I feel ya. I recently did something like this for my best friend who had his first baby boy. My friends and I made him a Pabst onesie (I know, awesome right? It had just a single image of a huge PBR can on it. Hilarious.) and a few Simpsons onesies on this website online where you can easily make any kind of customized onesie you’d like by uploading an image and clicking a few buttons. (The temptation to make half way offensive/funny baby clothing is off the charts here, by the way… but a beer can was as close as I wanted to stray into that territory.)

While onsies are awesome (and super cute), this site is about baby bibs. Cute baby bibs, to be exact, and what’s cuter and cooler than a personalized baby bib for your baby or your friends baby?

Here are some tips and ideas on making custom, unique, personalized baby bibs.

1. CafePress is awesome for this kind of stuff. You can upload images and push it onto baby bibs and practically anything and everything else under the sun. They also sell some really neat “underground” custom baby bibs. What I mean is that other people who aren’t some gigantic baby gift company are making their own fun baby bibs and whatnot and sell them through this site, which will print them on demand and send them to you when you order it, right then and there.

2. Copyrighted images are a pain. You’re not supposed to use them. I highly doubt any of the companies that allow people to print personalized baby bibs are going to stop you from putting Dora and your babies on name on the bib though. If they do, post a comment and let us know what happened to your custom baby bib. It’s probably best to use your own images and just not mess with this problem.

3. Having some graphic design skills will come in handy. What I mean is that it’s a lot easier to make a custom image in Paint or Photoshop and then upload the completed graphic to Cafepress (or whatever), than it is to use the online image editors. They kinda stink to be honest, and some sites don’t even offer the ability to edit the graphics, only upload pre-made images.

4. Feel free to sign your work. But do it small. Putting your name or a “From: Sandy” on the bib is cool, but the bib is about the baby, not about you! Besides, the bigger your name, the more chances that it’ll spend the next few years getting half eaten food spilled onto it. Not too flattering eh?

5. Use high quality digital images. You’re not going to want to print a picture that somone uploaded off Facebook onto a big baby bib. The reason is that even though the pictures came from a digital camera, Facebook automatically compressing the image to make it smaller (size wise, MB wise). When printed up this way, it might look pixelated – i.e. not very good. You want to get the picture from the digital camera itself. If this is meaningless geek talk to you, just look at the size of the picture. If it’s something like 50 KB, it’s not gonna work probably. If it’s like 1MB, it’s probably perfect. This is one of the worst aspects when you make your own baby bib online – don’t forget about this!

Now, let me break the mold here and bust out of this numbered narrative to make the last point. Unless you have to, don’t send it directly to the person from the website. Gifts mean a lot more with a card or a note in your own handwriting. It’s quite impersonal to send a custom baby bib directly from a company to your friends house! Make the gift your own by repackaging and sending it to them, or hand delivering it in a gift box with the personalized baby bibs inside.