One of the strengths of the process we use at ChoiceShirts is our ability to print on dark garments. This process did not happen overnight, and while the successful effects we produce are the effort of many months of testing and trial runs, it’s one of the things that we’re confident sets us apart and we continue to test and maintain the highest level of quality we can.

Certain shirt styles, brands, and colors react differently to the ink and spray treatments we use than others. This makes our process extremely challenging (though our print technicians call it “fun”). Every shirt style that we offer has gone through the rigorous testing to make sure that it doesn’t harm our production workflow, and that we’re able to ensure that the customer receives a shirt that looks and wears as they expected.

Even with all of this testing, we need to stay on top of our game: today, we were printing a large order on black tank tops. We noticed that one of the sizes of this particular style reacted poorly to the spray treatment, and we had to sidestep our production process to go through some testing, rather than consume a good deal of time and product creating sub-standard shirts for the order.

Printing shirts, like any other process, has the potential to throw unexpected difficulties into your production. The key to these curveballs is to minimize their affect your production, and instead, use them to improve your final product. A “mistake” still has value so long as there’s a lesson to be learned.

We’ve just wrapped up the finishing touches on a few new designs, most of which were relatively political. During the digital preparation I ran into a small hurdle. Not a new hurdle but instead just a self imposed dilemma caused by a memory lapse. I created every design in RGB format and completely forgot to covert and adjust the files to CMYK before my test printing. Now anyone who knows anything about pre-press preparation knows that this is not good. All of the files that I printed were dulled due to the color change over. Usually I would design using CMYK from the door or use RGB and spend some extra time tweaking and adjusting my colors after converting to CMYK but I just completely forgot. I did manage to adjust all of the designs barely making my design deadline. You can check out the end result. I tried to stay as bipartisan as possible :-).

Color managing is extremely important when designing for printing. Since monitors use the RGB color spectrum and most printers use CMYK, you really have to know your stuff and make sure you are set-up properly. We calibrate our monitors once a week using the Eye-One Gretag Macbeth color spectrometer. The prices for the spectrometer range anywhere from $250 to $2,500 so there is a product for pretty much anyone. This is definitely not a tool that you want to overlook. It ensures that what you are seeing on your monitor is what you will see post printing. Without this tool you are playing a guessing game.

Earlier in the week, Matt and Matt reflected on one of the biggest bothers of being a designer: creative block.

We’ve been thinking about the Choice100 and how we can use what we’ve learned and experienced as a company to help you, as a creative, be more successful. From our conversations internally and with our creative friends, we’ve come up with a few thoughts on the most painful moments of being a designer:

• Limitations of software, technique, or medium
• Lack of inspiration
• Misdirected leadership
• Perfectionism
• Ego

We’re thinking of all of these things as we build opportunities into the Choice100 program. So we’re asking you, what are your pain points as a designer? Where do you struggle the most?

You can respond in the comments, and video comments rock too.

Matt Cohen here and posting here for the first time. I’m the founder and current president of ChoiceShirts and now I’m taking on the new role as co-blogger with Alex Hillman for the Choice100. Alex and I decided to split up this blogging to make it a bit more interesting for our readers. I told him I’d take one post per week so you the reader could get a better sense of the nuts and bolts of ChoiceShirts and the business side of things while Alex and his team focus on building out the needed social elements of the Choice100.

This week as we gear up and continue building out the pieces for the Choice100 I wanted to focus on our art department and specifically on Matt G, our art production supervisor. Matt started out in our warehouse a few years ago but slowly climbed his way up to his true passion…art. Matt is responsible for making sure all our digital art gets prepped, ripped and printed correctly, efficiently and with the utmost care to design and print quality. I asked Matt to sit down this week and talk about some of his challenges especially as a designer. Oh yeah, Matt G produces a lot of the digital artwork seen on the ChoiceShirts.com site. Here’s what he had to say:

Creative Block

Creative blocks. We all have them at times but I seem to always forget how mind numbing they can be. I probably created five shirt designs that I scrapped today. Nothing seems to come out the way I want it to. I really wanted to start conceptualizing some political designs. I did my usual research and came up with a couple of pretty cool ideas (i.e.: Obama Fo’ Yo Mama, Vote Billary, McCain wrestling the democratic donkey, and a couple more) but every time I went to finalize the design I just hated it. Nothing looked the way I envisioned it. I kept thinking back to an art class assignment that I had in the 9th grade. The first day of class the teacher instructed us to come up with a design that represented a creative block. We had full liberty to create whatever our young imaginative brains could come up with. Ironically I had no shortage in creativity. I painted a cubed globe that was crammed with a ton of bright graphics in the suns light. On the opposite side of the globe was little old me standing alone on the dark side of the planet. I hit a home run with this design and received a good grade as well. Only if it were always that smooth but I understand that it comes with the territory. With the Choice100 campaign peeking its head around the corner I am not too discouraged. There will be plenty of designs and I will be one of many artists contributing. Tomorrow is a new day so I am just going sleep on it.

