I spoke in my last post about creating images to promote the sale of digital products online. If you are selling e-books, images templates or any digital media on cd’s which you produce yourself or you are selling digital downloads, you need a graphic ‘representation’ of your product.

Is this misleading?

There is a school of thought that, providing these images (especially if they look realistic) is not exactly playing ball as, after all, its not actually a picture of a product that your customer will be receiving.

In my opinion, if you are selling a download, I think its fair game – anyone buying a download – providing the description is accurate should realise that they’re not going to be getting a software box, a DVD or a soft cover book dropping through the post (although you do get the odd one!). Originally, the purpose of these images was to give your buyer some sort of feel for a ‘product’ when they were buying a download and that is why I initially used them. However, since eBay banned downloads, is it still fair to use the images? I think so PROVIDING that you include a disclaimer. Wherever I use an image to promote my ebook cd’s I always put a caption underneath reading ‘picure for illustration purposes only’, then at the foot of the listing  I always state the following in large bold text

‘SOFTWARE BOX PICTURE IS FOR ILLUSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY. NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ACTUAL PACKAGING. NO SOFTWARE BOX IS AVAILABLE’

Do this and you will be fine – you get the odd moaner…..”wheres my box?” but this is a tiny minority and they do make your listing sooo much better. So; how to create the images. Basically there are 2 ways, either you can do it from scratch using Photoshop, GIMP (free alternative), Fireworks or similar, which, if you are a wizz using such programs is no problem. If however, like me, you have neither the skill, inclination or time to do this, there are several programs out ther that will do the job for you based on your simple 2D images. One which I use and can strongly recommend is ‘Box Shot 3d’. This really is an amazing peice of software. Here’s some ‘boxes I created using it:

I think they look really cool. Basically all you have to do is create 3 designs – front, side and top, load these images into the program, set your parameters for size, lighting, angles, background, quality etc, and click ‘render’ and it will create the ‘box’ for you – the results are VERY impressive and realistic. The designs for these were created in Word and Paint – nothing more believe it or not – just make a rectangle, fill it with a texture, add some images and word-art and thats it. You can also create images of books, DVD cases, CD cases etc.

You can check it out here: http://www.boxshot3d.com/