We have a few gifts for you to say thanks for helping us during the OLP. We know some of you are new to Spreadshirt we’d love to have you stick around longer as regular shopowners @ Spreadshirt and t-shirt design contributors @ la Fraise.

So exclusive to OLP participants who have yet to try our services you can have:

1. A free Spreadshirt premium shop. Yep register for a new shop and we’ll upgrade you to premium status until the end of the year as a thank-you (premium shops are €10 a month) for your involvement in the OLP. Mail olp@ with your account id and registered mail address.

Sign up here (EU)

Sign up here (US)

2. 500 brouzoufs from laFraise (their loyalty currency, equivalent to approx €5 off a la Fraise shirt) for each new account created by an OLP participant. Again mail olp@ with your userid and e-mail address.

Sign up here

We’ve still plenty to come here (two more panel winners, more interviews, the CA feature, help us develop the two winning logos). But its winding down a little bit and i’m a little sad were breaking-up the nice party we had here. I was wondering if you’d be interested in keeping it going a little longer…..?

We have a nice open crowd, high number of comments and discussion and some really awesome designers. What if we moved the party over to la Fraise (the english part)? I’ve been talking about joining the la Fraise gang as a part-time blogger for a while now. Theres a small community of designers over there but nothing too established. I could continue as the host (alongside existing blogger Jouni) and we could start with a special collaborative design contest for you all. How does that sound?

A good recent example of what I have in mind is the Legion of Dooms great Robot Attack t-shirt containing robots from 20 different graphic designers. This was a recent winner at US based design contest Design By Humans.

Anyway you can make your feelings clear in the survey below:

 Loading …

We know you wanted this prize split, but it didn’t feel right as we’d advertised a certain prize, and we should honour that. So the la Fraise gang picked:

Pascalphilly

A one man OLP machine. One of the first to take part (he submitted our fourth logo with invitation back in wk1). Our top submitter (44 entries at last count), our top commentor (something like 200 comments). I don’t think anyone has spent more time on the OLP than Pascalphilly. Came close to the short and grand final lists 101 times but somehow kept missing out on that Grand Finalists spot. But his innovative concepts and advice helped numerous others with their entries. The prize is a thanks for us and la Fraise for his role in our community, particularly in kick starting the contest with a bang.

He wins a whole years worth of t-shirts from la Fraise Europe’s Largest t-shirt design site. In total thats about 100 shirts!!!!

Heres a sample of some recent shirts:

Also two other people we should mention

Mootsie.

The la Fraise gang loved your style and approach! Excellent designs that our both playful & funny. Their all time favourite OLP entry being Trust Moustache. So you win 5 free la Fraise shirts of your choice!!!

T-shirtTalk

The best external supporter of the OLP. Provided the collages of all the entries each week, but also interesting commentary and insights about the competition. We actually used the collages internally to promote the contest. The prize comes from us rather than la Fraise so its a special super secret Spreadshirt prize pack of goodies. Thanks for your support t-shirt talk!

For anyone that wants to stay involved with this style of competition we highly recommend you go and try your luck over at la Fraise, the English language part is just starting and you can expect a warm welcome. Read about la Fraise here

Mootsie and Pascal send us photos of you in your new shirts and we hope to see more of your work over at la Fraise in the future!!

Thanks to everyone who made OLP so fun to hang around in, it became seriously addictive to us and I guess to some of you.

Many photos from the unveiling and after party in the full post

Read the full post

Lots more to come, but while I sort through all the photos, videos etc here is a shot of us all on the stage during the designers interview section of the successful OLP unveiling. With so many nationalities and languages on stage it turned into some sort of highly entertaining carnival of action :)

Nationality wise on stage here we have:

3 French

6 Germans

1 Brit

1 Swede

1 Norwegian

Speaking 4 languages (English, French, German and Sign). The Designers Open didn’t know what hit them :)

More to come….

So here it is, after 2months of the OLP we’ve reached the who is the winner post. Its more than a little sad that the contest is coming to an end :(

But lets put on a brave face and reveal the happy news of our super great winners.

