FreePrints Brand Guidelines: PlanetArt’s Free-Print App, a Butterfly Icon & a 2020 UK Ruling

Free prints from a phone, delivery paid.

FreePrints is a photo-printing app that sends a set number of small prints each month free of charge, with the customer paying for delivery. It belongs to PlanetArt, a personalised-products company based in Calabasas, California, which says it was founded in 2010. A PlanetArt press release of June 2025 names Roger Bloxberg and Todd Helfstein as the company’s founders.

The app’s own About page tells its story from an earlier starting point. It says the business “started as a retail photo lab in Midland, Texas,” working as a processor of photo prints, and only later introduced the FreePrints mobile app, because the photos people cared about most now lived on their phones and tablets and there had never been an easy way to get them printed. The page gives no date for that step.

The firmest date for the app comes from the English courts. In a judgment handed down on 25 March 2020, the High Court of England and Wales recorded that the claimants — PlanetArt LLC, a US company, and its wholly owned UK subsidiary — launched the app in the United Kingdom in January 2014. The court described a service in which customers download the app, pick photos on a phone or tablet and have them printed for free, paying only delivery charges, with an entitlement of up to 45 free prints a month that resets every month.

That allowance has since grown. In November 2026 the FreePrints website says customers can order up to 85 free 4×6-inch prints per calendar month, and up to 1,000 a year, with one free print per photo; other sizes and extra copies are paid for. Photos can come from the phone itself or from albums on services such as Google Photos, Facebook and Dropbox, and the site describes ordering as a two-step process: select the photos, then check out.

One butterfly, many colours.

FreePrints is less a single app than a family. The 2020 judgment lists three spin-offs already on sale in the UK: FreePrints Photobooks, for making photo books; FreePrints Photo Tiles, for photo tiles; and FreePrints Cards, for greeting cards. PlanetArt’s own website groups them under “Photo Apps,” alongside further titles for wall décor and gifts, each offering to turn a phone photo into an object with the core item free.

The identity rests on the app icon. In the judgment’s description, the FreePrints icon is a two-colour square: a butterfly drawn in white line on a turquoise ground, with the word FreePrints. PlanetArt’s March 2020 press release says it holds a UK registration for that icon, combining the word and the butterfly logo. The court noted that the spin-off apps share elements of common branding but use “somewhat differing primary colouring and designs” for their logos. Because the same design appears in other colours, it said, the company had not adopted one consistent colour livery across its products — which, in the court’s view, diminished but did not remove the part that turquoise and white play in pointing to FreePrints.

Scale was part of the evidence. According to evidence from PlanetArt summarised in the judgment, by the end of 2019 FreePrints-branded apps had been downloaded more than 17 million times in the UK, including more than 11.5 million downloads of the main FreePrints app. The judgment also recorded that the company’s UK marketing since 2014 had produced more than three billion advertising “impressions,” an average of about 45 for each person in the country.

On paper and production the company speaks for itself. The FreePrints FAQ says every photo is printed “at one of our professional photo labs” and that customers choose between deluxe glossy and premium matte paper. Orders arrive, the site says, in as little as two to five days.

Photo books, prints and the services behind them.

Photo-book and photo-printing services sell something the customer has already made: the pictures. Their own sites therefore tend to lead with the customer’s photographs rather than with the company. Home pages show open books, framed prints and wall pieces in ordinary rooms, often styled around an occasion such as a wedding, a new baby, a holiday or the end of a year, and the product sits in the frame as a finished keepsake.

The making itself is shown through the tools. Most of these companies offer an online editor and a phone app, and they describe both in plain, step-by-step language: upload, choose a size and cover, arrange the pages, order. Automatic layouts, themes and templates are presented as time-savers, while desktop editors with grids, rulers and finer controls are offered to people who want to place every picture themselves.

Product naming follows the physical object. Ranges are sorted by format, page count, binding and cover — soft cover, hard cover, fabric, leather, lay-flat — and by paper finish, with words such as matte, lustre or gloss doing most of the work. Wall pieces are named by their material, from stretched cotton and acrylic to metal, wood and framed prints, so the label tells the buyer what will hang on the wall.

Behind the consumer brands sit the labs and the owners. Corporate pages explain which group a label belongs to, where its printing sites are and how its brands divide up the countries they serve, while lab-led services describe their printing methods and papers in more detail. For a designer, the useful lessons are in that split: a warm, occasion-led consumer voice on top, and a precise, material-led vocabulary underneath.

A court case, a portfolio and a buyout.

The icon was tested in court. Photobox, the London photo-printing company, began the activities complained of in April 2019 with an app that, the judgment records, was first branded “Printly – Prints by Photobox” and later became the Photobox Free Prints app. PlanetArt sued for trade mark infringement and passing off. After a four-day hearing in January 2020 in the High Court’s Intellectual Property List, under its shorter trials scheme, the court found that the Photobox Free Prints icon infringed PlanetArt’s registered mark under sections 10(2) and 10(3) of the Trade Marks Act 1994, but that the other signs in issue did not; the passing-off claim was not made out. The case is reported as Planetart LLC v Photobox Ltd [2020] EWHC 713 (Ch).

The owner has grown around the app. In September 2020 PlanetArt said it had acquired the assets of CafePress, the Louisville print-on-demand marketplace, from Shutterfly’s Snapfish business unit. Its June 2025 release lists the FreePrints line of mobile apps alongside Personal Creations, SimplytoImpress, CafePress, Gifts.com and I See Me!, a personalised children’s book brand. In 2020 the company said it sold in 11 countries; by 2025 it said more than 15.

On 30 June 2025 PlanetArt announced that it had closed a management buyout in which its management team and Atlantic Park, a credit strategy within the investment firm General Atlantic, acquired the company. The release said the two founders would remain significant stakeholders and serve as co-chief executives.

For a design guide, FreePrints shows how a single app icon — one white butterfly on one bright colour — can carry a whole product family, with each spin-off changing the colour but keeping the drawing. Compare Photobox, the London printer on the other side of the 2020 case, and Snapfish, whose business unit sold CafePress to PlanetArt. For this guide we use a lagoon teal, a deep teal and print white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FreePrints’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.