Here’s to a creative tomorrow!

Matt G.

As I mentioned in our previous post before we left for SXSW Interactive 2008, this conference (like many others in the interactive industry) is a haven for great tees.

I brought a couple of my own favorite shirts to the conference, but I couldn’t help myself when browsing through photos of the week gone by to mark off some other standout t-shirts to share with you!

I’re starting a Flickr pool for others to contribute their favorite SXSW T-shirt photos to, you can join that by visiting the SXSW Tees Flickr Group and submitting your favorite photos to it.

As I continue to go through around 13,000 event photos (the internet is a crazy place), I’ll continue to update our favorites list so check back once in a while to see what else we might have spotted!

In 2 short weeks, ChoiceShirts and I will be taking to the road and participating in SXSW Interactive 08 in Austin, Texas. For those of you unfamiliar with SXSW, it’s a conference previously dominated by it’s music and film components, but in recent years has been taken storm by thousands of web geeks, social networking fiends, and most importantly for us, some of the worlds best graphic designers.

Uploaded by Cookiecrook

Another component of SXSW that is generally well known is the volume of really great tees that are exchanged between various brands and their fans. Geeks LOVE t-shirts. You can check out some of last year’s favorites in this flickr pool we found, published by Smith Magazine.

Wouldn’t it be cool to see your design featured among the best SXSW tees photo pool for next year? We thought so, too!

How to participate:

We’re admittedly crunched on time, so you have to act fast. Here’s the scoop:

• We need all submissions by 6pm EST, Monday March 3rd. That gives us just enough time to pick a design and get it printed to take on the road with us.
• Shirts should be funny, appeal to geeks and designers, and utilize the ChoiceShirts/Choice100 logo. Because SXSW is in Texas, we’re looking for Texas themes as well. Think cowboy hats, cacti (thats plural for cactus, right?), tumbleweed…you get the picture.
• You can download an asset pack that includes our logo in vector art, as well as the fonts you need. Please mind the license, these assets are just for sharing between us.
• Be sure to review our “no rules” post to find out what kinds of designs we can print. We’re flexible, its really just a size limit (15″x19″). We can print vector or raster images in full color!

We’re going to pick our favorite design to represent the Choice100, print up 100 of them and take them with us to Austin to give out to other awesome designers from around the world to show them what kind of artists we’re looking to recruit. We’ll also be taking pictures of people we give them to and adding them to a flickr pool so you can see people wearing your shirt!

You’ll get one of these exclusive tees for yourself, as well, along with $100 cash as a thank you for your hard work. And of course, you’re going to be one of the first people we come to once we fully launch the Choice100 program in just a couple of months! Plus, what’s cooler than knowing that your favorite graphic designer hero is wearing your shirt! If you do have a design-idol that is attending SXSW, and we meet them, we’ll do our best to snap a photo of them and your tee, and share that with you.

In the event that you win AND you’re already attending SXSW, we’ll take you out to dinner one night as well, since we love nothing more than to talk shop and hang out with cool people. That’s why we’re going to SXSW in the first place!

To submit:

Email your vector art (along with a jpg thumbnail, to help us review quicker) to submit@thechoice100.com with the subject “SXSW Submission”. Be sure to include your contact info so we can get back to you if we pick you design!

Remember, you’ve only got until Monday, March 3rd to get them in.

Real quick, one more time:

• Design a SXSW shirt that includes Texas themes and the ChoiceShirts logo by March 3rd.
• You get a free shirt with your design, $100 cash, and we print 100 copies of your design to hand out at SXSW, and a chance of having your shirt among the ranks of “coolest t-shirts at SXSW”. Nothing beats that kind of street cred!

Just a touch over a month since the last you heard from us over here at the Choice100 project. Last time we spoke we were all psyched to start taking artwork. We even had a couple of people email us sample art, and the stuff you sent us was great! We were so excited to be able to properly take art, and then we realized that we still had some things to figure out on our end. So, many apologies at this time, but know that our radio silence here on the blog doesn’t mean that we haven’t been working our t-shirts off figuring out what to do with the awesome artwork from our contributors!

