Open Call: Design a T-Shirt
July 13th, 2010

Posted by Jeremy

Please read this entire post carefully

Over the last few months, we have gotten an increasing number of emails asking us to “please do a shirt like [x]”. This is cool because it gives us some clues about what you want, but it’s a bit hard to manage, as it gives us no indication of how badly you want it or it what quantities. It might be easier, we have thought on occasion, to just let you design a shirt yourselves… so that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Today, I’m happy to announce the first ever LoadingReadyRun T-Shirt Design Open Call, through which we hope to solicit a tonne of t-shirt designs from from you, the LRR fanbase. From that tonne of submissions, we will choose the designs that we like the most and put them to a public vote right here on the blog. The designer whose shirt is most supported  will be offered a contract, the short version of which is: we buy the design for $200, and that shirt becomes our next pre-order item.

Here is the part you need to read especially carefully

Submission guidelines:

  1. For this open call, we are looking for a variant LoadingReadyRun logo shirt–that means the logo should be the focus of the design, though you can interpret that as you like: you could construct it out of buildings, imply it in negative space, create it out of ascii symbols, whatever you like. You can have other things on the shirt besides the logo, providing the logo stands out and draws the eye. I’m including both bitmap and vector reference files for you to work with here.
  2. Four colours, maximum; front only.
  3. No copyrighted material except our logo. I like the Pac Man ghosts too, but we can’t put them on a shirt.
  4. No hatespeech: we’re Canadian; it’s illegal up here…also it’s really inappropriate anywhere.
  5. This is not a contest, it is a job offer. We reserve the right to turn down any submission, and might decide that no submission meets the necessary requirements for what we’re doing. We also reserve the right to tweak the winning selection to best meet our needs.
  6. We will not use your design unless it is chosen through the selection process. If your design is chosen, we will provide you with a form to sign that sells us ownership.
  7. Your submission must include the following:
    • Your name and email address
    • a pdf, png, jpeg, Adobe Illustrator or Flash file illustrating your design
    • a separate pdf, png, jpeg, Adobe Illustrator or Flash file illustrating your design as it would appear on a t-shirt.
  8. Assuming you understand and agree to the above, please send your submission to [email protected] no later than 11:59 pm PST, August 3, 2010.

Thanks, everyone, for your interest! We think this will be a fun experiment, and look forward to seeing your submissions :D.

T-Shirt Update
February 17th, 2010

Posted by james

Hey guys, just wanted to drop in and let you know how our new T-Shirt system is going.

As you all know, our first design out of the gate was the very popular “Is somebody doing science in here?” design. After three weeks of preorders, I’m happy to report we blew clear past the 50 preorders required for the run to go ahead. So you’re all probably wondering where your new shirts are!

Well, they’re coming. I picked them up from the printers yesterday and started organizing them all last night. The goal right now is to have them all sorted and packaged by the end of the weekend and ship them all out at the start of next week.

Moving onto our current design, things are most definitely slower. Now, we fully expected this to happen, and the “Slacking” shirt is still doing very well. In fact, with only 9 days left in the preorder window we only need another 5 orders to reach our print goal of 50. Remember, we have this shirt available in various designs and colours and that is one of the benifits of ordering now. If you wait until we have printed the run then you are going to be stuck, with the only option being a black T-Shirt (in your size). So if you have been meaning to order the new shirt, stop slacking and order!

CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER

So from all of us at LRR, I just want to throw a quick thank you out to all that have helped make this new T-Shirt system a huge success, and here’s to many more shirts down the line!

Olympic Beard Growing
February 16th, 2010

Posted by Jeremy

If you’re like us, you’ve probably been glued to the Olympics for the past several days–as well you should be: they’re great fun to watch. I’m actually delighted by the fidelity of the online streaming this year, such that even without cable TV, I’m able to waste hours of my day watching events I don’t even care about. Such is the nature of the games.

The other advantage of the Olympics is we get to make another Olympic video — something that doesn’t happen very often. This one was conceived by Paul because he hates you. He knew that by dangling the spectre of his so-recently-departed beard before you, he would illicit squeals of joy, before leaving you with the stark realization that this was only a functional means to an end — not a full return to beardly glory.

While Paul’s original script called for this to be filmed over several weeks, we decided that would be a people-wrangling-and-venue-booking nightmare, so we instead did entire thing in reverse. Paul and I grew out our beards over about five weeks, and then used a trimmer to shave them off about evenly for each section of the video. Delays in filming pushed the actual shooting time by another week, which actually turned out to be problematic for me– I’ve never let my beard get as out-of-control as it was for this video, and up close it was pretty scraggly.

Anyway, there you have it. While you’re here, you should check out our previous Olympic video, which introduced Canada’s freestyle slacking team. If you’re new to the site, you might not have seen it, as it’s a couple years old at this point. You’ll also notice that our latest T-shirt pre-order ties in with that video, and there are only ten days left to order one in the style and colour of your choice.