Design Share Make Wants to Give Your 3D Printer the Designs It Deserves

There is no shortage of online 3D printing design platforms these days. If you’re new to 3D printing, choosing a design platform involves wading through a whole lot of websites, each with its own perks and special offers. Luckily, you don’t have to pick just one. To gain a following, however, a new website must deliver quality products and somehow set itself apart from the other platforms and marketplaces. The latest is Design Share Make, whose motto is “Give your 3D printer the designs it deserves.”

“We believe like many, that consumer 3D printing is likely to grow rapidly with potentially 10 million people with 3D printers at home by 2020,” Design Share Make’s Ross Maddox tells 3DPrint.com. “In order for this growth to be achieved, the hardware will need to become cheaper, more reliable and more user friendly. A scenario which seems likely to occur. In addition to this, the designs available to print will also need to become much higher quality.”

Unlike many other platforms, which rely on user-created content, Design Share Make sells only work made by its own internal design team. The small, four-person company has two professional designers who carefully create each file to be precisely detailed and guaranteed to print. A strict quality control policy means that the company will not release a design for download until it has been tested and perfected. This means that designs, particularly the more complex ones, can sometimes take weeks before they are ready for release, but the team firmly emphasizes quality before quantity.

“Finally and perhaps most importantly,” Maddox adds, “they are all carefully optimised for desktop 3D printing. This means no more tedious and damaging support removal and no more designs that require an industrial machine to print successfully. It is our belief that designs of this quality will help to push desktop 3D printing towards mass adoption.”

Design Share Make sells models as downloadable files only, with prices ranging from $1.99 to $9.99. They also offer a premium membership for $29.99 per year; premium members can download as many files as they want, whenever they want once the initial fee is paid.

They also have a large collection of designs that can be downloaded for free; some of the coolest designs, in my opinion, are in this category, such as a 3D printable Taj Mahal and whale-shaped measuring spoons. The site’s other printable collections are steam trains, Disney Sensational Six, the Simpsons, large trucks, space exploration and Marvel’s Avengers.

“Unlike perhaps the other platforms, we know our product is more niche and we are trying to reach a smaller sector of the market – those who are willing to pay a premium for high quality,” Maddox tells us. “It is our hope that if someone was asked to show the uninitiated what their desktop 3D printer was really capable of, they would reach for one of our 3D printer models.”

Let’s hear your thoughts on this company in the Design Share Make forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out a demonstration on how to assemble one of the prints from the company’s train collection:

https://youtu.be/9Jq-41Iu7BM