I think it’s fair to say that no matter what design wins the Grand Prize,
Design By Humans are going to have some awfully nice tees to release over the next for weeks. The top 10 designs are up for voting for the rest of this week, at which point they will be cut down to a final 4 for another week of voting (this does all seem a bit drawn out, doesn’t it?), when the victor will be crowned. The smart money would be on
collisiontheory taking the prize for a second year in a row, but it’s a strong field I wouldn’t be surprised if any of them won. The whole top 10 can be found in a gallery after the break.
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My apologies for the page of pics before getting down to the text (because I know you hang off my every word… right? Guys? Hello? Is anyone reading?), but I wanted to show you a few designs so that the effect was clear. Basically, as the tee gets hotter, presumably from body heat, parts of the design change colour, changing the tone of the entire design. As you can probably guess from the title, this is an idea that I really like, I’d like to see it in reality rather than in mock-ups, but
Ink Fruit are clearly trying something really interesting. I’d probably be just as excited about the designs as the special ink if they hadn’t put the text on the tree & suitcase designs, but I guess I can’t have everything. I should probably point out that I can’t find the above tees in their catalogue, which is disappointing (I’d written the rest of the post before noticing), so I would expect that these tees are currently being produced, sorry to get you all excited.
Also make sure you check out Ink Fruit’s other tees, they’re a(nother) design contest that have some great tees in their catalogue. [via Shirtlog]
One brand that it would have been nice to see in Berlin at T-Shirt Day (since it’s where they hail from) is
Allmightys. They seem to have been a bit quiet recently which is unfortunate because when they release tees you can usually expect them to be of a very high standard, so I wish they’d release them more often!
The four tees above were all winners in their recent ‘Underwater’ themed contest. In the future Allmightys are switching from the themed competitions to a more straight-forward standard design competition that will be an open call for designs. For me this takes away part of what makes Allmightys special, I can understand why it has been done because as soon as you give something a theme you alienate some designers, but the themes were something different from what everyone else was doing (as a main part of their contest). Still, if it produces good designs then I won’t complain again.
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for
howies®, their tees rarely blow me away from a technical point of view, but they usually seemed to get things right and I got a good vibe from them. Yes, I said ‘vibe’, clearly 4 days in San Francisco changed me!
So, when I heard that howies were launching what is ostensibly a t-shirt design competition called teepay I rolled my eyes a little bit (more competitions?), but by the looks of things they’ve got it right again. If you know about Cameesa, then their business model will not come as a shock to you; designers upload designs, if 30 people order the tee then howies will print it onto their organic tees and post it out to you (though the FAQ states that it’s 50 orders), and the designer gets 10% of each sale, or they can choose to give their 10% to a charity of their choice. I can’t see what happens if you make an order and the tee doesn’t reach the minimum number of orders, but it’s safe to presume that you aren’t going to be paying for a tee that they don’t print.
In keeping with the charity theme, teepay are going to give 1% of their turnover or 10% of their pre-tax profits (whichever is greater) to environmentally and socially conscious charities through the ‘
1% for the Planet‘ organisation.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the designs do seem solid on the whole, especially the ones that have been printed, so hopefully that suggests that they’ve managed to get a good community of designers on-board early on, which should in turn attract more quality doodlers as time goes on. The ladies can expect to pay £20 for a tee, whilst the fellas will be parting with £25 to get their hands on some organic goodness.
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