The energy saving lighthouse.  Powered by its own wind turbine, it silently does the job of saving lost eco warrior vessels.

This is a vector revamp of an originally hand drawn design, and the halftone pattern used for the ‘light’ is enough to enter it into a challenge on Redbubble.

Buy this shirt

also available on Mysoti

Incidentally – this design placed in a ‘halftone challenge’ on Redbubble and got featured on the home page on 23rd March 2009

Redbubble Home Page 23rd March 2009

Not wanting to keep all my eggs in one basket (Redbubble), I’ve been looking at a few other places to get my stuff out there and bet seen by more people.

Mysoti

Mysoti is another Print on demand site that I’m trying out at the moment.  I’ve popped a few of my designs there to see how they go.  The product view’s a little different there as there’s more variations (including kids sizes), but on the face of it they operate the printing in a similar way to Redbubble using Direct to Garment printing.

Rumplo seems to be gaining in popularity as an aggregator of other people’s designs, and I’ve popped ‘Off Track’ up there for people to have a look at.

Threadless

I also had a first shot at submission to Threadless (avg score of 1.72 out of 5 – with over 700 scores).  I wasn’t quite prepared for the ruthless voting system!  I’ve since learned this is notorious at Threadless.  It seems the most prolific scorers are also designers who quite readily give out zero <cynic>for sometimes dubious reasons?</cynic>.  Now my submission may not have been good enough – (that’s fine), but scoring zero out of 5?

I think to get something through on Threadless you need to

• First go through the Critique section and really get to know what does well.
• Produce something truly original (although I’m not so convinced about that)
• Fit the style and really study what gets in.

I chose not to do the critique thing, and didn’t study too much on what gets printed – I just took a punt.  Might give it another go sometime.

At least I can use the design again after 90 days (after re-reading the submission t&c)