This is a very nice tutorial for slightly advanced things you can do with InkScape, and it's well written and easy to follow. Take a gander:

http://www.inkscape.org/doc/advanced/tutorial-advanced.html

With october coming up, there's a potential marketing idea you could use, given there's enough t-shirts to do so.

A section of the site dedicated to "Halloween costumes for the lazy"

Included could be shirts that serve as just that, a lazy Halloween costume.

There doesn't seem to be enough to make it worthwile, infact only Ceiling Fan and Infidel seem to really fit the bill, but perhaps that could be used as inspiration to some trying to create new shirts?

I logged back in after a few months to check to see if the agreement for submissions had changed from 90 days of tying up unselected designs -- it hasn't.

That's far too long. A design is voted on in a very short time; IMHO, tee virus should make it a point to decide within 5 additional working days (that's a full work week) if they want the design, or not.

One of the reasons I stopped submitting here was because of this 90 day "dead time" for any design submitted here that wasn't voted up and accepted by the tee virus folks. Bad enough for most designs, this is actually a killer for anything that has pop / news features. 90-day old social issues are often long forgotten.

I just thought I'd take a moment to point the problem out, perhaps see if other members would get on board with me and try to coax a more artist-friendly policy out of tee virus.

In the meantime, I will continue to refrain from submitting new designs. 90 days is just too long.

I know Tee Virus is slowly growing and it takes some time and money to make this site even better, but here are some of my suggestions:

1 - Create possibility to choose the side(s) of the shirt you want to see printed.
This way you can make some jokes that are only fun when you read both sides
2 - The designer can give preferences for the color of the shirt
Some designs just don't look good on white, and some people just like to wear black or something more colorfull. So black would be the most obvious and most important addition as a color.
3 - Let the designer create more exact measurements and location for the print to be placed.
At the moment, your design will be centered horizontally and the vertical location seems to be measured from the middle of the chest. It would be nice to have a possibility to, for example, create a 1to1 heart at the same spot your real heart is.

All these changes would open the door to a lot more creative designs, I think.
Thanks again for the great website and the great idea of letting us earn money while helpen Videosift!

I have made few logo parodyies like this one which I was going to include with a phrase for a submission:
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/7400/facebooked.png
My question is: Is this allowed or would it get rejected on grounds of copyright infringement (thought I'd better check before i submit it lol).

Ok I just voted "Very Bad" on a shirt, but I didn't expect the total percentage to drop that much. When I hover over the "Very Bad" voting option I get a "1 out of 5 stars" equivalent, but judging from the previous and present percentage, my vote was actually "0 out of 5 stars". Are the vote options 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% like the stars would suggest, or are they somehow different?

I also noticed a bug with the star power points of some people. Skeeve for example has 14 star points for having 14 designs that sold, when he actually only has 6 printed designs, so the max star points he could have would be 6, right?

We recently opened our very first specialty shop called the Acronym Shop available at acronym.teevirus.com. We'll add more over time as we have various common themes that several different tees share, but this is the very first.

What the hell? Now I have to tell somebody why a shitty shirt is shitty instead of voting in anonymity? Maybe I can understand what you were trying to do. I guess you want input instead of just a vote. But sometimes a shirt is bad and that's it.

Look, I don't have a problem with telling people how I feel about things, but I don't think I should have to risk hurting somebody's feelings and give them an honest opinion about their shirt design and I definitely don't want to have to walk on eggshells just so I can vote how I feel about it.

Take it off immediately, please.

I'm curious as to weather or not you could add an option to eliminate votes off a pre-existing shirt to give it a fresh start once it's re-workshopped.

I have shirts in my workshop right now I'd like to re-do, and re-sift, but the score from the originals are so low it would be somewhat difficult to get a decent score now, because if people who voted before are no longer here voted 50% or below, it's a permanent blemish on the shirt.

So, what about an option of wiping all votes off the shirt upon a workshop re-submission?

Had a strange thing happen today... got an email telling me one of my designs had sold... but that doesn't seem to be reflected the "commission earnings" portion of the profile where the line items are listed, as it was when the first sales were made. It *is* showing in the total at the top, which has increased.

Speaking from a POV leaning towards clarity, I suggest, for each sale of a specific design made:

quantitysold --- designname -- grosssale -- pendingearnings -- cleared earnings
v
v
v
v

Followed by:

totalpending -- totalcleared
w

paymentsmade
x

debitsapplied
y

availablebalance
z


There are many variations on this theme, but basically, since you're banking funds and there are various transaction types and classes of availability, you really should detail exactly what is going on in the clearest manner you can possibly manage. When it comes to money, you can't be "too clear" or "too detailed."

So, I created my first submission yesterday. Naturally, I wanted to publish it out to my friends for feedback and votes, so I used the facebook link to do so. Soon after, I saw that a friend of mine became a fan of Threadless Tees on FB. It's possible that she saw my post and it made her search for Tee Shirt vendors, or maybe I was being targeted with that update based on my post. Regardless, I decided to become a fan of Tee Virus, only to find that there is no such animal on facebook.

Is there a plan for this in the works?

