Delving Into the Derby

Thank You, Fishbiscuit. I guess he was here before I joined.

He was here when I started. I was surprised when you said you haven’t had a derby print. Keep subbing! I really like your work. :slight_smile: It’s clean and wearable.

I have given some thought to this forum and wanted to mull things over before rambling in a scattered mess. And like ApeLad, I haven’t read every post. That said, here I go.

Regarding text designs: If a pure text design is able to draw the kind of audience to win, it should run. Kritikrae’s recent sarcasm shirt (tribes derby) out sold the other winners by far bc it resonated with the buyers and voters. There is a beauty in the simplicity of a text design that is too often undermined by people claiming its not ‘art’.

Regarding a 24h fog: it sounds fun, but I think it will drive away voters. Voters (and anyone on the Internet) are lazy and a 24h fog could likely backfire. They don’t want to sift through a flood of mediocre entries to find the qualitees (quality tees. Get it?). I think that the new hotness column gives exposure to strong entries and enables them to catch up.

Regarding honourable mentions / editor choices : I think the language should be clarified a bit. It used to be that honorable mentions were in the side sale, and editors choices earned a daily feature. I miss that clarity. Now the HMS are called editors choices, and I am left wondering how to refer to the editor’s choice daily sales.

Finally, regarding voting restrictions :Let anyone vote (regardless of purchase history). It’s a pain to watch for shenanigans, but it does drive new voters and potential buyers to the site. I’ve had a lot of customers enjoy being a part of voting who then buy shirts because they are part of the process. Forcing people to buy first drives those bystanders away. Another interesting consequence is it also forces artists to be creative in promoting themselves and woot. Which really helps woot and all of us in the end.

I am clearly an amateur artist in that this is not my main gig (although I wish it were). I am a bit offended that I was not specifically insulted by name as some of the other amateurs were. This person may or may not have good ideas, but I think insulting the majority of artists currently contributing to woot may not be the best approach.

Change should be for the better.

The world has changed since our parents were our age, too. They were able to work 40 hour workweeks and afford a house, a car, a family. Most Americans (and woot has always been a majority American site) now have to have side hustles.

We need to stop having to have side hustles. No one should need to have a side hustle just to afford a place to live and food to eat.

Designers are working plenty hard enough without having to negotiate predatory contracts, and an exclusive contract for a design which is poorly promoted and lumped together with many other similar designs, which guarantees the designer no return on the exclusive nature of the contract… well, apparently that’s not predation in this thread.

Extolling hard work isn’t really helpful. Besides suggesting that designers aren’t already working hard, but it also puts the blame on them for not succeeding, and the fact is that there isn’t really an environment for them to succeed. “woot has changed”. Cool. Do we accept that (it seems most of the folks sticking around have) or do we try to fix it? Do we accept all change as positive and inevitable?

Because that’s how we get Uber, which makes billions, but as a company that defines every employee as an independent contractor, doesn’t have to pay for health care or any benefits at all for them.

And when we accept that as a viable way to employ people, that becomes normalized. People working 40 hour weeks for no benefits shouldn’t be normalized.

People working 40 hours a week for $8 an hour shouldn’t be normalized.

And artists making art for nothing close to a fair payday Should. Not. Be. Normalized.

Again, the shittiest, most painful thing in shirt curation is seeing someone who trusts you not make any money in that curation. That sucks when they can take that design back and try to make money off it elsewhere. It sucks when you know they have a brisk Society6 page. It sucks when you know that design has sat dead for years and the $50 you helped them make, with a non-exclusive contract, represents some small return on an investment of time which was otherwise shelved.

You, the artist, are still making the same $20 whether your EC is exclusive or there’s a non-exclusive contract. You don’t make less. Woot doesn’t make less. You could, hypothetically, even set the contract up so your design could sit around indefinitely at woot until you decided to pull it. That’s what Society6 does. It’s what both Threadless and DBH do for their artist shops. I don’t remotely understand why any artist would see these options and argue “oh, Pish, don’t change.”

Adder, you have so much rage. (I’m hesitant to address you bc I’ll likely make the list of enemies).

The point of this thread is to show that woot is listening and values the artist opinions in their restructuring.