We’ll tell you lots more details over the coming days, but here is a little review of the last week and then the final rankings.

Firstly the results of the OLP vote (these are not the overall winners), here is your top eight

1. Labelheads & Pop Your Collar by Legofish and Netweight
A tie with 12% of the votes each

2. Spreadshirt TM by Japasa with 11%

3. The Signal by Laurent with 10%

4. Play with the forms by Lufograf with 8.8%

5. Lovetab by Kimlarsen 7.5%

6. Molecular Goodness by thescientists 6.8%

7. Think Spreadshirt by Inadimova 6.7%

But there are a lot of different peoples opinions we had to take into account. In total we surveyed 6 groups of stakeholders in this project

1. You guys the OLP crowd

2. The panel

3. Our internal staff

4. Specific departments which have to work very directly with our brand - Brand & Comms (where I, Peter and Ami work) along with Graphics (where Carsten, Manuel and Greg) work and together we are the core team

5. Our end-customers (those that visit the site to create apparel for themselves and friends)

6. Our shop-partners (those that use our platform to run their own apparel business and make apparel to sell).

Our challenge was to take all your opinions into account and then make the best decision for our business. Its been a long and challenging process in which we’ve learnt a lot. Earlier in the week the core team myself, Ami, Peter, Carsten, Manuel, Jana (the CEO), Lukasz (Spreadshirts founder and now president) met to discuss the final shortlist and review all the votes that had come in from the different stakeholder groups. At the end of a long, tense meeting we were left with four logos, two groups of two that we felt happy in presenting to the Executive Management team who would make the final decision the next day.

Those four were:

Spreadshirt TM by Japasa

The Signal by Laurent

Play with the forms by Lufograf

Lovetab by Kimlarsen

So I immediately got on mail and the phone and invited them all to Leipzig for the unveiling. I could write a book about the saga that has turned out to be, but lets save it for another time. Anyway they are all here.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait back up a minute where were the popular community and panel picks Labelheads and Pop Your Collar? Well those two we debated on the longest.

Pop Your Collar
Great idea! As Frank said one of those why didn’t I think of it first ideas. But not everybody got it, take the words “Pop your collar” away and leave just the logo, in our tests not recognition for the collar wasn’t that high. It also felt maybe too generic. A few people raised concerns about the symbolism of putting a collar on somebody and we also felt that might not be taken positively.

Labelheads
Overall this was the most popular external and internal pick across the six stakeholder groups. We all love it we’ve made no secret about it. But we discussed whether it was really a logo, whether the people would be distinctive enough to be memorable if they were ever changing, whether this logo can work in all the setting it will need to (when we do advertising campaigns/co-operations with premium and more serious brands and partners).

We’re also a company that people use to make money, when they come to the site they have to get the feeling that we will pay their commission on time, or deliver a quality product which will last. Unfortunately we felt Labelheads moved us too far in one non-serious direction, a graphical corner that might not be relevant for future scenarios/directions we might take. We know you joke about OLP3, but it really isn’t planned. We want to adopt a logo for the long-term this time.

So with a heavy sigh we had to pass on Labelheads, but we’re delighted that it won Frank Pillers Innovativeness award which it thoroughly deserved.

So we were down to four, in two groups firstly: Spreadshirt TM & The Signal

Both strong stand-alone icons, full functioning and implementable logos.

As well as these two we had Play with the forms & Lovetab.

Neither felt like quite the finished article for us to use. Both highly customizable and personalizable something that could develop and evolve and be adapted by partners and for use in each area of our business. But perhaps the slightly riskier picks.

Jana presented both to the Executive Management Team the next day. Again she said it was a difficult decision but after a long discussion they opted for the second group Play with the forms and Lovetab. For the exact reasons listed above, it was felt that these could best evolve and grow with us and had the highest levels of customization, personalization and visualization of “your own label”.

Play with the forms getting across not just making apparel but all the ideas and design elements you can add to make it personal to you. Obviously still questions about its complexity, whether it could work in all the places it would need to and still be distinctive.