...to be a month of no new designs for the front page? It's the 11th already...

Just wondering. That "New T-Shirts for the Month of October" headline is looking kind of dated, too.

Long, sorry. Please read anyway.

Have you folks thought about maybe allowing the upload of several versions in the workshop? I think that could come in handy sometimes, and it makes some other things interesting.

You might have an original, several in-betweens, and a final... then I suggest it be set up so that people could vote for any one or several of the designs; simply count votes for, instead of ratings.

If you don't like it, you simply don't vote for it. That'd ID designs that were popular, and it'd also pick the version(s) of that design that was most popular.

Having watched the system for a little while, I have to say I think it has some flaws... I'm thinking you may have some trolls in the woodwork, or if not yet, then soon, because the current voting system is pretty vulnerable to astroturfing both ways - up and down.

Just voting for things you like - up only - is vulnerable too, but it's a lot less harmful to the business model because there is no mechanism for haters to step on things they don't like.

Plus, if you really don't like a design, you should probably be commenting anyway, rather than voting down, as it's considerably more useful to the designer.

For example, Lucky is really active in handing out useful comments... I'm to the point where I hope he has something to say about each new design of mine. I don't always agree (nor he with me when the situation is reversed), but it's *really* nice for me to get some feedback. Voting down... it just feels like a pissant thing to do. I'm not comfortable doing it myself, frankly.

Maybe a "vote up" should simply be a checkbox marked "I'd like to wear or gift this version."

The thing that bothers me the most is that for any tee that's freaky enough to be interesting to some particular demographic, there's probably going to be a counter-demo that it irritates mightily. You could have a tee that would sell well into group A, but group B hates it... and the combo of ups and downs would get you a poor rating of a shirt that would sell fine to group A.

What I'm thinking is that what you really want to know is if it looks like group A is a decent sized group. Group B isn't the market, so who cares about them anyway WRT to that specific tee? With the present system, if group A votes 100% 50 times, and group B votes 0% 50 times, you're going to end up with a tee ranked at 50%, which I don't think is what you want -- because it's a mediocre rating on a great tee.

I'll give you an example where I ran into this myself. Lucky's got (again with the Lucky!) a tee up with an elephant on it, quoting some Obama saying. Man, I hate that tee. Mainly, I think, because I'm really pissed at Obama (who I voted for), congress in general, the democrats, the republicans, the supreme court, the FCC... you get the picture. Anyway, I bloody well despise that tee. I wanted to "0/VeryBad" that tee *so* bad...

So I tried real hard to step back, forget what it said, and who said it, and what the elephant means (democrats I assume) and look at it as art, presuming that whatever it said was of interest to someone - was the art bad? No. Was the text ok? Yeah, it was. Was it either of great longevity (no) or highly topical to the moment (yes.) So... I voted it up. Because I felt it was important to counter the negative folk that I strongly suspect are lurking around here. But really... I would *never* wear that tee. I'm group B; totally not the target demographic. If someone *gave* me that tee, I'd use it to wipe out the catbox. And never wash it. And throw darts at it. Rusty ones. While cursing Obama roundly.

So my point is, if voting up (a version, hopefully) were the only option, you'd only have a set of votes that told you how many people thought they'd like to wear it, and no one grumping that it was a cat box rag and voting it down, hiding the fact that the tee actually had a decent audience (it probably does, probably half the country in fact, just not me.)

Right now, the site is so new, and the pool of active voters so sporadic (I mean, some designs get 6 votes, some get 42), it seems like if a suggestion like this is to be considered... now might be the time, rather than when the site has gathered significant momentum.

Lastly, I don't know how many of the site's authoratoti are familiar with flickr, but one of the things that has always struck me about that site is that at the community level, negativity is not encouraged, and it's by design. Some wag comes in your account, dissing your pictures, you can kill the comment, ban them from ever coming back, and keep things entirely positive. Same capability exists in the flickr "groups." I think - just my "IMHO" - this is one of the key reasons flickr has been such a raging success.

This relates to tee virus, how? Well, simply that voting up is positive. Voting down is negative. Quite aside from the potential to make it look like a popular tee isn't going to be all that popular, it just isn't all that nice. For a community to encourage a basic action from user to user that isn't nice... I think that's a design flaw that inherently weakens the community. Again, that's an IMHO, salt to taste, from a single grain to an entire shaker.

Anyway, just some Saturday morning thoughts on a site I like a lot.

At the moment, this design:

http://www.teevirus.com/design/Grab-a-Mop

...is both in the store and in the workshop with days to go. I asked in the comment for the design what this meant, but got no answer. So now I'm asking here. What circumstances lead to this?

Thanks.

Aside from the general goal of the site for the moment, one thing going on here is designers putting up things they like -- it's a given that the community won't always like them as well.

Since Tee Virus essentially has a print-on-demand system backing the site, I was wondering if it would be possible, as a service to the designers on the site, to offer them the opportunity to print the designs that are *rejected*...

Unless there's a layer of cost I'm not seeing, it seems to me that this is a perk for the designers, and an income stream for the site. Is there a downside? I mean, other than adding the mechanism to the site?

I know I'd use such a service.