Compete-tee-tion

I’ve just added another t-shirt competition to the list on the right.

Camiseteria is a Brazilian company (yes, this means the site is in portuguese) with a t-shirt competition that appears to work by the Threadless model where submissions are voted on and some of the highest scorers go on to be printed. There also seem to be some competitions sponsored by other companies (Camiserteria Extra, kind of like Threadless Loves) including one called Typographic Mixtape, which may be the coolest phrase I’ve heard this week.

They’ve definitely put together a great collection of shirts:

Shirts shown are Silencie, Limpeza Geral, Hey Stop and Lar Doce Lar.

Although the site is in portuguese, I had an easy time determining the english translation. I used Babelfish for the trickier bits, and it’s a great site well worth the extra effort.

The prize for being printed is R$350 cash and R$350 in Camiseteria products.

** Update: An english version of the site is planned, I will update this site with more information when it is online.

Although I just posted recently about cross-posting designs, I came across a great example of why this is such a terrible idea.

This is a really cool shirt (I even singled it out as such recently when I was discussing my disappointment with the Six Cities competition).

But since it is so easily recognizable as a great shirt, it won two competitions at the same time. In the Inspire Brand contest, it won its fight easily. In the Teetonic competition, it was printed. The Inspire entry was made on October 22nd, and the Teetonic submission was made November 2nd (just over a week later).

I’m not sure what the legal ramifications are for the designer in question.

The Inspire legal terms say that “The participant may display or archive the design in a portfolio or personal collection but may not sell or reproduce the design for commercial purposes without written permission from Inspire.” Unless permission was obtained, this is in violation. I doubt that permission was obtained because it still appears on the Inspire web page, but I have no proof of this.

The Teetonic terms and conditions state the following: “By entering the Competition you warrant that no Design or comments submitted by you to Teetonic.com will violate any right of any third party, including but not limited to their copyright, trademark, design right, privacy or other personal or proprietary right(s) whether registered or unregistered and that the Design has not previously been submitted to any other competition.” This is a clear violation of the terms, as the Inspire entry predates the Teetonic entry and thus this design was submitted to another competition before these terms were agreed to.

This whole thing is a messy legal situation if the websites adhere to their terms. I have no interest in maing trouble for anyone, so I haven’t contacted any of the sites involved. I took the step of making a comment in the battle page at Inspire that Teetonic printed the design, which ought to prevent it being printed at both places. But I think my point is pretty clearly illustrated: Read the terms, follow the terms to the letter and protect yourself from legal action.

Three new shirts from the La Fraise competition were made available in the store this week. Here’s a look:

The t-shirts are Chimp!, Rockshard Test and Sauvez un Bambou. Of the three, I’d only wear Chimp (there’s something about the satisfied look on his face that appeals to me), but the other two are good as well. My quibble with Rockhard Test is that the guitar is too obvious- I wish it had been at an angle, and that the overall shape of the design had been more of a splatter (like an actual ink blot test) and not the Christmas tree shape it currently is. Sauvez un Bambou is certainly cute (the translated text reads “Save a bamboo, eat a panda”) but I wanted the image to have more to it. If the panda were standing in front of a field of bamboo, that would have improved this for me.

Overall, a nice crop of t-shirts. Well done, La Fraise!

Here’s the thing: it’s basic logic that you can’t enter the same design in two different design competitions at the same time. Submitting a design requires the artist to agree to making the design exclusive to the contest, usually for at least three months (but sometimes for longer, read the agreements!).

I can see the benefits to taking a design that performed decently in one contest and reworking it to be resubmitted.

But, that is not what tends to happen. In the last week I have randomly discovered three designs that are entered in multiple competitions at the same time. And I wasn’t even looking for it!

Here are the three, with no further ado…

Also appearing at Split the Atom.

Also appearing at La Fraise.

Also appearing at La Fraise.

It’s possible that this was done in ignorance of the rules (Seriously, read them! You could be signing a lot more away than you realize…). This whole business seems pretty dishonest to me. One race at a time, people.

