You have been wondering when we make the switch and show our new logo. Of course we would have liked to implement and put the shiny new logo on our website, instantly after the end of the OLP. However, things were different, and this may sound like an argument: It wasn’t about a “marketing stunt” - we had to take our time, since we wanted to wait until things are fine, and we are really really happy with what we developped. Which is, what we are! You will guess which draft finally made our frontpage, it is …

the LOVETAB! And I can assure you that we tested and played around with both winning concepts a lot, which means we still like Lufografs concept and maybe we will see some elements of “Playing with forms“, even if not today or tomorrow.

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Sorry for any inconvience that has ocurred yesterday - it was no evil planned spamletter-campaign. It was just the forgotten mailinglist olp2007 .. and this is what happens: One sends a spam (or virus) mail to the regarding mailinglist olp2007. After this a few people complain, want to unsubscribe and respond to the sender, which is the mailinglist address olp2007. Then of course this mail is sent to all addressees again, and again some people complain and want to unsubscribe. It’s called a “mailinglist echo” and is a very oldschool web1.0 issue - the only thing you can do about it is not responding and waiting until the admins delete the mailinglist. We are very sorry for this — I still have no idea where the mailinglist address leaked but we’ve deleted the olp2007 mailaccount after we got notice (and, well, of course still around 100 mails).

But then, we also do have good news: we have a cooperation with the guys of ZEIXS! Think of an OLP for Design-Books: You submit your Shirt Design and we will print it in a book! Everyone of you who runs a Spreadshirt Shop can submit his design and it will be printed (well, if we get too many entries we have to select of course). ZEIXS already has released 4 books last year on Graphic Design, Logo, Typo, and Illustration - and is not only looking for Shirt Designs but also ie CMYK, Characters, Letterheads&Businesscards - so make sure you check the site, maybe you want to submit some of your OLP stuff, too?!

The shirts are here! I can tell you: It was never so attractive to be a loser - I could imagine that even our finalists are eager to get one of these shirts. Check them out:


Send out to start soon.

Happy happy new year, all of you!

We have two short news: First, I wanted to tell you that we get closer! In this week we did some more trying and testing - we agreed on the typo and decided between one- and two liner. Currently we work on the rearrangements of the logo for our website and business units etc. So hopefully, we can expect the new logo until beginning of february.

Second: It seems that we can start to send out the OLP Loser-Shirts in the next week. I was also told they look very chicque and it was worth waiting after all the Christmas delays. Nothing is for sure yet, and this is just what the little birdies in the trees told me, but of course we will give you an update as soon as we hold them in our hands!

In the meantime, we could share and enjoy more predictions for 2008, for example this one by iA. What is your favourite one?

At the moment we are working out both submissions further so that we can have a better comparison - and finally a decision about the new logo before Christmas. Since our graphic guys are busy with xmas (not only decorating the office) we decided to do this step with support of an agency.

We’ve asked a few agencies from Germany and the UK, some of them knew spreadshirt and already worked with us before, others didn’t. Here is our choice, and the title of the blogpost is right: we actually picked 2 agencies :)

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Now that Adam posted a video with me looking really stupid with my non-ironed shirt (it’s “formal thursday” at spreadshirt and all of us are nicely dressed up .. well, in theory - but even adam came in without looking like a rally driver and without muddy sprinkles allover his cloth) so I thought I need to blog this away - best by: giving you a quick update what happens at the moment.

We are in talks with several design agencies to help us developping the drafts further:

1. Milestone: Shoulder view until end of november to get an impression which one works better.

2. Milestone: Beginning of december - having a set of materials for both submissions to make a decision between the both designs.

3. Milestone: Mid of december - further development of the winning draft.

4. Milestone: Roll-Out starting (hopefully) in January, incl. new tagline and all that.

We will select the agency beginning of next week. We also will involve Kim and Nicolas and send them our drafts before we will publish them. And of course there is still the vectors for both designs avaible for a download, just in case you have spare time and feel energetic, yet creative and want to fool around with them :)

So, this is us, the two mass customized tourists, sitting in the middle of the “William H Gates Building” in MIT, Boston.