The biggest development in the last stretch of brainstorming has been a re-approach to our submission process. Previously, we’d stated that we were looking for the best of the best to participate in our Choice100 Shirt Designer community, but we hadn’t really been explicit on how to become a Choice100 artist.

Unlike other design contests where you submit art and then WAIT for the community to vote before it goes up for sale, the FIRST step of our process is getting your art up for sale. You get up to three submissions at the first step of our program. That doesn’t mean you will get all of the awesome benefits of being a Choice100 artist right away, but it does mean that sales of your art count as votes towards you getting into the Choice100, and all along the way, you’re benefiting from your art being for sale instead of it sitting on a shelf waiting to be sold!

As soon as your first shirt is sold, you’ve earned credit for it. Once you sell ten shirts, you’ll move up to the next level and start experiencing our affiliate benefits! At that point you’re earning more dollars, and you get to submit 3 more designs for sale. More designs for sale means more chances to make sales, and another step closer to the Choice100. You’ll also start getting additional promotional material from us to help you sell.

Now that you’re selling shirts, how do you become one of the Choice100 to get all of the benefits we have to offer? Stand out! Show us that you mean business as a t-shirt designer, and we’ll make it our business to help you succeed. Once you’ve made it to the Choice100, you’ve proven your ability to consistently produce the most fantastic work that we, and our customers, have ever seen. And we’ll be rewarding you appropriately!

There are a few more simple steps that we’re creating between submitting new art for sale, and achieving the ultimate goal of being inducted into the Choice100, but we don’t want to give away all of our secret sauce just yet. You’ll have to stay tuned for more, and we promise, it won’t be a whole month before you hear from us again.

We’re excited to hear from people about our new approach, so sound off in the comments!

If you’re familiar with screen print design, you know that there can be some limiting factors to how you design, and what you can print on garments. Each color requires the production of another plate, and generally, printing on certain colors proves challenging. Certain shapes, lines, and blends become challenging if not impossible on certain color garments.

No color restrictions - just set your canvas size!

When you’re designing for the Choice100, you can throw all of those color restrictions to the wind! This should let you concentrate on designing great shirts rather than worrying about limitations of the production process.

All you need to do is set up your “canvas” of choice for a 15″ x 19″ printing area. Our high-tech, direct-to-garment printing process lets us print in FULL color, with hard lines, soft lines, blends, and curves of nearly any shape and size. Even photos!

What can we print on?

Well, we’re here to print t-shirts. You aren’t restricted to the color of the shirt; we can print onto darks, lights, almost any color fabric that we can order from one of our t-shirt suppliers. If you have a specific shirt color that you’d like to print on, include it in your submission and we’ll do our best to match it.

One small catch is the AREA on which we can print. If you look above at the printable area, there is a little room for flex but we aren’t currently able to print designs that wrap around the side of the shirt. Sorry, maybe in the future!

What can I use to design?

The easiest way to put your artwork on a shirt is to submit it as a digital file. Ideally, a digital vector created in Illustrator or Photoshop. Vector art will keep its quality best when going through our process. However any image sized to 15″ x 19″ and saved to a PDF, Adobe Illustrator (AI) or Photoshop (PSD) file with CS2 or lower compatibility, or even a TIFF. Be sure that the background is transparent if it is meant to be in the final product!

Once I submit, who owns the work?[*updated* 1/18/08]

We understand that licensing is a common concern for artists. Our generous License Terms puts a great deal of the control in your hands. Submitting a piece of art to us does not automatically revoke your right to use the artwork anywhere else. Once the shirt design is accepted to the Choice100, we will have exclusive rights to print the design on t-shirts only and certain non-exclusive marking and promotion rights. If you want to use the art elsewhere, on a poster for example, you may do so as you wish.
If your design falls out of the Choice100 ranks and we are no longer selling it, we return all reproduction rights, regardless of print medium, back to you as an artist.

The short answer is: participate in the Choice100!

The longer answer is: participate in the Choice100 and not only make money selling high-quality tees without having to worry about overhead and inventory, but have a network of designers and design inspiration to help you be a better designer and sell even MORE tees!

We’re really, really excited to start 2008 with a bang, and we finally have some details about our membership incentive program to share with you, our potential Choice100 designers. The program takes sales incentives into account, as well as group performance and raw commission. This is one of the most rewarding programs out there, and we hope you think it is too.