Lovetab similar qualities but with a simpler smaller area for customization nicely emphasizes the idea of handmade, but combined with the pixelated shapes like a heart emphasize the technological side of the process. Both similar, both great.

So we’re down from 2800 to just two…..And the winner is………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. … drum roll please ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Lovetab and Play with the forms!!!!!!!!!!

We just didn’t feel ready to seperate these two, their just so great and at this point equal. Rather than pick the wrong one and possibly regret the decision later we decided to declare them both the winner and upgrade second prize to match 1st.

Now our Graphics dept and Kimlarsen and Lufograf (if they wish) can work together with us to develop the two logos and then we’ll make a final, final decision which to pick in the coming month or more. This process will also be open and you can follow it here on the blog.

Congratulations to Kim and Nicolas!! You’ve both won

Or the second prize Wacom + €3000 its your pick. The CA interview will now be split between you both.

Also congratulations to Japasa and Laurent. We decided to reward Laurent 3rd and Spreadshirt TM was too great to not be rewarded so it receives an honorable mention/merit/credit/unofficial 4th place whatever you want to call it. We’re discussing the prize with Japasa at the moment so that he gets to pick something he really wants. We’ll reveal it here over the coming days.

We’re estatic with our two winners and the whole contest in general (Jana said she was overwhelmed by the response to the project and had a ball here talking with you all, shes been following closely as you’ve probably seen).
You’ve really astounded us with your creativity and we’re more than a little humbled. Thank-you for taking part, they’ll be plenty more happening on the blog in the coming weeks such as:

- Revealing the la Fraise community, ISO50 and Computerlove awards

- Photos and videos from the unveiling ceremony

- Watch us work on evolving the two winning logos

- Interviews with the winners

- The usual fun and games and reviews of the contest from the core team.

- A super secret project I’m still working on and hoping to reveal soon, maybe, perhaps, possibly which would involve you all if you wanted to take part.

Congratulations to Japasa, Laurent, Lufograf and Kimlarsen and all the other Grand Finalists that got so far. Thanks to everyone who took part over the past two months, you’ve been great. We’ll be on online to talk and reply to your comments/questions tomorrow, now we’re hitting the OLP aftershow bash with the winners in which all the 2800 entries will be beamed behind the bar the whole night through. Great.

Thanks again!!

The Superheroes series by Nelson

Branded are delighted to award Nelson and his superheroes on their valiant quest to defend against the evil of Pollutionman, Badwool and the Scissor

This series has provided a lot of fun and humour over the course of the OLP. I think we all knew it wouldn’t make the shortlist, but Nelson was obviously having as much fun with it as we all were and so the new versions kept coming. Would Scissor recover the HQ? How would he counter the threat of Pollutionman?

But putting all that to one side, there was something deeper to Superheroes. It was brilliantly designed and very memorable. While its not right for us as a logo it shows:

a) a fresh idea,

b) a simple, clear & bold design

c) a little wit.

Everything that the Branded award called for. We’re already trying to think of ways we can use it in future, we’re sure Spreadshirt customers and partners will love it.

Congratulations Nelson you’ve netted yourself this 16gb Ipod Touch!

The remaining prizes will be announced over the weekend and Monday. 24hrs until to the winner unveiling here in Leipzig and online a little later.

An exciting day in the office today as some of the winners prizes showed up. This post is for anybody who thought we didn’t really exist and would just shut the contest down and all move to Mexico…:)

Read the full post

This prize may be a little simpler to allocate, there weren’t so many team efforts in this OLP, I’ve collated your options into a survey below.

Christophe the founder of Computerlove a great place to share your art and network with likeminded people, will look over your votes and make the final call.

Alphameetsomega - Our most prolific design team, these guys submitted 10 entries to the contest. Heres a selection

TeamScandinavia - Late entrants. This is Frode who works for Spreadshirt (as a sales consultant) and Jouni who is the english blogger for la Fraise, together they are…….TeamScandinavia

TheScientists - Pendar aka legofish and Shahin our wk7 entrants and grand finalists with MolecularGoodness

Lastly - Ikou & Nelson - Perhaps not pure collaboration, but Superheroes and Bubble Label began to merge and develop upon each others work which was great fun to see.

