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Built by Artifact · Prototype

Case study · Website + web app

Don't just show customers what you print.Let them show you what they want.

Left Coast Printing Pros is a San Diego print shop. The brief looked like a website. The opportunity was the ordering itself — so we built a design studio where a customer uploads their artwork, places it on the shirt, watches the price change as they decide, and sends a request the shop can actually produce from.

Client
Left Coast Printing Pros
Year
2026
Scope
Strategy · Brand · UX/UI · Build
Status
Prototype · seeded catalog and pricing
Four phone screens from the Left Coast site — homepage, product search, the catalog with per-piece pricing, and the design studio with artwork placed on a shirt — in front of a working print shop.

The studio on a phone, in the shop the orders land in.

The problem

The order was an email thread.

01

“Put it about here”

Artwork arrives as an attachment with a description. Where on the shirt, how big, which sleeve, what color garment — all of it gets settled over several emails, screenshots and a phone call, and any one of them can be misread.

02

Price was a conversation

Quantity, print method, number of colors and how many locations all move the number. A customer can't self-serve that, so every casual enquiry costs someone at the shop twenty minutes before it's even a real job.

03

Print has rules a generic store can't express

Screen printing has minimums and a setup charge per color per location. Digital printing doesn't. A checkout built for mugs and t-shirt blanks quietly hides the constraints the press actually runs on.

The reframe

The website shouldn't describe the work.It should start it.

The centre of the site isn't a gallery, it's a design studio: pick the garment, upload the artwork, drag it onto the front, back or a sleeve, and watch the printed size in inches as you scale it. The shop receives a placement, not a paragraph.

Price moves with those decisions, with setup charges and minimums stated rather than buried. Garment mockups are drawn as SVG silhouettes instead of licensed photography, and pricing, catalog and storage are swappable data — so the shop's real numbers replace the seeded ones without touching the interface.

The Left Coast Printing Pros homepage on a laptop and a phone: 'Custom gear. Printed on the Left Coast.'
One action leads the page: start designing. Everything else is in service of that.
Outcomes

What it delivered.

  • 01

    A print request instead of an email thread

    Garment, colorway, placement, printed size and files arrive together, in a form the shop can produce from.

  • 02

    Pricing that answers itself

    Method, quantity, colors and locations recalculate live, with setup charges and minimums stated rather than hidden.

  • 03

    Built around real print rules

    Screen print, DTF and embroidery are priced on their own terms, including per-location setup and volume waivers.

  • 04

    Ready for the shop's real numbers

    Catalog, pricing, storage and payments are swappable data and drivers, so going live doesn't mean a rebuild.

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