If you are looking for a fun way to promote your product or company, temporary tattoos
might be just what you are looking for. They are easy to design and inexpensive to
produce, and now there is a product which facilitates the entire process.
Temptu Tattoo Studio from Macmillin Digital
is a nifty graphics design program which allows you to create your own temporary tattoo
using their bundled graphics library. As best as we can tell, you can not import your own
artwork yet.
The product was influenced by Temptu Temporary Tattoos whose web site is
located at www.temptu.com. Temptu's artwork can be
seen on some of your favorite celebrities. This company works in cooperation with
Macmillin Digital to fulfill requests for custom tattoos, but tech support for the product
is actually done by Macmillin. So Temptu can sell you body paint and tattoo supplies and
even mass print your custom tattoo for you, but they can't support the program. A little
confusing at first if you do not read everything carefully.
One of the first things you notice about Temptu is that the interface is
wildly different from most other graphics design packages. This is good and bad. It's good
because who says the standard Microsoft GUI is the best way to do things anyway? It's bad
because it requires you to learn a new interface. Luckily, this one is very intuitive.
You'd have to be an idiot to get lost in the application. It's point and click simple, so
you can create and customize design very quickly.
Once you have created your tattoo, you can preview it in several modes
thanks to some clever background drawings of bodies and arms, t-shirts and cards. You can
actually superimpose your tattoo design on any of these backgrounds to get a better feel
about how your final tattoo will look. And yes, if you must, you can use this package to
create t-shirt transfers or greeting cards (though this is not what the package was
primarily designed to do).
Some sample tattoos come packaged with the CD as well as some paper
supplies. You can print your tattoos using a standard color inkjet printer, but you need
to understand that these inks are not necessarily healthy for you or your skin. The inks
used in professional Temptu tattoos are less likely to present problems.
There is another minor drawback. Should you elect to send your tattoo to
Temptu for mass production, they can only print them in black. They can, however, sell you
body paint and supplies to color them so . . . the product may not be all that you hope
for, but it is still a novel and cool tool which enables you to be very creative and
expressive in your marketing.
