I'm taking today to travel back home from vacation. I'll have some reflections tomorrow, but in the meantime...
It's been a while since we've had official Blazersedge T-Shirts go up for sale. We had numerous designs in the past, all of which have long sold out. (If you have one at home, WOOT to you!) Instead of just fabricating and ordering a design whole cloth this time (see what I did there?) I've decided to open up a contest for the best design, the winner of which will be chosen by popular vote in a run-off and will become the official Blazersedge shirt for 2010-11. The winning designer will get something cool too. I don't know what yet.
Here are the guidelines for designing a shirt. Please read them carefully. If you don't follow them your design won't be considered.
1. You can use any readily-available design process at your disposal. Cafepress is fine. Other reputable websites are fine. If you have connections with or own a screen-printing service that's fine too. As long as the production process is reliable we'll consider it. Most online sites have design tools and photos at your disposal as you create shirts. Just send the final photo plus the name of the site you created it on to the e-mail listed below.
1a. Note that a theoretical design detached from an actual t-shirt producer means nothing, as there's no way to determine practicality or cost of the design. Use a pre-existing company to design your shirt and send the name of the site you used along with the design photo.
2. You may not use any trademarked logos, including and especially the Trail Blazer logo. The only exception is that I believe I can get permission to use our current (not former) site logo if you want to include elements of that.
3. Shirts must be made of decent material and must cost no more than $20 at final purchase and under $15 will earn you STRONG preference for getting in the finals. (If it costs $20 it had better be the shirt to end all shirts.) Keep the dollar figures strictly in mind. In the past people have come up with all kinds of ideas that looked great on paper but ended up as a $30 t-shirt. We don't have that kind of market. We want to give away some as prizes without going bankrupt. Try to do more with less.
4. E-mail your design submissions to blazersub@yahoo.com. DO NOT post your ideas on the site in comments, Fanposts, Fanshots, Junk Drawers, or anywhere else. We don't want the sidebar gummed up with 100 shirt ideas and we don't want people rallying personal support. We just want to compare the best shirts. I probably won't even include names of designers until after the shirts are voted on so we get a pure vote. E-mail submission is the ONLY valid form.
5. Submissions are due by August 31st. Try to get them in earlier if you can.
All of you budding fashionistas are invited to have fun with this! Enjoy!
--Dave (blazersub@yahoo.com)