Patent ID: 7619638

Claim:
A system for designing a custom product containing at least one composite image, the system comprising: a server, and an image software system loaded on the server, wherein the image software system includes one or more product templates and a plurality of component images, the component images having positional information associated therewith for use by the image software system in positioning multiple component images relative to each other to create a composite image, and one or more design tools configured to download to a client computer and execute in a web browser at the client computer, wherein the image software system is configured to make the component images available for selection by a user of the client computer, allow the user to select one or more subsets of the component images, each subset comprising a plurality of the component images, automatically combine the component images in each subset into a corresponding composite image in accordance with the positional information associated with the component images in the subset, incorporate the one or more composite images into a product template to create a custom product design, and make an image of the custom product design available for displaying to the user at the client computer, wherein the positional information associated with the plurality of component images comprises positional rules which dictate a placement order for placing the component images on top of each other in a composite image.