Spring Is In The Air – Leap Over To SpringLeap T-Shirts

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Spring Leap, Springleap.com, T-Shirt Contests, T-Shirt Designers, design t-shirts, springleap, t-shirt community, t-shirt competition, t-shirt store

I’ve been a fan of Springleap.com for quite a while now, and I must admit they’ve gone through leaps and bounds (excuse the pun) over the last year. Springleap are based in South Africa, the only t-shirt contest / fulfilment site on the continent, and it’s fantastic to see that the major players in the USA have finally found themselves some real competition on their hands. For a start it can only drive up the quality of t-shirt designs across the whole market.

For a starters they’ve been generous enough to supply us with a couple of excellent deals for all you lucky readers!

Firstly a whopping 20% off all orders for the next month and a permanent 10% off all orders FOREVER!

Furthermore they provide a unique and refreshing view on t-shirt design and graphic design in general, the truth is the standard of design at this unique t-shirt label has rocketed over the past 12 months, and I have to tip my hat to them (if I had a hat) for the incredible achievements they’ve made in their eventful rise to the top. Not only has their presence on the Net exploded, with an enormously popular Alexa traffic ranking floating around the 40K mark at the moment, and almost 10,000 listings on Google, plus a phenomenal amount of press coverage. They’ve even branched out in to wholesale now and have started selling at two stores in South Africa.

If you’re looking for intelligent design, a progressive attitude to community building, extreme quality in both product design and production, then Springleap are a major contender, ignore them at your peril! This is one of the few t-shirt stores I actually enjoy rolling around, sure they have great tees, but there’s a superb amount of customer interaction here too, but first let’s take a look at some of their fabulous shirts!

Every month Springleap prints and sells their top 10 winning tees as voted for by their army of fans, and if you’re lucky enough to win you’ll every month, receive cash, prizes, royalties and your name on the back of everyone of your t-shirts. What’s more you can submit 5 of your best every month to increase your chances! The process is very simple, once you’re subscribed as a user their system makes sure you’re totally happy with the look of your designs and their layout bfore you submit them for a competition. You also need to supply a name for the design, some background information about its inspiration and a thumbnail image. Once you’ve submitted a design to your workspace area, you’ll need to enter a larger image of the design and a design on one of their t-shirt templates and you’re done. The fact that they actually promote your work as a designer shows a distinct difference in attitude for this market, most t-shirt crowdsourcing companies usually pay you off and wash their hands of you, Springleap actually want to help you get your name out there!

This month’s overall winner Beery Method came up with a spectacular design called Sacred Method. This guy is actually a very accomplished artist, you can see more of his work at www.BeeryMethod.com including photogography, illustration and paintings. The Sacred Wild is a wonderfully illustrated t-shirt, I particularly like the crackleture effect on this design, Beery is obviously a master at line drawing however the colours are a superbly subtle mix, resulting in a very accomplished tee. The shirt is available for both men and women at only $19 / £12 (also available to buy in Rand or Euros!)

Here’s one of the strangest tees I’ve seen in a while, Sundae Best by Vonmonkey offers a more surreal slant with a heavy Rene Magritte influence at first glance, although the illustrative technique reminds me more of a woodcut etching, and an extremely subtle palette here once more.

Someday I will Rock by Boots is once more beautifully illustrated, there seems to be rather a lot of expert illustrators at Springleap and Boots is no exception. I can imagine this being a very popular tee amongst the women, a little too cute for me personally, however Chris adores it so I’m guessing plenty more feel the same way. There’s a generous six different colours in the design, there’s a strange blend of beatnik meets Victorian picture book about this one, a nice piece of wordplay and a bold and impressive image. As with almost all the tees available at SP, this is available in small to large sizes for women and small to XX large for men. But hurry, I suspect the women’s tees for this one will sell out fast!

This has to be my favourite tee at Springleap, Summerai by Robbielee displays a great sense of humour, but beyond that the conception of the design has been completely carried through, from the faux-Japanese style to the incredibly realistic wood grain effect, absolutely perfect in tone, colour, hue, line and perspective. I love the casual pose of this character, and the details such as his helmet hanging from the handlebars and ice cream in hand on the verge of melting. Definitely a chilled out tee for a hot summer’s day.

Beyond the great designs there are so many extra features at this site I just don’t have the time to mention them all here but I would recommend you take a gander at their highly entertaining blogs in the Wordup area as well as some other great community interaction via their Peeps and Talk T sections plus plenty of great interviews with tons of their designers.

I would proffer that Springleap.com must have ruffled a few feathers of their competitors, I mean this is a company that really puts their customers and designers first rather than forsaking one for the other, they’ve proven themselves time and time again, a perfect belnd of t-shirt contest and store paves the way for the future of the tee industry! Now leap over there and start voting!

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