Frak

So, got to -98F yesterday...Still no -100. If it doesn't happen this year then it will be the first time that the South Pole didn't hit -100F two years in a row. Global warming isn't real my tush!

I got things to do down here dang it, it better hit -100F

Oh well, so some good news: one of my designs won the t-shirt design contest. I figured at least one of them would win. They were pretty freaking cool if you ask me, though I might be a bit biased. There was only one other design that I thought would beat me, and I think it came close, or at least there was enough interest in it that they are going to see about maybe making two shirts. The rest were all pretty boring and/or trashy. Sorry to anyone who made them, but the f-bomb on a t-shirt is about as white trash as you can get...but that's just my opinion. I wonder how many people that statement will tick off :}

I made a few designs and though only one of them won the station's vote I will be making a couple of the others for myself and Krissie.

Here are the designs:

This was one sticker design



This was another sticker design, it was a last minute thing. I spent a lot of time making the graphic and then had nothing to do with it. It didn't look right on a t-shirt design, so I threw it on a sticker with some text.

And here are the shirt designs:


This was one design, the one I voted for. I think only one other person voted for it. This is one of the designs I will make for myself.

And this is the other version that was up for voting. I may make this one, not sure.


I had a bunch color combinations I liked but had to settle with a couple so I didn't flood the folks with options, and I chose to go with neutral colors to be more accessible to the community. Not everyone loves blue like me :} I will probably make a darkish blue version of the above white design for myself.

This is approximately the color I would like to use:

Here are just a few of the other designs using the above graphic that I really liked as well.

A nice ringer, though the company that I would be getting the shirts from doesn't have the color combination I like in the ringer style, I just think it looks good this way so I may look for another company.

And a jersey version:
This is close to the long sleeve shirt design I want to go with. It looks really good with a black and white long sleeve shirt, the sleeves being black and the gray you see above being white.


Now Krissie also had a design idea. She wanted the lost dharma thing with a pole in the middle. She even went to the trouble of drawing me a pole. I told her I though I would probably be able to draw two lines and a circle (the pole) freehand, without a reference ;}

Here's how it came out:
This is the other design that didn't win that we will be having made anyway. I don't want one, but Krissie definitely does. We battled over the back of the shirt for quite sometime. She wanted the crooked fading LOST intro font thinger, but I refused. It didn't go with the design at all. After I showed her the font she wanted on the shirt she agreed it didn't go with it. We went through many, many fonts even some free ones I downloaded to find something that appeased me, I mean her ;} She now likes to comment on the feng shui of t-shirt design as she puts my obsession with the flow of the design :}


I had, and still have tons of ideas for designs, I just didn't have time to put them all down. There were a few designs i just tossed because I didn't like the end result. Each one of these designs took me a good deal of time. You have no idea how long it took me to figure out how to get that stinking light reflection on the ball of the pole on Krissie's design. It wasn't necessarily difficult once I figured out how to do it, but I was teaching myself how to use adobe illustrator the whole time I was designing this stuff. A VERY painful process.

So I had one day left to complete all my designs. Two were done for the most part, but I had more ideas. That's one of my biggest problems, I can never shut off my brain. While going through the fonts for Krissie's design I came across a little lost logo that I liked. I thought I would try and turn it more South Poley.

This is the inspiration:
I don't like how there are folks in the black that just disappear because the design has all the characters completely black.

This is what I came up with:

If you notice I changed the design so that any shape in the black of the shirt is white and visible. The cool thing about this is that I used only the original font/logo I found. I just moved things. The exact details I will not divulge, mainly because the people reading this won't care :} If it's not obvious, it says POLE now instead of LOST. This was a HUGE pain in the tush, mainly again just because I needed to figure out how to do what I wanted. The actual process isn't too bad, now that I know what/how to do it.

And then, because I am NEVER satisfied with anything I do, and I had an hour left to complete the designs, I figured I should make it even more "Poley". What I decided to do was replace the cast with, well us. The design already was very difficult, but this next part was a nightmare. In a very large part because I was unable to save the files, photoshop and illustrator were corrupting the files, I nearly lost everything I did. There were a lot of not so nice words coming out then...

And without further ado, the winning design for the South Pole t-shirt design:


Pretty dang creative if I do say so myself :}

and here is the version I like, and may make as well: