[I'm busy as hell, please excuse the recent rash of blurb-based posts]
This one’s probably the most open-ended contest that Threadless has ever run (apart from the regular contest… obviously), because its theme is just ‘Travel’. The winner gets sent to Iceland which is really cool, even if that country is probably about to go bankrupt.

Community-centric tee shirt company Threadless.com is proposing its design community to describe their taste for adventure in its latest “Threadless Loves Travel” challenge. Whether a tropical getaway, a trip to space, a road trip across the country, or even a walk to the kitchen, designers are asked to bring their stories of continent-hopping and deepest travel desires to life.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Sponsors for the Threadless Loves Travel challenge have made it possible for the creator of the chosen design to actually fulfill his or her dreams of travel. Icelandair, action sports accessories company Dakine, IES Abroad (Institute for the International Education of Students), and even the band Calexico, are each making it possible for the best design to take to the skies in style. The creator of the winning design will receive a bounty of traveling goodies including two round-trip tickets to Iceland on Icelandair, a $1k credit to a travel site of his or her choosing, courtesy of IES, a Dakine Split Roller 90 Travel Bag, and a personalized song, written by Calexico, inspired by the winning design.

“Threadless Loves” challenges give designers an opportunity to flex their skills and design to a particular challenge. Challenges are sponsored and supported by companies relevant to the idea. Previous “Loves” partners include Hot Chip, Moby, MTV’s Human Giant, and the Lomographic Society International.

As always, designers will also receive a $500 Threadless gift certificate and $2,000 in cash!

Deadline for entries is October 22, 2008. For more info on the design challenge and all its partners, hit the links below:

Threadless
Threadless Loves Travel

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Tags » contest • design competition • Iceland • Threadless • travel

The Scribtee crew have dropped three designs, all of which are printed on American Apparel tees as usual; one by Aliadotony (the grey one), one by Ninhol (the white one), and one by Attilla “Ilja” from Berlin (the black face tattoo one). I’d say that my favourite of the bunch is Favela (the white one), all the pretty colours make me stop thinking about how crappier places they are to live!

Scribtee

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Tags » aliadotony • American Apparel • black • design competition • Germany • grey • ninhol • scribtee • white

I don’t know why I cover laFraise’s weekly releases when I don’t do the same for Threadless or Design By Humans, or the rest of the myriad of design competitions out there, I guess its because no one else really touches laFraise, probably because they’re still stubbornly ignoring American shoppers (the laFraise US store isn’t current enough to carry anything from the past few months of releases). I don’t know why they’re not given the praise that they so clearly deserve by the tee world, they consistently print some fantastic designs (Black Colors, one of this weeks designs, is particularly beautiful), get lots of great, well-known artists designing for them, and their prize package certainly isn’t to be sniffed at either.

laFraise

*Whilst we’re talking about competitions, here’s a reminder that you’ve less than a week to enter the Philadelphia contest to win a Threadless t-shirt and $50 gift certificate.

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Tags » American Apparel • casajordi • competition • contest • design competition • France • lafraise • Mens • T-shirts • Womens

I really hope that Google tranlsated that correctly, I wouldn’t want to be insulting any Brazilians/Portuguese out there.

Camiseteria have released six great new designs, so check them out in the gallery and then head on over to their site to put your language skills to the test.

Camiseteria

*Thanks to Fabio from Camiseteria for re-writing the title for me so that it made sense!

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Tags » American Apparel • black • brazil • creme • design competition • grey • purple • red • T-shirts

Hmmm, it feels like its been way too long since I last posted about a robot t-shirt, so here’s one from Bang Bang T-shirts (who you may have noticed have a lovely new ad banner).

This design, showing a robot appreciating robotic takes on classic artworks, was the winner of their recent ‘Robots’ design competition, and was designed by daniellesgarden.

Costiness=£13.99 (free worldwide shipping) Buy It Here

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Tags » American Apparel • bang bang t-shirts • blue • daniellesgarden • design competition • robot • robots • T-shirts • UK

I think that the thing that drew most people to itself. was the fantastic glove pocket tee, and designers were probably drawn in by the possibility of a $4000 cash prize for submitting a winning design, but if you took a closer look at itself. then you would have found a very promising site with some excellent designs.

Initially, itself.’s tee designs were fairly subdued affairs, single colour designs printed onto white tees. Recently though, their design competition has resulted in a couple of rather more colourful winners, but I still think that their first wave of offerings has a lot of charm about them, and ‘more tape?’ is no exception. It’s simple, it’s fun, and I have absolutely no idea what it means, if its meant to mean anything, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, that’s how I like it. The original version had stripes running down to the hem, but I think it looks a lot cleaner and executes the concept better with a few less stripes.

itself. don’t rely on a third party such as American Apparel or Continental Clothing to produce their tees, they use a custom shirt that they’re really proud of and with pretty good reason too. If you click through on that last link, you’ll see why they like their tees so much, a wide and loose neck, thin ribbing on the neck, as printed tag rather than a hang tag that might be slightly irritating. These things all show that they’ve looked at what they would like to wear, and then seen that vision through. I’m sure they also used to claim that they dipped all the tees in a special wash of love and joy (or something along those lines), but I can’t see it on the site now. The tee is indeed very soft, and the fit is really nice, ever so slightly shorter and ever so slightly thinner in the body than an AA tee (at leas that’s how it felt, I haven’t checked the figures). I’m not in love with the neck though, wide necks aren’t really my style, they make me feel like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but it isn’t exactly so big that it would put me off from buying the tee. In terms of the print, I was worried that it wrapping around under the arms would make it feel a bit constricting, but thankfully that isn’t the case with the water-based ink print.

Costiness=$21 Buy the Mens Version/Womens Version

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Tags » design competition • funny • itself • review • Reviews • T-shirts • white

When I took a quick look, and it was a very quick look, at the submissions to Terratag’s design competition (basic guidelines: design a t-shirt with a robot on it) I wasn’t actually all that impressed with what I saw, but I guess that I must have missed this design, because I really like the concept, and the execution is pretty great too, so its a good thing it won the competition or I would have never seen it.

Costiness=£20 Buy the tee here

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Tags » alice in wonderland • design competition • grey • mad hatter • movies • robot • T-shirts • terratag

Remember the Popdeck x laFraise competition that I mentioned a while back? Well, it seems that things have taken on an exciting and unexpected twist!

If you purchase any deck from Popdeck (not just the winner from the laFraise competition) you’ll receive the Popcorn design that was one of the laFraise winners. That shirt costs €23 from the laFraise store, and its printed on an organic American Apparel tee, decks from Popdeck cost $40 (the $32 shipping cost to the UK is pretty high, but hey, a deck weighs a fair amount). I could do the rest of the math for you, but now matter how you plug the numbers into the equation your calculator is always going to read “hey, that’s a great deal!”

To get your free tee you first need to purchase the deck, then send an e-mail info@popdeck.com with your size. As you’d imagine, this deal is strictly whilst supplies last, so it might be a good idea to get on it sooner than later if you’re interested.

Popdeck

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Tags » collaboration • deck • design competition • free • lafraise • popdeck • skate deck • T-shirts

Allmightys are rapidly turning into my favourite European design competition, they’ve got the quality, the community, the artists, and I just get a generally good feeling about them. Their latest themed competition was based around patterns. As you can probably tell from the gallery above, the winners were a pretty diverse bunch, branching off from what I’d consider a pattern by a few degrees, but still creating clever designs that are undeniably patterns. My pick ‘o the bunch is actually the Gold Prize winner of the contest, Slum, a great colourway and beautifully illustrated, bravo, darruda!

Allmightys

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Tags » allmightys • darruda • design competition • europe • Mens • patterns • T-shirts • Womens

itself (yeah, no capitalisation even though its the start of a sentence, that’s just how they roll) have hit another one out of the park with their latest competition winner, called Pandora’s Box, by an artist called Draco who I haven’t heard of before but would be happy to see popping up on my browser again.

Costiness=$21 Buy the tee here

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Tags » design competition • draco • green • itself • Mens • T-shirts • Womens