Another month and another tee brand chart. Congrats to Linty Fresh for bouncing back up to 11 from a lowly 70 last month. The top ten now get a nice box to live in with arrows and icons - Fancy huh!
And now the rest - some big movements this month as the effects of the big pre-Xmas PR push start to fade. My guess is that the chart for the next couple of months will be a more genuine reflection of who is designing great new shirts - rather than who has the most effective marketing team.
This is the shirt for you if you have someone in your life who never stops wearing stupid jack skelington shirts (and shoes and belts and pants and hats and….). Wean them off of their tim burton thing with a shirt that’s absolutely not TB, but is on the same floor in the department store of life.
Oh - and anything with a chainsaw is great to wear on Christmas day. So why not. Killer Bunny by Assault Shirts. I really hope they do more of these cartoon gore shirts - skulls and spatter are all well and good - but you gotta love some cutesy gore!
It’s well over a year since the last survey of tshirt design competitions. Back then it was all about threadless. It’s still all about threadless. But there are others. And some of them are big. Really big. Here are a dozen notable ones!
uneetee - if theres a second place to threadless, uneetee probably have it. Huge community, great designs, $1500 prize. and I love some of the shirts over the past few months.
uneetee.com
la fraise - french site, 15000 Euro contest, what’s not to love. They even let you spill our design over onto the underwear!
lafraise.com
design by humans - $3500 plus residuals and one of the most comprehensive guides to designing a tshirt you could wish for - even down to ink types and tiny TINY considerations. great site.
designbyhumans.com
wooshka - a good old fashioned design vote print site with $500 prize. Quite a turnaround on designs too - well worth a visit.
wooshka.com
a better tomorrow - another language barrier - another great competition 500 EURO - google traslate is your friend!
a-better-tomorrow.com
bad as hell - interesting site, lots of activity, great community, scary tshirts, good blog - as long as you can cope with the gore this is a great site. $250 if you win the competitions to get printed.
badashell.com
collar free - $200 may not be the biggest prize on offer here - but the vs style voting is nice. I just say which of 2 designs I like best - so the best should spill to the top - voting is the most fun of all the comp sites in my opinion.
collarfree.com
shocker - shocker are the bad boys of tee land. If you want to offend your mom - buy a shocker. If you want to REALLY offend your mom buy a shocker you designed yourself - and make $150 while you do it.
shockertees.com
j!nx - gamer gamer gamer - huge community, more of a community site with some tees than a teeco - but a great competition / submissions location for gamer / geek related tee ideas.
jinx.com
itself - $4000 isn’t too shabby! and some of the designs on the site are great, creative, and clean. Arty, jokey, crispy.
hereitself.com
teetonic - a great wee site with a nice competition paying out £100 and 50p per shirt sold (I won’t even bother converting that into $ with the current economic meltdown ramming sterling into the ground it’ll probably be worth about $0.01 by Christmas!)
teetonic.com
Almightys - if commission is enough for you - almightys is a neat site - 2 euro per tee sold (again - convert this using your favourite credit crunch calculator if you live outside the eurozone)
almightys.com
I do like this shirt. Honest. But the real reason I’m posting this is the amazing van. Campers are cool. Maybe it’s just the Glastonbury glow, but life in a shiny camper bus is pretty appealing right now. Shirt at ATZ (in french, but you can always babel it!)
La Fraise has always had some of the wierdest shirts. Now it has the wierdest shirts AND undies! Brilliant!. WHat the Gerbil face is about I don’t know! Or is it a hamster? How do you tell…?
Any tee company with a designer called Zoltan gets my vote! Zoltan is one of those names I always adopted when I was the overbearing space lord who was evicting the earthings from the playpark when I was 8. ‘Flee the might of Zoltan’ I would shout. The Affair is a new tee label from a couple of Aussies, as far as I know they don’t want the earthlings to flee.
The flash site has a real feeling that the web designer has been set free, become his own client, and is using those great ideas no one else would pay for! The shot below is part of a 360 spinning guy in a shirt. Really! If you want to see this shirt backwards, just spin it. The attention to detail is supreme - it’s like they’re selling sunseekers, not tshirts.
All the shirts are printed on American Apparel and are limited editions of just 200. Snap ‘em up! Free worldwide shipping is available as a launch offer, which saves a few quid / bucks / euros [delete as approp.].
I happen to live in the best city that Germany has to offer. Of course I’m talking about Berlin. All T-Shirt-Maniacs could easily shop themselves into their financial ruin - there is so much creativity to see (and purchase), all those little stores and boutiques that often sell self-made stuff that isn’t available anyhere else. Not surprisingly so many companies and artists settle there, especially in the flourishing inner regions of East Berlin such as Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain.
