Oh, yes, I never lack for ideas - just the time to carry them out
. I'm actually thinking of the Cafe Press type items more for my main website, which is the reason I've been looking into vector graphics programs. The site's logo is pretty recognizable, and wearable, etc., but since I've never done vectors I have it only in the three sizes that I use on the site. I also have some note card designs specifically for that site that are mostly text and straight lines, so would be (relatively) easy to do as vector graphics. None of these would be anything the general public would be interested in, but the people who are "into" the topics of the site would be, and having them available as various products would be a good thing for that audience.
I've been horribly ignoring that site the last few months, except that I've continued trying to finish up a book-length collection of interrelated essays for it. Because the subject is fairly complex, I don't want to put them online until they're a cohesive whole, but I
have to get some new "regular" essays up on the site before visitors decide I've abandoned the place! I've also been thinking of ways to make it more of a destination site as the more fannish Tolkien-related sites that blossomed briefly because of the movies wilt away, as they're now doing.
My heart and soul are in that site - the one with the tiles is an enjoyable hobby. Some people knit to relax after a hard day at work - I come home and make a few background tiles. I've taken time away from my main site over the last few months to try to get the basic overhaul done on the second one, but now I hope to get my priorities shifted back.
Not that there aren't ideas for the second one. Because of the original greeting card purpose of the site, I've started using some of the tiles to design note cards and stationery - the "We've got over 3000 images, and you can pick any of them to put on your note cards" idea has been put aside, because I'm discovering that just because a tile looks great on the screen doesn't mean it'll print out well. If the cards could get going, the next thing would be wrapping paper, which some of the tiles are wonderful for - I could afford to buy a "wide format" printer that could do wrapping paper, but they're not cheap and I wouldn't want to buy one until I knew it would get used (maybe when I retire). Of course,
all of the tiles are raster images, so trying to do a Cafe Press type thing with them would be pretty limited, I'm afraid. And there are very few of them that I'd even want to try turning into vector images - they just aren't right for it.
Other "monitizing" ideas would be selling special collections of tiles that aren't available on the website or having a subscription-only area of the site. The book-length set of essays could be sold, too, I suppose, as an ebook (I can't imagine trying to do it on paper without internal hyperlinks). But I hate to limit things that way, and monitizing has never been a big goal for me. Anyway, I keep learning with everything I try, so I don't consider something wasted just because I don't make money from it. (And trying to make money from it just adds more layers of things to worry about that I don't want to take time for right now.)