How Come There Aren’t More Designers 3D Printing?

The 3D Printing world is still growing. While there is an abundance of people outside the space designing, trying out their hands on 3D Printing may have been challenging. This begs the question, how come there aren’t more designers 3D Printing? Tom and Tracy Hazzard answer this question. They talk about the struggles many face when wanting to design 3D Prints and the learning curve that they have to face in acquiring a different skill set. But not to worry because these challenges can be overcome!

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How Come There Aren’t More Designers 3D Printing?

How come there aren’t more designers 3D printing? That’s our question.

There are a lot of ways that could go. We have some suggestions and some answers as to why.

From our own experience, why aren’t we jumping into 3D printing designs right now? Why are we podcasting instead of designing? The number one reason is there’s not a market yet.

It’s emerging. There are people putting up all kinds of files online to sell them. There are some that are selling 3D printed design products.

At this point, it’s like less than 1% of the designs out there are being sold. There’s money being made on them. At that, it’s pretty small. A lot of those designs are under $10 a download. It’s too small. That’s why I say the market is too small. Does that mean you shouldn’t jump in and you shouldn’t be 3D printing? No, you absolutely should be learning.

The faster that better designs get out there, the faster the market will grow.

That it’s on the 3D print industry right now to encourage designers. Maybe you have to seriously sit back and think about should I be paying designers? Should I be hiring design service bureau to create designs for my printer? Should you be paying designers to design for you? The answer is yes. The mistakes that a lot of companies who have done this are they go and hire some celebrity designer thinking that, “It’d be great if I had 3D print designs from so-and-so fashion designer,” or whatever. The problem is they don’t 3D print. You can’t take what they have and translate their style into a 3D printed object. That’s a failure.

It won’t be very successful. That’s for sure. There is a distinction between designing products and then 3D printing them and designing products specifically to be 3D printed.

3D Printing Designers: There is a distinction between designing products and then 3D printing them and designing products specifically to be 3D printed.

I don’t mean to bash Martha Stewart at all. I’m so thrilled that she likes 3D printing and all of that. Those designs that were done for MakerBot were a sad failure. It’s unfortunate. The reason that they’re failure is that they’re not useful. They don’t highlight what 3D printing does well. They’re just cute objects.

They’re contrived.

It’s like, “What models do we have that we could 3D print?” That’s what a lot of companies are out there doing. That’s a mistake. You have to sit down, hire some designers and get them to design for you special 3D print items that highlight what your clients want, what your customers want and what your services can do. Show off the great things that 3D print can do like customized products and things like that.

There are many new fashion items coming out in jewelry and fashion accessories that are a good application.

Wedding, baby gifts, children, anything for kids are great applications. Kids put their name on everything. There are many areas that could do so well. We’ve been trying to put up gift lists on our blog. We’ve done Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, wedding gift list. It’s interesting to go out there and try to find something when you’re looking for a gift. It is the number one way people are going to look for designs and it’s hard to find.

It’s going to change all the time. We do see it growing tremendously in the future and more things being 3D printed all the time. More designers are going to get into it, but there are things holding them back. Monetization is holding them back a little bit. They’re worried about protection of their copyrighted designs.

That’s starting to resolve itself. That’s probably the paper download and all those design license options are starting to resolve itself. Part of the problem though is when you throw up your design onto one of these design file servers, you’re among a bunch of junk. It’s a lot of junk out there. The sites that are curating and doing a better job of encouraging better designers. You want to be where the good stuff is because it’s going to reflect on yours as well. I hope this helps you with our Ask Us Anything feature. You can ask us anything design, 3D printing, all sorts of questions like that. If we don’t know the answer, we’re going to research it and find out for you. You can find that on HazzDesign.com.

You can find us anywhere on social media @HazzDesign. You can leave us a voicemail on Facebook, for example.

Thanks for reading.

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