The past few days we’ve presented the 14 submissions for Spreadshirt’s 1st ever API contest. Now we’re ready to name the winners! As you saw in Martin’s posts (Part 1 and Part 2), we broke the submissions down in to 5 different categories. The majority of the submissions fell into the category “bringing different types of content to clothing”. In the API contest’s description, we purposely decided against laying down clear category boundary lines – but this is still covered within our platform strategy. The fact that many of the submissions fell into this type of category has influenced how we approach our API and how future contests will be organized. But, more on that at a later date.
Intro out of the way, let’s get to the winners! After lots of meetings and hefty discussion, we decided to award the prizes as follows:
1st Place (€1,500 each): Face it Shirt by kwellman // Shirtgraph by soe
2nd Place (€1,000 each): Draw it Yourself by stricon // Shirtpress by nucci
3rd Place (€500 each): SnapShirt by fahim // Drag to Shirt by kwellman
Martin has written descriptions about each of the apps. That’s why we’ll give a “global explanation” of how the jury came to their decisions.
As we have written many times and repeated in our API presentation: our strategy is to bring different kinds of content onto t-shirts. That’s why a focus was placed on mashups like Face it Shirt or ShirtGraph.
We also continue to be interested in integrating other systems according to the multi-channel principle. Apps that fall into this category are Shirtpress (which, compared to the second WordPress submission, had a better layout and didn’t use an iFrame), Drag to Shirt (very easy to integrate into websites) or SnapShirt (Android app). We also all had Draw it Yourself on our list of favorite apps – even though its development wasn’t completely finished, the tool has a lot of potential and uses the t-shirt as a surface to express creativity, almost like a canvas.
We’d also like to take this chance to highlight the QR apps. We especially liked QR Code Shirt and qrshirt.mobi because they had a nice and intuitive user interface. We also nod our heads at the very comprehensive software by t-shirtselbstgestalten. Even though these three apps didn’t make it up on the podium, we were really excited about the ideas and complexity that were put into the projects. As a small consolation prize, we would like to thank these three developers with a 12 month premium membership.
Many thanks as well to all of the participants (check your inboxes) and hope that you continue to tinker with our API!
@MartYn – we have yet to test how the quality of a digital print from these sites will look on a shirt. Instagram photos with their “retro” look might work better in lower quality, and some Facebook photos are of pretty high quality. We’re certainly interested to see how they will print – and will certainly show you those tests 🙂
@Kitaro – thanks for your feedback. You are right, most of the apps allow you to add pixel based designs to a shirt. While we also think vector prints are superior in quality, we see the value of apps like these as well. Because so many people use Facebook, instagram etc. for photosharing – and the demand is there. Our service is there to allow people to add all kinds of content imaginable to shirts.
On a side note, we are currently working on ways to speed up the vector upload process (perhaps you have noticed this already). This direction opens up doors for us to someday allow vector uploads “on the fly”. We’ll certainly keep you updated on this.
The projects are good (technically speaking) however most of them are designed to create tshirt from photos (facebook, url, instagram). Do you really think that your partners are going to use them? For the tshirth the quality should be greater than the quality of these websites and most of the partners are using vector graphic designs, not pictures, because the quality is better. Anyway, congratulations to all the winners.
One thing has come to mind with the idea of putting Facebook photos and Instagram photos on shirts. Won’t the quality of the photos be really poor when printed as the quality of the photos on these two websites are generally low quality pictures to start with?