Lastly those people whose alternate personalities turned up fight club style to give their logos a little comment “nudge” check out the comments to Maggo and jeyjey

Vote below

 Loading …

Labelheads by Legofish

 Picking Labelheads for the my special award was not an easy decision: For my selection for the overall award I tried to look most of all if these designs would make sense for Spreadshirt from a logo perspective (for me, this is not only a design decision but also one of giving a company and its employees a new identity). There are a number of constraints for such a selection (contrarily if you just evaluate the beauty or freshness of a design alone).

But for the innovativeness award, these constraints are gone, so my selection space was much larger. But a few designs made it into my personal short list for both awards, and one of my most favorite designs since its first posting are the Labelheads.

I have commented on this entry before:

“- A clear winner, one of the most innovative ideas seen in customization in a long time
- transports perfectly the customization message of Spreadshirt, you should launch it in any case with the logo configurator, and for a premium, allow Spreadshirt customers also to customize their personal Logohead; for top merchandisers, you could create an own logohead (perhaps with a king’s crown)
- And if Spreadshirt needs a serious logo, the stand alone version of the letters without the Labelheads also works well
- My personal trademark attorney is indifferent about the design from a professional point of view, but just LOVES it from a personal point of view

- Downside: what is in ten years? How sustainable is the logo? However, I believe that the language of the Labelheads also will allow for modifications and fun in 11 years …”

I am not a designer nor a graphic arts specialist, but I know a little about customization and personalization and thus the business model Spreadshirt is based on. And to connect this idea with the Labelheads design was a great idea for me. I especially liked the detail and level of execution of the design proposal (as in the end in innovation management, having a great idea is one thing, the other is to transport your idea and transfer it into a rigid solution), including the great mini-configurator. I could go on, but from reading the postings and comments in the OLP blog, I believe many of you share my selection anyway.

So, Congratulations Pendar aka Legofish — and have fun with your totally customized outfit!!!

Thanks Frank!

Congratulations also from the Spreadshirt/OLP team Legofish this was a very popular entry and you thoroughly deserved to win this prize!

You get entirely customized:

Trainers from RBK Custom,

Clothing naturally from Spreadshirt,

A watch from 121 Time

A bag from Timbuk2.

Custom Muesli from Spreadshirt friends MyMuesli.

More panel prizes to be announced over the coming days.

We’ve talked a great deal here about design (5000 or so comments) but we’ve talked less about the individuals behind the design. You can meet the finalists here, and some of the other participants here. This prize is about the people who’ve made OLP a fun place to be the past two months, and helped us reach our goal of getting so many great designs into the final. Those that have helped promoting and supporting the contest (like t-shirt talk) and you guys who’ve been submitting and commenting, particularly the latter in this case.

One of the successes of this OLP for me has been the bringing together of professional and amateur designers, in one contest without the elitism you can sometimes see in other contests. As you’re all at various levels of design experience its great to see those with more knowledge helping other designers with advice. So who should we reward with a whole years worth of shirts for their contribution to the community of la Fraise?

Some suggestions:

Jebs - a regular commenter, reviewer and advice giver (top commenter for this month)

Japasa/Nelson/Mootsie/Legofish - For not taking things too seriously, and for entertaining and playing around like Superheroes, Moustache and Eyebrow Man, Mood for Adam, Pirate Label heads as well as submitting serious entries.

Pascalphilly - the most active submitter and commenter, I don’t think anyone has spent more time on the OLP since it started.

Azzaoui - Supportive and quick to give advice to others.

Laurent - For submitting consistently different and great designs that made us think and might have pushed other designers into new directions.

Shirtnerd - A personal pick, interesting comments that usually make me laugh/smile.

The list could go on and on (AlexanderWende, Jeffersonb etc etc). Who would be your pick?

However you found a way to contribute to the OLP, thanks! If we could give this prize to you all we would (we’re trying to line something up, give us a bit more time to see if we can pull it off)