thoughtcrime ink: design co-omperatition!
overview | enter a design | score designs | critique section | your designs
Welcome to thoughtcrime ink’s first t-shirt design co-omp-era-tition: half competition, half cooperation. Competition because many will submit designs and we will choose a few (up to four) to print. Co-operation, because your designs will raise money for Anarchist Bookfairs and other grassroots projects in Canada. Sound awesome? Then please keep reading.
We are printing up to four t-shirt designs, and paying the winners $100 each (we wish we could pay you more… but it is a fundraiser).
Enter as many designs as you want. We are also paying the winners a hefty zine-like royalty of $1 per shirt sold on top of the $100. And you’re credited on the site. If all goes well… we will make this a regular thing.
The whole design kitIf you are having difficulty with any part of the kit please .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
How to get us to print your shirt
Take your time, sketch and draw for awhile, and come up with a really good, original design. It should put your head on backwards, too. Feel free to work with friends (friends who know how to digitize stuff are especially handy). Submit as many designs as you want.
Is there a theme? What are you / other people looking for?
This time around, there’s no theme, but we are looking for political shirts. We identify as anarchists, but we don’t care if you do or not. Also, not everything we like screams “anarchy!” In fact, we’d like to broaden the topics of our shirts, such as to anti-racist, anti-sexist, ecological, and queer themes for example.
The politics in your creations can either be in-your-face, or not obvious or “blatant” at all. Express any emotion, thought, or sentiment under the sun in relation to your subject matter. Your design(s) can have words, or not, but we’re not wanting to print words-only designs (not this time around anyway). See the “inspiration” section in the design kit for more info.
How will the winning designs be selected?
Logged-in visitors to thoughtcrime ink will get to rank the designs, comment on them, and perhaps indicate if they’d… gasp… buy one. This feedback, combined with the thumbs up of our discerning but appreciative quality-control committee at thoughtcrime ink, will get your design printed.
Isn’t a “design competition” kind of capitalist? You know, “competition.”
If the thoughtcrime ink community gives feedback indicating they think more than four designs kick ass, we’ll likely just make more designers “winners.” Four is just the maximum number of designs we can afford to print up in one go. The point of this isn’t to produce winners and losers, but a community of political illustrators, craftspeople and designers encouraging one another.
OK then. How do I get started?
To submit a design, you should download and read the “design template kit.” The design template kit explains what we can and can’t do in terms of printing, so this may affect your design. This time around, for instance, we are only doing two-colour designs.
The design kit also contains photos of our blank-shirt-wearing friends (download), so if you know how to wrangle Photoshop, you can give us an idea of the placement. This is mainly so that site visitors can see what your design looks like when someone’s wearing the shirt. While it’s lovely for us to get your design work all digitized this way, if computers and/or digital design are a barrier for you, let us know and we’ll see if we can help out.
Whoa whoa whoa. I’ve got some good ideas, but I don’t know my way around Photoshop, etc.
We want this competition to be as barrier-free as possible in terms of computer skills. As long as your design is completed except for the digitization part, and you can get your art scanned at a nice size that’s clear for people who want to appreciate it, we’ll worry about getting the winners screenprint-ready. You’re still subject to the printing limitations, so again, please download the kit.
Where do we send in our designs?
Can I get feedback before I send my design(s) in?
We’ve put up a “critique” section where logged-in members of thoughtcrime ink (not just us) will give you feedback on your designs, so you can further develop your ideas before doing the complete design. You can send your sketches, mockups, etc. in there, and hear back from other members of the site.
Where do we vote on designs people have submitted?
As soon as we have a few designs in, we’ll put up the voting pages. We’ll make these very easy to find, believe it.
When do you announce the winners?
About six weeks from when we wrote this (Aug 15), which makes this round of submissions close on Oct 3, 2008 Nov. 5, 2008. Please keep submitting! Deadline’s been extended because we’re so busy. xox, the collective.
Questions?
Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Ready to go? Submit your designs here.
