For SPiritwear we use SPIRIT-WEAR They are a PTO Today sponsor and they do a fabulous job. Our school has not done the Tee Shirt designs, but this vendor can do them too. It's probably on their website.

Yup, checked it out. Seems too pricey!

PresidentJim

Have you seen the website PATRICIA'S SPIRITWEAR, LLC. It's great!

I'm sure that there are some technical 4th graders that might be able to pull off a nice design for a t-shirt, but I guess it's what you're looking to do.

For many of the reasons that JHB quotes (size, color, complexity, etc.) I feel that having an adult design the artwork is overall better.

Maybe even more importantly is the fact that if your school is a K through 4 then there is almost no way that any of the Kindergardeners, and likely not even the 1st, 2nd or maybe even 3rd graders are going to be able to provide viable designs. Having a 4th grader myself, I know that the majority of 9 year olds won't be able to give you viable designs. That means that a design contest, assuming that you're trying to have a "professional" looking logo, will not be fair for all of the kids. It's similar to the poster contest that we just had for anti-bullying (Martin Luther King B-Day). If we only had one prize for the "best" poster a 4th grader would have end up winning it. Instead we had a winner from each grade, making it fair.

I would recommend that anyone looking to do this should indicate that the selected design will be used as a reference, and not as the final logo. That way, like JHB pointed out, if the "best" one has issues it can be worked around without the hard feelings.

PresidentJim

We've done this at various levels. It's very important to carefully define the design specs - size, number of colors, complexity (lots of intricate features are difficult to screen print - or add to cost). So work with your t-shirt supplier to do those.

We had a situation this year where a student submitted a great design - by far the favorite, but way too complex for a t-shirt design. There were some hard feelings with some thinking it was the PTOs fault for NOT saying it couldn't be complex; others taking the position that part of being an artist is understanding your medium and what is appropriate. (This was middle school, and an older child who could definitely be considered an "artist".)

As far as voting, we have paper copies with no names on them. Then whatever group (faculty, PTO members, etc) is making the decision, gets to vote. I've seen where it might 1 or it might be 3 votes depending on how many submissions. We usually do it where you just put a tick mark on the paper you like (or top 3). Then we narrow it down to finalists and do it again. It's very simple, but always seems to work well.

Note - this is when you have a group in a meeting with everyone available at the same time. You could do something similar with ballots if was broader.

I disagree that it has to be a high school student. We have MANY talented kids at our elementary school. In fact, it is amazing! We had a 4th grade student last year design our bulldog for our t-shirts that we had titled "Give'em Some Dog"... Bulldog is our mascot. Give'em some dog meaning give them your best, or as a baseball coach would say Give'em some dog at the end of every game when it came time to say "good game" to the other players. We had a student in mind, and since it was over summer break, didn't have time for a contest as we wanted the shirts for book rental and back-to school night. We live in a small community, and the running joke was that everyone in our town had at least 2 t-shirts. We purchased them for $5.50 a t-shirt and sold them for $10. In 2 months time, we had 3 re-orders and sold 540 t-shirts! It was overwhelming and amazing at the same time!

This spring, we have already come up w/ a slogan for the students to match their drawing too. I'm expecting MANY kids to participate. Our slogan for next years t-shirt is going to be "Not in OUR house" again, using it around our bulldog theme. Kids can draw a bulldog in a dog house or such. We'll have our contest in April and announce winner by school's end. Students, teachers and staff are amazed at what we have done w/ our t-shirts the first year, and our principal is floored. It is so need to go into school on school spirit Friday's and 2/3 of the student population of 700 kids are wearing our t-shirts! VERY cool and the students love it!

We also had our student sign at the bottom of the bulldog so he could have full credit. A huge picture of HIS dog was on the back w/ our slogan, and a smaller version of his dog on the front w/ our elementary school logo. Lots of fun and so neat to see our shirts out and about town!

Julie

PresidentJim;140653 wrote: I think the idea of a design contest will only work for the older students (High School). Anything younger and you may not be thrilled with your final product.

We held a contest last year to select a new mascot. As far as the artwork, that was decided upon by the School Council and some staff input.

The way we held the contest (voting) was to have all staff members and all active PTO members shpw up for a vote. We used weighted voting. To do this each votee received 4 votes, one worth 7 points, one worth 5, one worth 3 and another worth 1. We setup raffle boxes for each submission. The rule is that you cannot put more than one vote in any given container. You don't have to use all of your votes if you do not want to. In the end we took the top 3 vote getters and then had the students vote democratically to decide on the new mascot.

This type of voting is pretty fair as it takes into account everyone's favorite choice, second favorite, etc.

Good luck,
PrtesidentJim