Threadbare

I got dinged... apparently because of one of these:

- Each submission must be approved by 3 Judges before being put in the running.
- Improperly sized thumbnails and designs
- The design has too many colors
- The design has a gradient or halftones
- Submission did not use the templates
- Inappropriate material within the design
- The design contains copyrighted material
- The design is too large to print

I think I did all the middle ones, so it's either too large or just not good enough (almost definitely the latter!). I'll try again some day soon...

Threadless, not threadbare

I posted my first design to Threadless today, I'll find out in about a week if it has been accepted to be scored and scrutinised by the masses. The basic premise of the shirt is a play on CTRL-A meaning "select all". Yes, I'm a geek, but geeks rule the world (and hopefully buy the T-shirts to prove it) so fingers crossed :)

This T-shirt design is my first ever attempt at using a vector illustration program. I downloaded the trial version of Zoner Draw 5 (rather than paying several hundred pounds for a copy of Macromedia Illustrator) and it was relatively painless, once I figured out the basics... like how to join shapes together and fill them with colours.

For those that have never heard of it, Threadless is a T-shirt site. "Great!" I hear you say. But there's a twist... Threadless is a Web 2.0 T-shirt site, which means that community collaboration is the key.

The designs are created by users. The designs are voted on by users. The most popular ones (via the black box of Threadless' final decision making process) get turned into T-shirts. Users then buy them and send in photos of themselves wearing them. They also tell all their friends to visit Threadless and buy them too.

So Threadless, as far as I can tell, needs no designers, market research, no models, no photographers, no advertising budget... just a website, a warehouse and a bank account. Now why didn't I think of that :)

h4ppier photos - updated

To all you flickr users out there, I have updated my flickr app  h4ppierphotos  after a few months of inactivity. You can now:

1. In basic view: You can remove tags from batches of photos.
2. In advanced view: You can choose to sort 'search all' results by ascending or descending 'date taken'.
3. In advanced view: You can timeshift the 'date uploaded' for batches of photos.
4. In advanced view: You can change the 'date uploaded' to match the 'date taken'. Use this to make your flickr photostream match the actual order in which your photos were taken!
5. There seems to be a glitch in the flickr API at the moment so searching for photos 'not in sets' doesn't play well with setting date ranges. I'll check this over the next few days/weeks and post an update if this is fixed. This is a 'read only' glitch so will not affect any of your photos - you might just get blank searches where you expected to see something show up.

If you'd like to leave feedback about the app, please post a message on the  h4ppierphotos  flickr forum.