as far as I could tell there was no place for an artwork description.
Finding and buying art on Nuzart.com
When searching for art, visitors can browse by color, subject, shape, genre (i.e., abstract, pop art, realism) and technique (i.e., medium).
Unfortunately you have to pick one category to start, and then click “search options” to add other search categories to narrow things down. There’s no advanced search option right from the beginning.
I suppose it all worked out fine in the end, but it just wasn’t as intuitive as I would have liked it to be.
Nuzart.com also has a search bar, for searching by keywords, but keep in mind that if you want to narrow down your search you will need to search for the keyword first and then add in extra search options (like color, genre, etc). You will not be able to start with several search options and then add a keyword later.
I did find Nuzart’s sorting tool—which allows you to organize your results by the most “valued, big, expensive, etc”—rather helpful, especially when sorting by price.
So is it worth it?
If you really want to reach a specifically European market with your prints, then yes, it’s probably worth it—at least enough to sign up for the free account. I’m not so sure that I’d be willing to pay 9 euros a month, however, just for an extra 80 images and better placement on the website.
Part of my hesitation is because Nuzart is still very new, so it’s hard to get any data as to the number of visitors they receive each month. My assumption (as with every new website) is that it will take some time for them to gain traction, and until then, it probably won’t be worth paying for.
I’d also like to see Nuzart’s search tool improved slightly, but that’s more of a minor issue than anything major.
If you’d like to learn more, I encourage you to head on over to Nuzart.com and check it out for yourself. In time, I do believe it could become a viable print-on-demand option for artists who want to sell to a European market.