Hey super awesome Threadless community

I have an idea I wanted to pitch here to see what people thought about it, and to ask what people have done to make their own similar projects like this one. I want to make a zine, and I have been brainstorming a subject to make it on that would be versatile enough to either be able to have a few issues, or to be a nice big one.

My goal for this is to have it be a collaborative piece that allows me to be a sort of "Design DJ" with the submissions and arrange an interesting sequence based around a theme. The theme right now that I want to pursue is "Form and Shape". I want to intentionally leave this broad and see what kind of associations people make, and try to find an interconnecting thread in everything once I have enough material to work with.

So I am wondering, what do you all think about it? Does it need a little more direction? Is anyone interested in submitting and collaborating on this project? I'm looking for this to be a fun, not a quest to make some cash, so if anyone's interested I'd love to hear your input.

So I have a submission I am about to submit, and I have been thinking to myself if it's going too close to the "don't use any copyrighted material" clause of the rules. The whole composition is made up of scans of pictures from an old Botany book, so I don't know if it's going to be overstepping that boundary...

I think I kind of have my perspective warped by all the arguments amongst Printmakers on copyright and originality, where "as long as you change it in some way, it can be considered original work" seems to be OK.

Tell me, is this going too far? The critique link is below, I'm gonna wait and see what people say before actually submitting it for scoring.

Link To Crittique

I just posted some shirts on rethreaded, if anyone's interested in trading. I also wanted to throw the question out there if there were other shirt trading sites like rethreaded, its kind of a cool idea to just trade stuff.

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I just watched this movie last night, and I think I need to run out and rent the other movies directed by Tarsam now. Don't you love it when you find an awesome movie that has you daydreaming about it later, whether it be for the cool costumes or the amazing storyline... Man I'm such a sucker for strong symbolsim. You guys should watch this, it's beautifully shot.

For Example:
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Hey all you veteran designers and bloggers out there!

I have a question for anyone who's ever done a collab. piece and submitted it to Threadless. In particular, I've loved how great things like the Pizza Party and Monster Mash Collaboration have come out and how great of an idea they were. I have lots of ideas that I'd love to get out there, but have some interest in trying them out as collaborations to see how they can evolve with more than one person's input.

So to everyone out there who's collaborated on a shirt design: How did you go about it? I'm impressed with the fantastic blog kept by alexmdc on the shirt, and I've seen FRICKINAWESOME on so many people's submissions as a collaborator... I want to try my hand at this and just would love some words of wisdom before I jump off into the deep end.

So guys, what did you do? I know I can just throw out an idea, but how did things work if a design prints? Also, what works well for contests to hype it up and get visibility for the design?

I'm already studying the Pizza Party blog for ideas haha.

This is what I have been staring at for almost four hours.

I have been sitting here watching the back entrance of my school for a while now. I'm starting to wonder if I should be doing something more productive than watching youtube. All I've done is look up new recipes... I figure in the next few months while I'm doing this I may get into blogging more... or go on here more :)

Does anyone else do a job where they stare blankly into space like this?

So.... I have a snow day, and there's no snow on the ground. I was totally supposed to have an awesome class today (slightly sarcastic "awesome" there) but now it probably will not happen till next Monday.

Do snow days rock or do they make you pissed off? I know I'm like... right in the middle right now.

And I can't fall back asleep. That's the one thing that aggravates me.

Hi there, just a quick question for all you designers who use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

I have been working with the Adobe programs for about 2-3 years now, and I have gotten into using Illustrator a lot recently, but one thing is bothering me about my work. I go through people's designs on flickr, and see amazing shirts here on threadless, and there's one thing I really haven't tried or had success in the distant past doing. A lot of hand drawn elements are interesting me, and It's driving me mad to how they might go about it. I want to be able to take a clean, well defined pencil sketch or inked sketch and bring it into Illustrator.

For some reason I have not seen a way to scan things in Illustrator ever, so I assume you import in Photoshop, clean up there, adjust contrast, and bring into Illustrator for a live trace. The thing is.... not to rag on the function at all, it's a great tool in Illustrator, but.... live trace isn't the most accurate.

Could anyone grace me with their glorious knowledge of experience and let me know how they go about doing this? Do you even rasterize your scanned elements? Is there some other way to go about this all together that I have no idea how to pull off?

Please enlighten me, because I'd love to be able to use things that I draw more in my Illustrator work, even though I've been getting better and better with the pen tool trying some things out.

Thanks so much for your time!

Hi there threadless community, just a quick question for anyone who wants to respond.

Does anyone have any good tips for drawing on shoes? I've been google-searching all morning and haven't found anything too informing... so, anyone know what's good? I'm looking for suggestions for styles of shoes (i know chucks are good, but still, there must be more out there), materials, ect. Whatever is good, just leave a comment, it'd be much appreciated.