3 new prints coming soon!

there is a new competition in town that is raising some eyebrows. well, some brows are being furrowed.

tshirtvault.com has a new contest model that awards designers $3 per $19 shirt sold, and the top 5 designs sold get a portion of a $10,000 prize.

why are brows being furrowed? some find the setup incredulous, and even i feel like i am gambling as i submit designs into the competition. the detail that is concerning artists is the fact that you have to send it print ready art from the word go. the first rule of design is to never send the print ready art until you have cleared the check. and for tshirtvault.com to start selling your designs, it's a necessity to have this art up front.

the fear is that these designs could end up being ripped off. the company is brand new and hasn't had the time to build any trust with the online designer community.

i am throwing my hat in only because i see other respected designers taking the same gamble. and if we're ripped off, i will commiserate with good company; if that's any consolation.

now that i've waded through the uncertainty, i'll speak to the perks. barring rejection from tshirtvault.com, these designs will definitely be available to purchase on march 1st:



this eliminates a lot of work for designers. usually, when a design is finished, a designer looks at the different competition communities threadless, emptees, design by hümans, tee fury, shirt.woot, etc.) and guess which one is the best fit. then you submit and cross your fingers for prize money or 24 hour partial sales compensation. all tried and true systems, no doubt.

tshirtvault.com operates more like the old bountee.com (now a different company, hence no link) where every design submitted is available for sale, there's no uncertainty. and unless you win one of the top 5 sales spots, you retain your designs artistic rights and can pull the design at anytime to sell elsewhere (which raises the issue of the bigger design competitions not accepting previously printed designs, no matter how low the quantity, they're tainted.)

so i'm hopeful, and i have selected designs that are particular to tshirtvault's printing process and have been favorites when featured as sidebar art on sites like tee fury, but have never been printed. so please, spread the word. make my gamble worthwhile and help me get in the top 5 printed designs!

the desperate plea.

itunes just shit the bed.

i have been playing my 7,000+ songs in itunes since i first fell in love with my imac 4 years ago.

every song has been imported by itunes off of cds or purchased through the itunes store. (i bring this up so everyone understands that the aac codecs are all correct for itunes playback)

i recently purchased a couple itouches, and i noticed that some songs refused to play.

then i find that those same songs refuse to play on my imac as well.

no error messages, itunes is still pointed to the correct folder containing all of the music (both the songs that still play and the thousands that don't) and nothing happens.

i reinstalled itunes, and it immediately picked up where it had left off, same problems.

i then pointed itunes to an empty music folder, tried out a few songs and got the error message that it couldn't find that track. perfect, right? nope. the songs that wouldn't play before still did nothing. no reaction from itunes at all.

pointed itunes to the correct folder again and i still have the same problem.

insult to injury is that a call to apple will cost me a one time fee for them to walk me through how to fix a problem caused by using their software and their products together, as i can only imagine the itouches are the catalyst for this problem (chronologically speaking, at least.)

i bring this up in my oft-neglected blog as a final cry for help.

i have tried all the google-fu at my disposal, and i can only find fixes for windows operating systems.

has apple gone rotten?

sha-na-na-na-na-na knees, knees!

i have a new design going up for sale on teefury tonight at midnight titled "use your illusion." (hence the comical title to this blog)



if you're having a hard time deciphering why i think this design is interesting, start looking at it knowing that it's an optical illusion. your mind has just been blown, courtesy of dann matthews.

this sale, like all teefury sales, is only for 24 hours, and it's dirt cheap. so go pawn your dirt!

damn squatters!

thanks to my ego, i quickly found out i had lost something dear to me.

while twittering with old bandmate and fellow designer, justin peterson, i found out that dannmatthews.com was gone.

it has been purchased by a domain squatter, who buys up hundreds of derelict domains to then sell them back at ridiculous markups to the poor schmos who lost them. call me mr. schmo. i hadn't kept up with the yearly charge by sheer ignorance and a previously unused broken email account as my lifeline to godaddy.

so, i almost hesitated (almost) calling the new owner of dannmatthews.com a squatter, as i have asked him/her/satan how much they would like to buy it back. but something tells me i'm 100% correct in my prejudice.

so, i just purchased danndesigns.com, and after i await the pending server re-point, i'll have a new home.

at least it's not a bad domain, it's just not as great as being able to own my own name :/

new website! (2.1)

i have been meaning to update my website for some time. while i was very pleased with the easy to update look of version 2, i was never 100% pleased with the completion.

so i started making some alterations (most notably on the designs page) and bringing in something more (dare i use the adjective) "dynamic".

click here to take a look for yourself.

i will most like make my way through the shop page and finish off the rounded look, as well as rearrange the stock, as a lot of the shirts have sold out (indefinitely or otherwise)

for now, the "up for vote" section i had on the home page has been removed. i might revisit that in the future. i may also add my twitter feed... or i may get off the computer and make myself a sandwich. the possibilities are endless!

fuzzlebeast.

threadless is running a 10k prize competition. this year's theme is new trends.

so i looked at the (extremely) vast collection of threadless shirts and saw a lot of designs that tell a great, well thought out story. not too many left the story open-ended for the viewer.

so i created trevor & the fuzzlebeast.


a design with enough detail to draw your own conclusions, making my suggested trend one of open-ended story telling designs.

this design should be up for vote soon.


if you would like to see how this design came together, i have the work in progress images here.

nerds unite.

i have a 2nd shirt up at shirt.woot today.

it would be my third shirt with the wooters, but they had asked to buy a previously sold design at one point last year.

i am pleased to present:


i read through the forum's reviews and the posters aren't as pleased with this design as they were with my last woot design. on the other side of the same coin, this design has already sold double in the first 12 hours what the other one sold in it's entire run, and most of the tweets from strangers have been positive. take them both and there you have the facts of life... the facts of life.

shirt.woot only keeps the 20 most poular designs, so this one could be gone soon.