3. Online Contest

Threadless is a t-shirt contest website where people like you design shirts in Illustrator and submit them to their website. After you submit your t-shirt graphic it is reviewed and given a score from their graphic design experts after one week. If your design was one of the best, you win a thousand dollars.

Guidelines

There are a number of guidelines by Threadless. View the list of reasons why your design may not be accepted. For example, you may only have a max of 8 colors including black and white.

Template

Threadless requires you to use their own template to submit your t-shirt. Download their template, insert your designs anywhere on the shirt, although you must choose one of their t-shirt colors, and move it into the work area box on the left side of the Illustrator file. Look through the photos below for examples of t-shirt layout ideas when you submit. When you are finished, save your design as a JPG at 150 dpi and make sure there are no designs outside the black box.

You may use guy or girl Threadless t-shirt models to display your shirt on your design submission. Feel free to cut them out in Photoshop.

Thumbnail

You will need to create a gif thumbnail of your submission. The thumbnail must be 100 x 70 pixels and under 10kb. When you have the files ready, and know what you want the title of your design to be, fill out the form to the right to send us your submission. Illustrator does not let you save GIF so you can first save it as a JPG and then open it in Photoshop. In Photoshop, create a new document with the dimentions, then go to file > save for web...here you will have more options to make your file smaller.

Submit

Go to the Threadless Submit page and create an account (your classID) on the right side of the page and complete the t-shirt design submission form on the right. When you submit it successfully, it will allow you to put in an email address to forward the confirmation status. Enter mouseflip@gmail.com and your class email to receive the confirmation.