Signing Bonus

If you create a design that you want to sell through the Choice100 network, you will be able to submit it for consideration. Upon approval as a printable and saleable shirt, we will help you choose a design category for it and put it up for sale in a dedicated section of the ChoiceShirts online store. It will be available for sale there, and available for you to link to from your Choice100 Blog page (each Choice100 artist gets one), personal blog, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or anywhere else that you want to promote your shirt design. You begin receiving referral and commission dollars from the first sale, but once you reach your 10th sale for every design you submit, you will receive a $100 signing bonus per design to congratulate you on your official entry into the Choice100!

Sales Commission

By linking into the dedicated Choice100 section of the ChoiceShirts store, you are able to sell your shirts without having to worry about any fancy e-commerce solutions, shopping carts, credit card processing fees, and most of all production and inventory overhead. You can link in from your Facebook page, Myspace page, personal site, blog, twitter, instant message profile: ANYTHING! We will pay out a 20% commisson of ALL orders that come from your referrals, even shirts that aren’t ones that you designed. With average shirt prices around $20, that’s $4 per shirt ordered, whether you designed it or not. That means if you sell other people’s shirts, or anything from our own wide selection of tees, along with your own, you make bonus cash!

Designer Royalties

We think that you should not only get credit for your hard work selling, but your hard work designing. That’s why we’re going to pay a $3 per shirt royalty for each sold using your design, regardless of who sells the shirt! So if you’re doing a good job of selling your own shirts, you’ll could earn $3 royalty + $4 commission (on a $20 tee-shirt) per shirt sold. That means you can be making $7 per shirt. And remember, you can have more than one design for sale at a time, increasing your profits!

Performance Bonuses

On top of sales commission and royalties, we’ll be sharing even more opportunities for sharing in profits with designers who created top-selling designs. Cash and prize incentives will be assessed and rewarded each month, and you can even win bonuses up to two months in a row!

Group Rewards

We’re setting our goals high, and hoping that as a group, the Choice100 can pull through! Large group participation goals will be designed to get the Choice100 artists motivated to sell as a whole, and will be able to receive large prizes (like cash in the THOUSANDS of dollars), together!

Fun Events with New Friends

In addition to all of the financial incentives, the Choice100 will also be organizing face to face events, starting in Philadelphia where we are based out of and hopefully spreading across the country to city-based “chapters” of our Choice100 design community. A lot of focus will begin locally here in Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean you can’t participate!

Are you excited yet? We’ve got an aggressive schedule for the rest of this month to start receiving design submissions for our launch event.

Stay tuned for more on that. Be sure to subscribe to find out more about our launch!

As we’ve said before, we know that we’re not the first t-shirt community out there. What we’re hoping will help set us apart is how we’re really raising the bar for the definition of community by sharing ownership in the ideas!

Original photo by Bryan Loar

In the Choice100, it’s not just about a group of designers working with each other to create awesome t-shirts and explore the realm of t-shirt design, but also about a group of designers being given an opportunity to be decision makers for the future of ChoiceShirts. That’s pretty awesome, for an established company with a successful business model like ChoiceShirts’ to give up some control and realize the power of the empowered.

Our exact method of sharing ownership is still being defined (want to help? check out the question of the day at the bottom!). The goal is to have an enlightened and empowered body of talent not only as a resource for the ChoiceShirts, but use the resources that Choice can provide (marketing, sales, and low overhead direct-to-garment printing) to the benefit of the designers that participate. This is a mutual type of ownership that is unique, in our opinion, since it lessens the chance for designers to feel like they are being taken advantage of and really puts the focus on letting them shine. Our thought is, if you do well, we can do well. So why not do whatever we can to help you do well?

In other contest-driven sites, where designs simply get voted on to decide if they go into production, a designer may make it through the gauntlet once, have their product hit the market, and regardless of successful or poor sales, never make it back again. What we hope is that, by fostering a sense of pride from ownership in the process, designers will continue to return with high quality work over and over. Furthermore, the owners will be diverse, lending to a highly diverse decision making process and hopefully, a higly diverse (and therefore increasingly more popular) end product.

Original photo by L. Marie

Think of it this way: how interesting is a community of designers who are all creating the same types of designs? Wouldn’t it be more fun if a designer known more for craft-related tees were commenting on the blog of a designer known for making motorcycle enthusiast tees? I think we’d have some pretty neat commentary coming across the wires!

I think we’re about to discover some people’s hidden passions and interests, just by engaging a diverse community who are all after the same common goal: the success of the Choice100!

And with that, the Question of the Day!

If you could make one decision for any company that you buy from, what would it be?
And get creative, no “I’d tell Apple to give me free computers for life!” answers.

Thanks for your input everyone!