The nerd level of both of these videos are pretty intense. So, proceed and watch with caution.
Despite both of these T-Shirt “folding machines” not being the most parsimonious way of folding a T-Shirt, you’ve got to admit that the creation of a such a device is pretty damn cool. Especially when you consider that they were built with LEGO pieces. Now would I ever get around to making such a thing? Probably not.
By the way, someone should inform Sheldon Cooper about this device. Something tells me that he would dig it.
And for you strange people who swear that K’NEX is superior to LEGO, I’ve got a video for you too:
I had a chance to chat with the big winner of the Design By Humans 2010 $10,000 design contest, Jonathan Lax (who is better known in the design circles as YONIL). YONIL talks about the stress of competing, the inspiration behind We Did This To Ourselves, and what he’ll be doing with his big cash prize!
Coty: Yonil, congratulations on winning the Design By Humans $10,000 contest! What has the last few weeks been like having to wait to find out whether you had won?
Yonil: Thanx a lot man! I’ve been saying this to anyone who would listen from competition-day one: This was the most intense and challenging competition I have ever took part in.
A true mind and emotion rollercoaster. From the second you submit your designs up until the final stages there are almost two months of promoting & introducing your designs to friends, family and even strangers.
Then there’s the anticipation for every phase of the competition, seeing if you got up a stage or not. The last couple of weeks were really really hard to handle – no jokes – I personally, never actually thought I would win. fantasized, yes, but at the same time tried avoiding the thoughts about the whole thing. Winning was an absolute shocker for me.
Coty: You pretty much dominated the 10K contest having had 2 designs voted into the final top 8. What was your reaction like when Design By Humans announced you as the 10K winner?
Yonil: I wouldn’t say I dominated anything. Yes, I did have 2 designs up there in the final 8, but if you ask me if it made me feel any safer than all the others then the answer is one definite “No way”. After two failed attempts (in 2009 and 2008) to make it through the first elimination round at the DBH 10K, I was so happy to find two of my designs in the final 24 – you can’t imagine how happy. Then the final-8 day arrived and I had good faith that one of my designs will make it through. I wake up to see both made it through.
How do I handle this? What do I do next? Obviously I didn’t have such great promotional skills like others in the competition had, so I just went with spreading the word in any way I know of possible.
When they announced my design as the winner I was kind of shocked. My reaction was opening up a beer bottle (it was 9am here), sitting back on my sofa at home, letting all the stress wash away and simply enjoying the feeling. Good moment.
Coty: What was your inspiration for your winning design, We Did This To Ourselves?
Yonil: “We did this to ourselves” is a statement about what we do to earth. Us humans have to start realizing what is happening and face the facts that none are responsible but us and that is also why we’re the ones who must fix it. One plastic bag at a time.
Instead, it seems like we’re only getting more and more tangled in our problems for all the wrong reasons, rather than changing our ways.
Coty: The last two DBH 10K winners came from the Philippines. Are you happy to bring the prize home to Israel?
Yonil: I guess it’s nice and all, but it doesn’t work that way for me really. I judge a designer by her/his ability to create something I can relate to, appreciate and that changes my state of mind or emotion.
The country we live in isn’t really a factor you know…
Coty: Both Zerobriant and Christian San Jose/Archan Nair did an amazing job at promoting their designs. But at the end of the day, they didn’t win and you did. What did you do to promote We Did This To Ourselves?
Yonil: Can’t say I did something completely new here but here’s the list of my exact actions:
I obviously emailed every single person I know about the competition asking them to vote for the design and comment. Some friends and family members helped by spreading the emails around to their circles of friends.
After making it to the final-24 I designed a minisite so that people would know exactly what I’m talking about when asking for their vote and so that they could find instructions on how to register to DBH easily. This is the address: http://yonilatdbh.weebly.com/
Posted pics on my website (www.yonil.com), on Flickr, Emptees and Deviantart requesting people’s help if they like the designs.
Using facebook in every way possible, posting the links to the minisite and directly to the design at DBH, opening events for every round of the competition and posting pictures of the designs everywhere I could.
Also on Facebook I uploaded a picture of the designs asking people to tag themselves in it so that as many people as possible would see it and read the info. I promised to have a raffle for all the people tagged and give out a free shirt to five people in case I got 1st place, and so I did.
I printed out little business cards about myself in the competition and handed them out at the local Pecha-Kucha night in Tel-Aviv.
Friends obviously helped a lot posting the links on their facebook walls and promoting my designs on their blogs.
Coty: Some critics say that contests like these are more so a popularity contest than about the art. That is, the most and original and unique pieces do not always win. What would you say to these critics?
Yonil: I don’t really like competitions based on popularity only where “most votes=win”.
