Facebook is Out, Fair Play is In: New Design Contest Rules

You told us, we listened. Our process for selecting the winners of the Design Contest just got a large serving of justice. Find out what’s changed.

As you know, the winners for our regular Design Contests are selected by way of collecting votes on Facebook. Until now.

We received feedback from many contest participants that Facebook is an outdated platform on which to perform such voting, or that they are at an unfair disadvantage because they don’t use Facebook. We’ve also encountered some problems with bots and various other attempts at trickery on the platform. Most importantly, a Facebook voting system placed designers with large social media followings at an unfair advantage, while smaller or emerging designers had little chance to compete. And this is supposed to be a design contest, not a popularity contest.

The Design Contests are intended to help lift up talented designers and give everyone a fair chance to show off their skills (and earn considerable prize money in the process).

We took your concerns into consideration, had a long think, and came up with a fair-play way to choose who takes home the gold. From now on, the three winners will be selected by a panel of design experts at our Headquarters in Leipzig, Germany. Facebook voting is no more. Underdogs rejoice! Little fish now have just as much opportunity to win as the big fish.

Our jury knows their stuff. They work with designs for a living.

These are their criteria for each entry:

Does it come out well on a Spreadshirt product?

How relevant and suitable is the design for the contest?

Is the design unique and original?

Does the design show solid design skills?

There will now be just 3 phases to each contest:

Design submissions

Jury deliberation

Winner announcement

As always, only one of your submissions will be able to make the Top 3. Winners will be announced on the Design Contest page, as well as in the blog. We’re looking forward to seeing your submissions for our next contest, and we hope the more even playing field works to your advantage. Good luck!

What are you waiting for? Show us what you’ve got and enter the current contest today!

What do you think of our new, fairer system? Let us know in the comments below!