This new shirt over at Design By Humans has been receiving a lot of attention, and for good reason; it’s excellent!

I confess that upon first glance I didn’t “get it”.  At least not in the way the designer intended.  I casually assumed that the hands were trying to cut the colored rainbow stripe.  However, once I looked closely I saw that the rainbow stripe actually comes out of the wounded hand.

If I had to guess the meaning, I guess it’s that you can’t judge a book by its cover? A palm reader would have a hell of a time with this hand….

The positive spin – we received way more votes and comments on this one than we did last time.

The negative spin – we weren’t even close to winning.

Either way, it is back to the lab for us to create a bigger and better t-shirt design that is sure to break necks. Regardless of the results, and I am serious about this, the whole process is fun and exciting. When I submit a design, I can’t wait until the moderation is over and we are live for better or worse. Receiving votes and comments add to the overall experience and provides great feedback. We even suggest doing this if you are thinking about starting a t-shirt line.

So now it is time to retire this t-shirt design. For one last look at Seeing Sounds:

We had to do it again, we just entered the Design By Humans t-shirt contest and brought the best we had to offer right now. We went with the trendier hand drawn look and included the timeless boombox. The title of the design is Seeing Sounds and right now it is pending approval. I will post the design link as soon as possible. The light grey print on the shirt actually represents metallic silver. If you get a chance, please swing by and give me a vote.

**UPDATE** The artwork has been approved and you can click here to view and vote.

Here is a sneak preview:

As we previously chronicled, submitting t-shirt artwork to a t-shirt competition can be a tough contest. You can get ripped on your design, loved for it, or completely ignored. We purposely didn’t bring our “A game” the first time around because we wanted to work out the kinks of the process and make sure that we knew how everything worked. Meaning…we didn’t want our best artwork to go to waste by our own ignorance such as improperly submitting the artwork or something like that.

In the meantime we have sat back and become active members of the different t-shirt competition sites and are ready to enter the game again. We also went back to the lab and came up with a few different concepts and themes that we wanted to illustrate. As active members, it was easy to see that most of the winners had depth to them with double meanings.

Before we give away the house on the design that we have coming, we wanted to share a few thumbnails as a sampling of what we have been working on. Our expectations aren’t necessarily to win, although we would love that, but more to do much better than last time (3 votes).

Here are some thumbnails of the composite in black and white because we haven’t started to color it in. As soon as we add the color, we are going all the way live:

This is the 2nd day since the approval for our t-shirt design submission and we are having a good time studying the process. We didn’t put our best foot forward this go-round because we wanted to make sure we learned the game first. As of early Saturday morning, we have received 2 votes and are barely hanging on to the first voting page. As with our experience with Digg and making it to the home page there, we are going to assume that falling further down in the voting system will ensure less votes over time. In other words…..it should be over soon for us on our first submission.

Here are a few of the improvements that we can make next time:

1. Make better color selections for the shirt as it relates to the artwork.
2. Polish the design and add more detail.
3. Stick to the theme. We liked the idea of shooting stars and went with the 3D look because of the stars. Looking back now, we feel like the stars were appropriate for 3D but the guns and floral weren’t. We will probably fix the design up more and make it more western/darker for the next competition.

So it is back to the drawing boards for us. We have the next theme picked out and need to get to work. We have also learned a few secrets to the process that we will post later after we test them out some more. In the mean time, visit our site where you can custom design t-shirts for your next event.

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We are big fans of Design By Humans, the t-shirt design competition site. We have bought many a shirt from them because of the trendy designs, highly technical prints and ease of use on their website. Are you surprised to hear that coming from us? We love t-shirts just as much as you do and can recognize high quality whenever we see it.

Well, we have been sitting on the sideline too long and want to throw our hat in the ring. It will be a fun exercise for us and hopefully we’ll get a few votes. The hardest part for us was choosing the color of shirt to go with our “3D glasses effect” design. Here is our artwork and the two colors of shirts that we were choosing from:

We ended up going with the green t-shirt design to keep the colors bright. The name of the design is “Shooting Stars” and it can be found here. Since it is an election year, we don’t mind asking for your vote !

*Win or lose, we will be posting a t-shirt design tutorial in the next couple of days showing you how you can achieve the 3D look with your artwork. We will also be critiquing our own work and learning the in’s and out’s of t-shirt competition submissions. Stay tuned…..

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