If you go by votes, my designs in this competition were far from first place – I’m 110% certain of that – so I wasn’t the most “popular”.
I think that DesignByHumans have found themselves a very good formula for picking out their winners. Yes, one of the elements for judging a design is the number of times it’s been voted for, I think that’s mainly what makes this website a community alongside it being an online store, but the votes are merely one factor in the whole formula, and if you ask me, far from being the most important one.
I’ve seen designs with as much as 30 votes get printed and vice versa, designs with tons of votes that didn’t print. I’ve seen designs that I like get printed and designs that I don’t. What’s important is that the DBH staff get the final say – and this is exactly how I believe it should be – it is their business, it is their store and the public opinion is important, but it’s only an indicator for finding out where the wind blows.
Coty: Of course, people want to know what you plan to do with the big $10,000 prize. Do you have anything crazy planned for the cash?
Yonil: I just got engaged last week. So most of the prize money will probably go into the whole “getting our life started thing” I dunno – Ikea furniture maybe? How whack is that??? heh…
The one thing I do know I will be getting for myself is a Wacom Cintiq LCD screen/tablet. Been fantasizing about this one for too long.
Big congratulations to the 2010 Design By Humans $10,000 contest winner, Jonathan Lax (affectionately known as Yonil in the T-Shirt community). Yonil was indeed one of the favorites in the competition, with TWO designs making it to the top 8 finale. I actually thought that having two designs in the final would have hurt Yonil (because it would force people to choose between his two designs, thereby splitting the amount of votes he would receive). Well, he sure did prove me wrong.
Lax edged out my selection to win it all (Zerobriant) and trumped the defending champion from 2009, Christian San Jose. There’s a new design powerhouse at Design by Humans, and for the first time in two years, that person is not from the Philippines (remember, AJ Dimarucot won the big prize back in 2008 while San Jose’s Filipino inspired Mecha-Labaw won it in 2009).
Threadless released a slew of T-Shirts this past Monday, as they are known to do, but I was pleasantly surprised with one T-Shirt in particular. Burger Eclipse by David Schwen is an epic T-Shirt. Why? Burgers! I love burgers and Burger Eclipse is all about the burger. And apparently, designer David Schwen is a big fan of the burger too, he is incidently also the brian behind the popular Threadless tee, Burgervetica.
Every burger fan has a burger or a burger joint that they swear is the best. For me, that place is Hodad’s in San Diego. This is what I had to say about my Hodad’s experience:
“The menu is a simple one: burgers, fries and shakes! I decided to get the Double Bacon Cheeseburger and I even SAC’d (added Swiss and American Cheese) it! Let me tell you, the burger that I had at Hodad’s may possibly be the best burger that I have ever had (and I’ve had a lot of burgers from many different places). Part of it might have been the setting and people, but, the burger alone was ace.”
Now, I have to say that the burgers at Red Mill Burgers is also delicious as hell. So good! The Bleu Cheese N’ Bacon Burger is THE burger to get from Red Mill. It is amazing and is making my mouth water RIGHT NOW.
And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Shake Shack in New York. They say that this burger joint is the closest thing the east coast has to an In-N-Out. I’d have to say that the Shake Shack surpasses In-N-Out. It’s just a greasy good burger with no regard for veggies (love that). But it’s still not Hodad’s.
I freakin’ love a good burger! And ALL three of these burgers were, as we say in Hawaii, ono!
This is pretty neat and grim and sad at the same time. I’ll start with neat. So it’s neat because the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) took part in a unique campaign to bring attention to the illegal slaughtering of Siberian Tigers by poachers in Moscow. To do this, they distributed white T-Shirts featuring a line drawing of a tiger. It’s neat because they were able to couple the T-Shirt with augmented reality technology so that whenever an individual stepped in front of a special screen at one of the boutiques offering these T-Shirts the augmented reality would kick in and they’d see themselves getting shot. They could also visit a special website that would detect the T-Shirt and provide the same effect.
Getting shot is grim. Even if it’s virtual.
And it’s quite sad that we have to resort to to such things just to grab peoples attention, especially when it comes to tiger killing. Tigers are awesome! What’s even worse is that I doubt this will have any effect on the poachers themselves?
I propose vigilante violence. The WWF should go all Batman on those Siberian Tiger poaching fools. Kind of like how they do on Whale Wars. Do it.
A few episodes back, I reviewed a little T-Shirt contest site from Costa Rica called Bunker Designs. They’re selection of tees was a bit sparse and the activity on the site  seemed to be a bit quiet. However, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that they’ve moved forward with a new website design and have released a selection of new, top notch T-Shirts.
