I had a good Idea of what I wanted to do but I needed to explore the design just a little bit. After downloading the T-shirt Template Kit, I explored the texture and color of the shirt.

I originally wanted to do black on yellow for the guys and yellow on black for the girls but after playing around with the design, my "design sensibility" told me to go with a warm yellow on Charcoal for the fellas and the same yellow on bordeaux for the ladies. Although it's not exact to the concept of yellow and black for the shirts, I felt that people would still get the concept and for me at least, the colors made all the difference.



TIP: I did consult with a few of my designer friends however I realized post-submission that I really should have opened it up to the opinion of the Threadless community. Just marketing wise, it would have been a great tool to have a lot of people invest in emotionally before hand before putting it up. I'm sure this is common knowledge but just in case.

Deciding what to put up was the second part of the process. I had a building blocks between the in-kit models and t-shirt blanks so I decided to make all of them and go from there.

What I alter realized was that the 250k maximum dictated a lot of my decisions. It was hard deciding what to do. The situation totally reminded of how I felt when I was killing time in a hostel in Australia and my buddy was asking me really random hard-to-answer questions such as, "If my life depended on it, would I rather lose a hand or a foot?" It was incredibly difficult to choose what to give up.

Could I lose the models?
Do I shrink everything down and cram it all into a single graphic?
Should I only show one color choice instead of two?
Do build a flash movie and stick it all in?
Would I rather give up my foot or my hand?

I ended up going with a simple animated gif that had the guys and girls designs rotating at 5 second intervals. I felt that the design needed to be large and on a shirt and because the placement was very straightforward, people would know how it would look like on their bodies. Finally, I would rather give up my foot than my hand. But that's another blog for another time.

Being a usability guy, I also decided to do a test run of the voting system. I found myself making decisions on a design within three to five seconds so I wanted to make sure the users saw both designs in all their glory. So when I made my animated gif, I made three frames to the gif and had the first and last frame as the same graphic with the first frame being 2 seconds and the last frame being 3 seconds. That was even confusing to me so just look at the graphic below.

TIP: if you have multiple screens… make sure graphic automatically transitions within 2-3 seconds to the next frame. I later realized that a lot of designs had multiple screens but I never got to them because I had to manually do them.

Armed with my designer color choices, cool subtle texture, and thoughtfully built animated gif, I was ready to submit.

Cheers,
John Lee aka LoveAndWarren

NOTE: After a submission, a design needs to get approved. I read on other threads that it takes on average from 4-8 days… I got my submission up within 2.

Check out my design submission "Love Quarantine" and if you like it, Vote $5 on it!