Compete-tee-tion

By now I think most people are familiar with ShirtADay. They’re one of the websites using the business model of selling one shirt a day (others include Uneetee and Shirt.Woot). ShirtADay is different from the others because they focus primarily on slogans, because the price drops steadily as more decide to buy- and because there are so many different ways to buy a shirt.

Here’s the deal: ShirtADay’s daily design can be put on several types of clothing (including hooded sweatshirts), and not only that, customers can choose the color shirt they’d like it printed on. And if the day’s shirt doesn’t suit you, there are several other shirts available, ranging from the Shirt of the Week to Clearance products to the selections at their affiliate, Rerun Tees.

My shirt, Konami Code, was a Rerun tees offering. The print is pretty great- it has the right amount of ink, heavy enough to not show the black shirt through the white ink but not so heavy that it cracks with wear. It’s also centered well on the shirt, and the shirt itself is of good quality (Hanes Tagless, a nice heavy shirt).

Overall, I’d recommend the quality of ShirtADay. It’s especially recommended to anyone who likes to customize their shirt purchases or who enjoys shirts that make statements. And remember, if you have a great idea for a shirt, contact Shirt-a-Day. You’ll get a percentage of the shirt’s earnings if they use your design.

There are definitely some great shirts up this week. I’m most partial to the two shown above, Still Life with a Van (gorgeous colors, nice shape to the art) and Never Take Your Abilities for Granted (awesome concept, creative use of halftones).

There’s a lot of variety in the new offerings, which is nice to see. It ranges from retro (X-Ray Goggles Work) to illustrative (The Young Explorers Society) to off-beat (Bad Reception) to cartoon-y (There’s No Crying in Breakfast) to experimental (The Swirl of the World)… all the bases are covered, and with really well-done work.

But before you think I’m uniformly positive, let’s address the reprints. They’re totally, completely, ridiculously boring. Since the Threadless catalog is packed with classics and brilliant work, it’s kind of shocking to me that those are the two shirts they landed on. They’re both of a quality level that I think would be unlikely to be printed today, which makes me question the wisdom of doing any reprints at all if this is the result.

I’m working on the format of this site right now, so I apologize for any broken-ness that may occur. There are still a lot of problems with the code, but hopefully I’ll be able to get those worked out this weekend.

Thanks for your patience.

Zazzle has recently hopped on the t-shirt contest bandwagon. The current contest is “Talking Food,” and the winner will walk away with a whopping $1000. Entries can be designs on any Zazzle product, including t-shirts. A winner will be chosen from the 25 most popular entries.

Enter before August 12th, 2007 for your chance to win.

Have you ever thought to yourself, wow, I would love to design a shirt that had an airplane in a circle on it? Then this is the contest for you! Nutrisoda’s logo is an airplane in a circle, and they’ve started a t-shirt contest.

Here’s the deal: The logo should be somewhere on the shirt. The shirt color should be black or white, and you should use four or fewer colors. Other than that, it’s up to you. A panel of judges will decide your fate (there’s online voting as well, but that is just to determine a Popular Vote winner). All profits from sales of the winning shirt will be donated to Dress for Success.

If the promise of charity doesn’t grab you, maybe the first place prize will. The winner will receive a weekend getaway to Boston or San Francisco, a silk-screened canvas of your design by artist Daniel Dens, a 24 multi-pack of Nutrisoda every month for a year, and 100 t-shirts with your design. (There are also prizes for second place, third place, popular vote, and one in twenty entries will instantly win a prize.)

While I’m usually pretty skeptical of the results when companies hold t-shirt contests, I think this one has promise. Last year’s winners are definitely nice, so I think good work will win out this year as well.

Another Friday, another Shirt.Woot Derby. This time the theme is Heat, and entries that rely on Woot logos and culture are banned. Another improvement to the format is that entries are now displayed according to how recently they were submitted (instead of according to popularity, which kept a lot of mediocre work scoring highly last week).

It might take some more time before the voters start to get a grasp of what works on a shirt (currently a lot of voters seem to be voting on thumbnail images without enlarging to see shirt placement) but I think this week’s winner is almost guaranteed to be more interesting than last week (grey shapes on a white shirt? sigh).

As always, the winner’s shirt will be printed next Friday, earning the designer $200 plus $2 for every shirt sold after the first day.

Camiseteria has just announced a new competition: As part of a partnership with iMasters InterCon 2007 (a networking convention for the fields of technology, the internet and the media), Camiseteria is asking for t-shirt design submissions using the theme of The Meeting of Two Worlds.

The winner will receive R$1400 (half in product, half in cash) and an invitation to attend InterCon 2007 (a value of R$210). The submission period for this contest ends soon (the 13th of August, which means the competition only lasts two weeks!), so anyone who’s interested should act soon.

Note: Camiseteria is located in Brazil, so all of the site’s content is in Portuguese. I use Babelfish when things are unclear and that seems to work fine, so there’s no reason for english-speakers to avoid the site.