The three new tees include What’s Going On In My Mind and Starcatcher by HeavyHand, and GandALF by Sergio37. Both of the HeavyHand T-Shirts continue with the Bunker Design vibe that I really dug with Gulfie. Though I have to say that What’s Going On In My Mind reminds me of a bit of Wotto’s style (see Guilty Pleasures). As far as Starcatcher goes, I especially love the symmetry!
Now, GandALF is were things get a little bit weird for me. This parody shirt doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the line, and looks like it would probably fit in more with something we’d find at RIPT or TeeFury (those guys love to parody). Don’t get me wrong, I love me some ALF (I believe I’ve referenced ALF a few times on this blog before). I grew up with ALF so whether or not it fits in with the rest of the Bunker Designs T-Shirts, that’s okay, because it made me smile!
Both Starcatcher and GandALF are available now from Bunker Designs for $20 and you can score What’s Going On In My Head for $22. The best part is that you can score 20% off your entire Bunker Designs purchase by using the coupon code BDCOTY at checkout! Awesome.
Some of you might remember that about two weeks ago I posted a story about New York based artist Rob Pruitt ripping off the popular Threadless T-Shirt, When Pandas Attack. The tee was designed AJ Dimarucot and Jimmy Benedict (aka jimiyo), despite this, neither artists received attribution for the design nor did either provide Pruitt with permission to use the design.
Since then, the close knit T-Shirt community has been discussing this hot topic, with one forum thread on the popular T-Shirt site Emptees receiving 300+ posts regarding the topic.
Threadless, a popular Internet based T-Shirt company with a tight knit and vocal community decided to take things into their own hands. A handful of Threadless faithful made their way to Pruitt’s “Pattern and Degradation” gallery in West Village for a silent protest of sorts, with each member decked out in the original When Pandas Attack T-Shirt. Oh, and they also had a huge panda accompanying them. Threadless posted a few photos from the event and promises to share video. And guess what, Pruitt was at the gallery.
“Yesterday in NYC at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Threadless fans and staffers staged a silent attack against the use of a Threadless design, “When Pandas Attack†(which was originally a collab by Jimiyo and AJ Dimarucot). Rob Pruitt, the artist who allegedly misappropriated the design (to put it kindly) was actually in the gallery at the time, and was completely baffled. We’re sure the guy sneaking around in a panda suit helped our silent yet powerful cause too! Talk about art creating art creating one very confused “artist.â€
Now you’re wondering why Threadless doesn’t just sue Pruitt for copyright infringement. It turns out that since Threadless is crowdsourced, they only keep the rights to the apparel, while the original artists hold the rights to the actual design. So therein lies the problem. AJ Dimarucot, one of the co-designers is based in the Philippines, which makes things quite complicated. he wants to take action, but because he lives so far away, it is difficult for him to do so. And Jimiyo has gone on record as being quite apathetic to the whole situation.
So what to do? Well, first off, we can start by showing Pruitt that he is wrong. If you live in New York:
Show up to the gallery wearing you When Pandas Attack T-Shirt and ask Pruitt why he ripped off two artists without giving attribution or getting permission.
If you don’t have a When Pandas Attack T-Shirt, then show up anyway, and question him and/or bug the staff or curators about the situation. Let people know that he ripped off this piece.
Post about this story on your blog, or better yet, RT this post or link to it on your Facebook page so that when people Google Pruitts name, this and the other posts linked will also show up.
A few months ago, Threadless began making a few changes to their website and catalog of T-Shirts. If you remember, they used to have a couple of different T-Shirt collections, including TypeTees, Kids, Select and of course the basic Threadless tees. Both TypeTees and Select we removed from the menu options (although Threadless continued to sell them alongside their basic Threadless tees).
As of yesterday, Threadless has brought back their Select collection of gourmet Threadless T-Shirts. The select line has always been their premium line of T-Shirts, but in the past, Select tees were curated by the Threadless staff and the designs were specific to the Select line. The new Threadless Select line now features popular and original Threadless designs that are tweaked, modified, “tinkered on, blown up, or scaled back” in some way.
If you remember, a while back, Threadless did a promotion with GiltMan[By the way, GiltMan is invite only so use this special invite to gain access to Gilt Man]. Â They sold premium Threadless tees featuring original designs that were modified in some way. Looks like they used GiltMan as testing ground for their reinterpreted Select line.
The Select line also features premium materials:Â ”Printed with water-based inks, to be softer and eco-friendlier. Made with premium materials, like pima and organic cotton. Tees, tanks, but also tunics and pullovers.” Also of note are the styles made specifically for the ladies. If you’re one of those girls that think the basic T-Shirts is just a guy thing and have avoided Threadless because of this then you definitely want to check out the new Select line. Ladies can now choose from a selection of tunics, tanks, dresses and v-necks.