You are calling the amateur artist community bitter and greedy and envious. And honestly they are anything but that. I’m sure there are outliers, and people will always be suspicious of shenanigans here and there. But your criticism of this community is 100% misplaced. My skill, my work, and my love for design has grown so much because of the artists I’ve met here. I think every ‘amateur’ like me is floored that Woot sends you a copy of your art when you earn an HM/Ed Choice, let alone the chance to win thousands. The people you’re insulting have been nothing but loving and supportive in the development of my art and they don’t deserve your trolling.

My main concern with Woot over the years is the barrage of side sales. Shirt.woot is no exception. I realize there’s not much you guys can do about this, but woot used to get a lot more traffic when someone just had to look at one shirt—or a even shirt and one side sale—decide to buy, or not. But it started to feel like a job with so much product and the traffic dropped.

Assuming you’re not going to cut out all the side sales, at least give artists the F contract so they can put a design in their own shops. Used to be an artist could put something up, and if they didn’t place and didn’t win an EC, then they could shop it around. Now woot pics 20 HMs and that’s that. Honestly for me, I haven’t minded as much because I don’t have the time to manage multiple stores. But my experience isn’t everyone’s and shouldn’t be the norm.

As far as rules; I’m fine with all the old no text, no Star Wars, incidental text only, etc. but don’t make it the standing rule for EVERY derby. It shoehorns the derby and artists get used to it to the point when suddenly text is allowed, or Star Wars is allowed, we get some sort of riot on our hands.

One more thing—not so much about rules as it is derby participation.

A few years ago there was no “artist resources” tab in the forums. Everything was posted in the main tab and there was lots of participation. WIP and critiques abound from artists and non artists.

Then in an effort to organize the forums better threads like that got hidden away in artist resources, which few people went to and all that wonderful discussion was gone by two or three derbies.

I’m not sure if there’s enough of a community left for that, but it gave a nice feel to the whole effort and produced a lot of better products thanks to real-time feedback.

Ok, throwing in my two cents :slight_smile:

First off, I’m 100% on board with making the derby/site more mobile-friendly. Yes, this is a huge undertaking that would take time and money, but well worth it IMO. I feel like it’s a problem when there’s no way to search a design/artist other than clicking a link to view the full site from the homepage on my phone. Maybe it’s as simple as adding a search bar or something?

Secondly, I’m all for pop-culture art, but I think there can still be a balance between original and pop-culture/parodies that seem to rule the fog. What about alternating derbies each week between original art only and allowing pop-culture references into the mix to keep things fresh?

The only “problem” I can see that hasn’t been discussed is late entries and voting. The way it works now is to have all your artwork and files ready to go by 11:59AM CST Thursday or your chances of making it into the fog are slim to none (not always the case, but most of the time). I guess where I have an issue is a majority of the voting happens on Thur-Sun and leaves no chance to make it to the fog if I subbed anytime after Sunday. It makes more sense to me just to allow submissions from Thur-Sun and give everyone a focused view of all the accepted entries that they can vote on for the week. Of course, this means the rejectorinator would have to be on full alert to give time for resubs if needed. Then again, this could really just be more of a personal experience that I’m witnessing than an actual problem…

TL;DR - Make the derby mobile-friendly, keep a good mix of original only vs pop culture in the guidelines, and keep subbing limited to Thursday-Sunday to allow ample time for votes to be tallied.

P.S. Did someone say Amazon customers are now allowed to vote regardless whether they’ve purchased from Woot or not?

Yeah, voting is opened up, for better or worse. It’s a double edge sword, when you have virtual celebrities coming in and bringing their followers.

I don’t know how long you been around, but back in the day, the derby theme was announced on Thursday and submission started on Friday. So you had 24 hours to create something amazing to get it in on time. It was rather uncommon for a Sunday submittal to get a print. Now we have an entire week to design. It’s hard to argue about not enough time, now, IMHO.

On a different note. There had been much discussion about there being too many curated galleries off the main page, and only one of which would have anything “new.”
What if you stopped all these curated galleries, but rather had two main shirts to focus on, on the main page, 1 daily/derby winner, and 1 HM from the previous week. These HM would be the same shirts that you put into your “side sales” but instead of showing all of them on a second page, you limit the group to 7 and release one a day. Maybe this HM print would be a $200 pay-out and $2 per shirt (even on first day). Just like the secondary derby winners used to get.