Me looking a little bit like a pumpkin waiting for halloween, adam in his usual pose, being English amused and quite interested in this very inspiring surroundings. We have held our little presentation today, and rated it ourselves with 75% - it was a nice crowd and the right questions afterwards .. the only problem was we finished our presentation at 2 AM last night. But we have also shown some of your entries and the reaction was great. More fotos to come later - for now, it is time to announce the week 6 shortlist. You definitely want to continue to read, since it has some “no brainers”, and some kniffeliger ones - plus a handy surprise at the very end.

But, let’s start from the beginning, and like we said before - you really striked us this week! A lot of great designs came in, some of them improved versions from before (like eyeletman, Think Spreadshirt, the lovetab, or the “hero series”) others are brand spanking new. And a couple of these we want to put through if you like. To make it short, here is the week6 list:

Spreadshirt TM by Japasa

A draft that came in early last week, and was improved by end of the week. A winner by votes in the internal seeking and sharing. Congratulations! Together with:

Pop your collar by netweight

An outstanding idea, a simple shape - and lots of comments and props. Well done, netweight! The third one in this row, also with the same amount of woohoos as the collar and the TM is

UP THE BRACKETS by schimanski

A very cool concept - flexible and playful - a nice bracket to fill with all we have to offer. Disclaimer: this submission is by spreadshirt’s own carsten ullrich, but as you can see from the comments, we have no issue here that we smuggled him through I’d guess (we didn’t even know until this afternoon since he did it in his holidays and uploaded undercover).

Universal Language by bean

We have been a fan of this since bean submitted his first version - now he improved it and we like it even more, since it is more readable but still kept it’s charme.

Play with forms by Lufograf

We already praised it in the last blog post - now it’s on the shortlist and we would love to see more playing around with it!

Find your own! by Laurent

This one came through altough we wanted to step back from too much tags and lables. I guess it’s because Laurent found a very playful way to deal with this - just add some more and play with it.

Necktab by kimlarsen

Very well executed, and despite netweight was the first to come up with the collar theme we like how the collar and the tab are picked up and work together in this draft.

Now, for the end and the surprise - some lines on a discussion we had earlier today. We thought about bringing a last weeks’ design on this weeks shortlist. As you maybe have seen already, Alexander Wende had a huge output and we feel we still owe him a place on the shortlist for such entries like “you are the key” or “Against Nudity”. So what we decided today was to not bring a design by last week in this weeks shortlist since this would be against the rules, but that Against Nudity will be the first design which goes into the “Wildcard Shortlist”.

So, sorry Alexander for not making it in this weeks shortlist, and congratulations for being the first wildcard for our wildcard shortlist!

Appendix: How does the wildcard shortlist work?

We’ve talked about this before - and tomorrow we will reveal more information on this. Basically we would like you to go back through all the weeks as you’ve already did for week1 and week2, and make notes on the designs you think are worth being reviewed again. From all the entries you propose we will conduct an additional shortlist and pitch the best designs into the finals.

Congratulations to all who made it & props to the ones who didn’t - don’t give up and have a good final week7!

Greetings, everybody! After a rough 26 hours slide including deutsche bahn strike, flight delays, cancellations and still missing bags we finally reached Boston — where we attend the Mass Customization Conference at the MIT (yay!).
Nice city from what I’ve seen so far (Airport baggage lost&found office, Hotel lobby). If you have any tipps besides the “standard tourist program” and The National concert tonight or the Black Mountain gig tomorrow - we’re open and will stay here until wednesday. Here are some first photos and impressions from our hotel room, including the incredible toilet-phone …

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It’s Thursday, it’s quizzy quiz time. Now we want that mascots! I’m sure you all remember the best fitting testimonial, yet celebrity of all time. The ubermascot, the one that advertised a simple thing and made it a huge success - it was of course …
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We didn’t hit Boingboing or TechCrunch - but in the last two days we had a nice traffic peak, sparkled by a blog post at laFraise and some newsletter sendouts. For the numbercrunchers: We’ve reached more than 7,500 unique users yesterday, with an average of 2,500 daily users. We have more than 1,100 designers registered, with an average hangout time of about 10 minutes - and most important, we are scratching close at the 1,000 submissions mark (*Update* - we made it).
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