The last two shirts have been posted, and I am really enjoying them. It almost redeems the whole Six Cities program for me (ALMOST).

First up is the Zandra Rhodes shirt. It’s not my style, but I can still see that there’s a level of quality there. The illustration style is fun and distinctive (the kind of thing I would probably want if I were a fan of Rhodes). There appears to be some metallic ink used on the tee, which helps justify the price. It’s a nice product on the whole, and I can easily picture other people wearing shirts like this.

Then, the Stefan Sagmeister shirt. I really love this shirt. The main character has a ton of personality (he looks like a mean little sock monkey). There’s a cool message. Overall, this shirt is a winner. I feel like it could potentially be better (for instance if the back had other animal characters spouting incorrect opinions) but there’s something to be said for simplicity and there’s nothing wrong with this shirt as is.

It’s too bad some of the other shirts weren’t up to this level of quality, but two cool shirts (Sagmeister’s monkey and d8’s make it better) and two decent shirts (Rhodes’ illustration and Timorous Beasties’ collage) is a reasonable result.

Yep, it’s Monday and that means Threadless has a new batch of shirts. All the buzz seems to be surrounding Spoilt, which is admittedly a cool design. But it’s not to my taste, personally- I have a huge pet peeve about people reading my shirts, so I tend to avoid stuff with lots of tiny text. I feel it’s a better poster than a t-shirt.

My favorite is My Turn!, which combines several of my favorite things: Pies, strange creatures, a wrap-around image, the color green and hand-drawn textures. Excellent. Plus, it’s available in long sleeve.

One last comment: can the rhino thing be over now? They’re all over the place on Threadless lately, which bugs me because they’re not all that unique looking or attractive. I submit that hippos be substituted for rhinos in the future, because they are much, much funnier.

I’ve previously posted about Six Cities, and now there’s an update:

Teetonic has begun posting the Six Cities shirts done by professional, big name designers. And, to be frank, they’re a hot mess. Let’s take a look…

The pages for these shirts aren’t currently labeled, so there’s no telling which professional is responsible for which shirt. Not that it really matters- of the four shirts, I only find two to be at all wearable.

Make It Better, the Glasgow shirt, is pretty decent. I like the subtle change to the last E, the color choice is excellent, and I dig the message. What hinders the shirt, though, it the bizarre placement. I don’t particularly wish to have text coming out of my armpit. If that text were just a couple of inches lower, this would have been a truly great shirt.

The other semi-decent shirt is the green one (the Dundee shirt), with a colorful collage of… stuff. I think I see trees, a bike, some people talking, maybe a building. It’s not an original concept, and you can get shirts similar to this from any number of places. I wish there were some cool details to this collage (maybe some interesting size choices or new objects created out of several images… I’m just spitballing here, but there were options). It’s disappointing, but still wearable.

And now, the unwearable…

The tiny tie shirt, representing Inverness, is just odd to me. Why ties? Why tiny? Why safety orange? The world may never know. All I can say is that I have never seen ties that small in nature, and it weirds me out. I assume that there are six ties to represent the six cities, but beyond that I don’t understand anything about this.

And finally, Red Square of Stirling. Again, I have a lot of questions. Namely, who the eff is paying $34 for this weird shirt? There must be a story behind this, right? Maybe the square represents some kind of Scottish tradition I don’t understand. The sloppiness of this shirt is even represented in the product page, which list the shirt color as being orange (same as the tiny tie shirt) instead of red, as the picture clearly shows.

Two more shirts should be on the way, hopefully those are at a higher level than this mess (excepting Make It Better, which is acceptable).

And the real tragedy of all this is that I think Teetonic typically does some really nice work. Their regular design competition certainly has a higher level of quality than this Six Cities competition did. Here’s a sampling of some of their more typical shirts:

Much better, right? Teetonic is a really great site, and this Six Cities competition was definitely not up to par for them.