On a final note… I see a trend towards MORE restrictions in the derby and enforcement of rules. I have not heard anyone suggest that the derbies should have NO theme or that there’s too much enforcement/ restrictions. Maybe just switch things up a bit every week; no text, incidental text, no pop-culture, text only, no cats, no starwars, etc.

I’ve been around since 2010, but only submitted to dailies and never really messed with the derby. I’m not arguing for more time to submit (a week is plenty of time), I just don’t see the point of allowing to submit anything after Sunday if it has no chance of making it into the fog. At that point, you’re basically giving them an EC which may or may not make you any money and gets lost into the sea of designs they offer every week. I think I’d rather just have a select few make it into the honorable mentions and receive a flat payout of $200 plus royalties, although I can’t complain when my catalog earns me an extra bit of income every month thanks to quantity.

Got it, missed the point. Yeah, a window for submissions might make sense.

Since I don’t know you, I have no idea what your motivations are. I can best speak for what woot looked like during its first 5 shirt years or so. I personally think that there were lots of decisions made then that began ostracizing buyers and artists, homogenized the woot populace, and set the stage for low-vote derbies and low-sale prints. But I also saw a lot of woot artists fall like dead leaves from the woot tree. I saw lots of artists who had had success elsewhere come to woot and get nothing for their efforts. I saw live traced moons beat creative themes and skilled linework. The horror, the horror, yadda yadda.

But see, this is how they get you. You have an amateur see a contest like woot’s and it’s like bringing your kid to toys r us for the first time. 100%, seeing an idea you created on a shirt for the first time is a ridiculous high. I remember being in New York once and ending up in Battery Park, and just seeing the Statue of Liberty in the distance. It’s a surreal feeling, even if you’re not particularly nationalistic… it doesn’t seem real because it’s such a symbol, such a widespread image, but it’s a tangible physical thing. Like sitting in the chapel where the actual Last Supper is. Like meeting a celebrity. Have you ever met someone famous, even small potatoes famous? They don’t look real. They could have just been on stage in front of you, but now they’re offstage and they look fake. I get that owning a product with art you created is that same sort of soul-lifting “this can’t be real” experience. I’m not an artist, but it’s happened to me. I’ve seen numerous artists here net their first win, too. In at least one or two cases, I gave someone their first proper printing. It’s powerful.

Of course, once upon a time woot gave you three shirts if you printed. Plus a guaranteed payout for first day sales. Plus a reasonable commission for every sale made between day two and the design’s reckoning. Once upon a time, a designer could make more after the first day than many shirts now seem to make all week, and still not survive its first day of reckoning.

But woot isn’t a place that frequently cares about history, so… I guess what it comes down to for me is, yes. I get that, as a hobbyist designer, you are pulling in maybe an extra hundred a month if you’re regularly getting ECs. I totally get that you get to have a tangible proof of your efforts… no one gets that at a call center, for example.

But if you’re doing this for the right reasons, and you care about the art you’re doing, and you’re proud of that effort? You should be getting paid.

I don’t know how to explain to Americans that they should be getting paid. Americans really like being paid poorly. They consider this a point of pride.

And really, $2 a shirt is not bad pay, IF you can be reasonably sure you’ll be selling a reasonable amount of shirts. It was many, many years before even a single derby shirt would have made less money if woot had said “no prize, but $2 per shirt” as the base contract from the start of the sale. Most would have more than broken even with $1 per shirt on the first day and $2 each thereafter. But while History is important to figure out how we got here, it’s a bit of a moot point to talk about what someone would have been paid then using the payment plan in use now. It’s just there to point out that it’s not inherently terrible.

But woot can’t promise 500 prints now. I’ve seen very few tees that I’ve recently browsed making even 100 prints. lots of ECs won’t clear 10. For context, when I tracked these things better, no site was offering less than $200 for an exclusive contract, and that was mayyybe one or two places. Most were offering $500.