For all people ever planning to visit Berlin as a tourist (and you really should) I’d like to recommend one place I visited again yesterday and I could visit every sunday: the flea market at the Mauerpark.
The name “Mauerpark” comes from “Mauer” which means “wall” - and in this case it is THE (in)famous Berlin Wall. Eighteen years after its downfall the last remains and reminders of a brutal and injust regime are long gone, instead the former “Todesstreifen” (death zone) has been transformend into a very popular and much frequented park and since a few years there’s a huge flee market every sunday. It’s always crowded as hell, but even though I usually feel uncomfortable in huge crowds I like it a lot. Maybe that’s because of the overall ambiance which is very relaxed after all.
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Here at OMGTees we love tshirts. Obviously. We love all kinds of t-shirts. But there are some shirts we hardly ever see.
We want to see your one off, diy, homeprinted, freezer paper / sharpie / school project / maker silkscreen / tie dye / or any other kind of home made experimental tee.
This isn’t a threadless style design competition, this is pure show off!
Send us pics of the tee, but also of the process of designing, making and printing your shirt. Start to finish if you have it, or just a phone snap of your shirt. Just send it through. Stuff like this we just found on Flickr, or this youtube from makezine.
Fame and adulation awaits. We’ll post the best designs from time to time on OMGTees.
UPDATE - new updated article available here!
So you have a Tshirt idea. Threadless rules, but there are a stack of other sites out there asking for your tshirt ideas. The rewards can vary enormously depending on where you send your design - anything from a sticker, to one off cash payments to a cut of all Tshirt sales.
So which site gives best value for you? You need to weight up a few factors:
So below are links to the submissions pages of 20 sites offering to print your shirt. Any experiences of submitting to these would be vastly useful - comment below. The list:
J!NX Shirts
J!nx are very geek focussed, a typical shirt featuring an RPG joke. They offer $100 for an idea, $400 for the artwork if they use it.
Threadless
Now offering $2000 worth of benefits ($1500 cash, the rest essentially in Tees). Competition is fierce on Threadless, but if you get a shirt printed you instantly become a shirt design legend among your peers.
Cafepress
You don’t so much submit your design to cafepress, as just publish it. You take a cut of everything sold. Cafepress has some sweet designs on it, but you do risk simply sinking into the clutter unless you put some effort into an affiliate style site to promo your shirt. Potentially higher rewards, but you have to do most of the promotional work yourself.
NerdyShirts
$200 for a shirt design, $50 for a slogan. They do promise a quick response though - “if you win, you’ll get an email on monday”. And if you want a portfolio piece, they take some nice promo pics!
Busted Tees
Busted have a simple policy “just send it to us at ideas@bustedtees.com and if we like it we’ll give you $150 and a shirt with your idea on it too!”. You can’t say fairer than that.
TShirt Hell
An edgy shirt site, TShirt hell may be a home for your more… out there ideas. $200 plus 10 shirts of your choice is on offer. Picking 10 shirts won’t be a problem, $200 is typical, and you get a different kind of cool point here!
Shocker Tees
If tshirt hell blushed when you showed them your idea, try shocker. They print anything! $150 for your idea. Cool points? Perhaps. Infamy? Guaranteed.
Stagehand Tees
Stagehand do a seemingly endless list of black shirts with simple lettering with some pretty funny stuff on them. Which is about right for a seller of apparel for stagehands, roadies and entertainment technicians. Not exactly the mightiest of prizes no cash, just the first tee off the presses but hey, it’s a free tee.
Thoseshirts.com
“where conservative humor, superior quality, and professional artistry come together.”. $200 for your idea, so if you have a great Clinton gag, or firearm pun, this may be the best place to try.
Split the atom
A slightly above average $250 is on offer here for your submission. Guidelines, templates etc… are all particularly good although I find the flash site a pain to use on my laptop. User voting a la threadless is also used on split the atom.
Off Your Back Shirts
OYB shirts offers a $100 voucher plus 2 of your shirts. Some pretty ‘worthy’ shirts on offer, so if you have a cutting comment on our tv obsessed lives in the form of a 16″x16″ square - you my have found it’s home.
Uneetee.com
This is a pretty unique site, operating a single lead design at any one time. It offers $2 per shirt sold with your design on it, so if it sells a few thousand you’ll be better off here than at Threadless. I like the JENIUS shirt.
Thats the list! If you know of, or are, another place to submit ideas comment below!
