Thanks Goth 🕸️🦇! Our design community simply is the best there is. We thank you for your overwhelming participation in the design contest – and we can hardly believe our luck. Over a hundred exciting designs were submitted to us, and these gloomy treasures were voted into the Top 20:
- Count Dracula design by Tizika
- Cat-a-combs designed by Lucky State
- Gothic Garden – Black Plants designed by derholle.de
- Gothic Girl designed by kimprut
- Angel of Darkness designed by spassfaktor-shirts.de
- Kawaii Gothic Unicorn designed by Dalukey
- Gothic Pentagon designed by Herbst Art
- Snake and Moon designed by OHSHIRTSHOP
- The White Crow designed by Monsieur Mouton
- Bleeding rose with cross stem and heart designed by Matches-EA
- The awakening of Catleman Jack designed by Fluse-san
- Aesthetics Gothic Skull Girl Femme Fatale designed by Sinus Herbst
- Gothic Aesthetics Goth Girls Pentagram Peter Cross designed by PxL Design
- Gothic Medieval designed by PandaKing
- Stag Demon designed by ArtCreativa Multimedia-Design
- Goth girl with raven – Witch with raven designed by Hopfauf
- Raven with Rosary designed by MadoDesignShop
- Relax only death is always busy designed by lalalalu
- Dark visions designed by jo bullfinch
- Mr. Smart Darkness designed by PONCE AND BANANA
It continues to be exciting! A jury consisting of Spreadshirt employees* will decide who will make the Top 10 from this top 20 short list. The results will be announced on 14.06.2023., just before the witching hour (by 23:59).
Hi Rico,
It seems like Spreadshirt is making this far more complicated than it is.
I never mentioned ‘font design’ because that is completely irrelevant to the topic of designing T-shirt prints. Typographical T-shirt designs can be made with existing fonts or they can be made with custom made typography. It should not matter at all whether a designer used a font or made every letter of the text themselfs. Because if the quality of the overall design is very good, then Spreadshirt won’t be able to tell if an existing font has been used or if the text has been custom made by the designer.
Simply typing straight lines of text and then calling your design finnished is far less original than a text of which you can clearly tell a lot of work went into the design. Anybody can judge which of the two is more original and which took more work.
I designed every letter of my design and combined it with illustrations. My design was not just straight lines of text, so you would be able to tell a lot of effort went into it. Whether I made it with an existing font, or I made every letter myself, that is irrelevant to the overall design. But unfortunately thinking in different ‘categories’ made it imposible for my design to compete with illustrations.
Spreadshirt should only judge every design on their originality and their overall design quality. Whether a design is a photo, an illustration, a text, or a combination of those, that shouldn’t matter. Because they are ALL T-shirt designs. So there is absolutely no reason at all to think in different ‘categories’ and reject a design just based on it being (mostly) text or whatever. They are ALL T-shirt designs, so please judge them all that way.
Kind regards,
Luc
Congrats to the designers that made it to the top 20! I’m happy for you, but …
As a designer who designs custom made typography, it is such a shame text based designs never ever make it to the next round of a design challenge from Spreadshirt. 75% of the designs that made the top 20 are from Germany (seems bias). 100% of the top 20 designs are illustrations, with only a few that contain a little bit of text.
Why doesn’t Spreadshirt value a more diverse top 20 to really give the customer a choice. Not all your customers want only illustrations. This way it will always be an illustration that wins.
I’m not so much disapointed I didn’t make the top 20 but I’m more disapointed that text based designs are not even given a chance to win.
I hope Spreadshirt will change its way a bit. Not only for my sake, but for the sake of other text based designers as well. We all want to feel like we have a chance to win.
Kind regards,
Luc
‘brandnewdesigns’ at Spreadshirt
Hello Luc,
Thank you very much for your constructive criticism. You have hit a sore spot. The reason why we prioritise illustrations is that font designs are simply much harder to evaluate. On the one hand, it requires jurors who are familiar with the creation of font designs, who are familiar with the matter of letter design and typesetting, to be able to evaluate the quality. A well-done font design can look like an ordinary text design to an inexperienced person, even though the letters may contain small fine details such as an individual width, kerning, strokedetails, special ascenders and descenders, open or closed counters and so on.
But we will try to include text designs more in the coming contests. We have a few ideas – without giving anything away.
Thank you for your feedback.