If a site couldn’t promise payment for your art, they gave you a non-exclusive contract, a period of time you’d be up, a shirt or two (screenprinted, usually), and whatever profits you could make, with the knowledge that you could go make other profits elsewhere.

This is what I do not understand. I don’t like that the non-exclusive contract world happened (or “had to” happen, if you want to deal in promoting the business above the creators), but it gave artists a choice, and it gave them freedom after making the choice.

And it still gave the artist a copy of their shirt, if you had a decent company backing you.

Again, I don’t know how to tell someone they deserve to be treated fairly. I don’t know how to convince someone that accepting a world where $20 is a fair payment for exclusive rights to your art means that all artists get hurt, because while art may be a fun sideline for you, it’s many folks’ actual career, and now the folks looking for art know you’ll do it for $20, so why pay a trained artist. But I’m not even trying to understand why folks would allow themselves to be paid so little. We’re all desperate out there. But supporting an exclusive contract in this setting is absolutely bonkers to me.

It’s also bonkers to me that woot would not understand supply and demand, as a site that made bank on the risk of a product selling out, but I doubt they’re about to cut back on the number of ECs, and I can grasp why a derby entrant wouldn’t think about how supply and demand can harm or help their sales. Lots of things are bonkers to me. But changing the contract from exclusive to non-exclusive for ECs would literally not hurt anyone, while keeping them exclusive is clearly not only harming artists, but keeping many of the ones woot grew from entering the derby at all. That should concern us, right?

Now you’re insulting all Americans. I am not sure why you’re here. All your points become invalid when you insult everyone.

It’s like Bill Cosby, I’m sure thousands of people looked up to him and grew up to be better adults thanks to him as a role model. But then all the SH!T came out and everyone wants to forget that he ever did any good for anyone…

It was a huge plus when the derby switched to an earlier announcement. Back then, some rushed their designs so they can get it submitted right at noon Thursday, and it gave a huge advantage to those who did fast work over those who did nice work.

The odds diminish greatly with a late entry. Never say never, though. A Wednesday morning submittal has won first place before.

I’m just popping in to say that I agree with making the ECs non-exclusive or at least having an “opt out” option for them. The EC contract is why I stopped entering the derby. Personally, I don’t want to risk spending a few hours creating something that I might give up the rights to for pretty much nothing (designing is my full-time income). In a perfect world where I had unlimited time, I’d take the risk because the derby is fun and I love Woot. It’s where I got my t-shirt designin’ start and I will forever love Woot and the derby for that. Whenever anyone asks me where they should start if they want to delve into t-shirt design, I always direct them to the derby. It’s a place to see examples of great shirt designs and also to enter your own, get feedback and improve. The payout for dailies and derby winners is amazing and really generous.

But, I’m totally confused about why everyone is arguing, haha. I think I read most of this thread and it seems like the big debate is about the exclusive contract for the ECs. Everyone seems to agree that it would be great if this were changed, right?

Also, I liked what Kevlar said about bringing back the “Artists Resources” tab and having a place for pre-derby discussion and critiques. That would be really nice if there’s still enough of a community to participate.

I feel like there are two discussion happening here. Some of us are discussing the toppings on the pizza. And others are discussing whether pizza is appropriate for breakfast!?

Us kids are discussing derbies, the interface, subject matter, rules, etc. The parents are discussing the value of work, contracts and unfair business practices.

I think the intent of this discussion was leaning more towards the “kids” discussion… But that is not to say that the high order discussion might prompt some serious mirror staring! “My, god, what have we done!”

Some of us started out discussing toppings then were told we’re not smart enough to pick our own toppings.

So…

  1. I agreed ECs should not be exclusive. I think I brought up the F contract days ago.
  2. Apparently working hard is now a bad thing. Who knew.
  3. I have no 3. Carry on.

I should NOT have been drinking coffee when I read this. Now I have a desk to clean …

At the very least, I too feel there should be a way to opt out or set the expiration that allows the artist to make that choice.

(One thing I noticed after Threadless released their exclusive rights was an increase in design thieves targeting their designs. Woot holding the printing rights allows Legal to go after them versus having to go after them yourself.)

FWIW, he’s the only artist in which my count has diminished.

My wayward son?