First Annual CMU Freshman
CS T-Shirt Design Contest
Fall 2006

Highlights

Make a high-resolution image of your shirt design and
submit it to pattis@cs.cmu.edu (as a uuencoded zip file).
Each image must include your class year (2010) somewhere
(prominent, hidden, integral to the design, etc.)
All entries must be submitted by Friday, November 3rd.
Entries will be posted then, for voting the subsequent week.
Preorders for the winning design will be taken, and the t-shirts
will be distributed before finals week.

Entering the Competition

Submit one large image for the back of the t-shirt, and optionally one smaller image for the front (e.g., a small "logo"). You are limited to two ink colors at most (the "third", background color, can be supplied by the shirt itself). If you intend your design to require a specific background color, also supply an auxiliary jpeg, in which the fabric color has been added as the background of the image (this is for web-voting purposes). If you used photoshop, include your .psd file.

With each submission, include a text file that contains the following information:

Your name (not announced during voting; but, the winner's name will be announced after voting finishes).
Intended color of shirt (if your design is intended to work with many or unspecified colors, the background of your images must be transparent). If you need to specify a shirt fabric color, choose from the following commonly available options: beige, black, blue, brown, burgundy, dark forest, heather gray, navy, orange, red, or white.
A brief description about your design, and any special instructions that may be necessary to understand it, position it properly on the shirt, or present it for voting.

File Format:

I'm guessing at the information below; if anyone has experience using images to produce t-shirts, please let me know -becoming the "production supervisor" is worth IC points too.

If possible, please create your designs with Adobe Illustrator or some other program that creates images with a vector file format. If you are able to do so, the design images you send should be in the .eps file format. If you use Photoshop, please remember to include your .psd file. Remember that while Photoshop has the option to save in the .eps format, it is still saving in bitmap rather than vector representation. For this reason, be sure to do the following BEFORE YOU BEGIN CREATING YOUR DESIGN:

Open Image/Image Size
Set the Resolution to something higher than 300 pixels/inch
Set the Document Size: a standard design on the back of a shirt is about 9x12 inches. Consider the size you would like your design to be, and adjust accordingly.

To sum up: either send us files in .eps format created with Adobe Illustrator, or send us files in .jpeg/.tiff/.png format with extremely high resolution, large size, and any accompanying project files.

Tips:

If you have difficulties realizing your design in the form of a digital image, feel free to ask friends with some experience to help you with the details.
Fine details are hard to reproduce with screen-printed fabric, so consider the size at which your design will eventually be rendered on a t-shirt and adjust the level of detail of your design accordingly.
Make the background (any part of your image in which you would like the shirt fabric color to be visible) of your image transparent.
Recall that you are limited to two ink colors; do not send an image with more, although you can specify an intended shirt color as the "third" color.
If you use two ink colors, you will likely find your design to be most effective if those two colors are quite different from each other, ideally complementary colors.
Although ultra-fine details will not render well, it is still important for you to pay attention to the drawing quality of your image: are parallel lines actually drawn parallel to each other? If you scanned a drawing, is there unsightly noise left in the image you're about to send? Etc.

Logistics

I must receive all entries by Friday, November 3rd.
On Monday, November 6th, I will place all the designs on the Entries web page and send out email to everyone with that url and a request to vote. The names of the artists will NOT appear on this page; the description of their design will.
Voting will occur from Monday, Nobember 6th to Friday, Nobember 10th, via a link on the Entries web page to SurveyMonkey.
I will announce the winner on Monday, November 13th and take orders (you'll need to specify a size and pre-pay) for that entire week. I'm expecting the price to be around $10/shirt.
I'll order the shirts immediately afterward, expecting that they will arrive by the start of finals, so we can distribute them before the winter break.

A Few Design Examples from UW

Here are some pictures of t-shirts that I still have from when I taught at the University of Washington (please excuse these quick photos of oft-worn clothing). They indicate the design level that I expect a talented undegraduate to exhibit.

Back: UW Dawg (their mascot is the Husky)