This year, 112 students entered the Culture Shapers T-Shirt Design Contest, blowing away our expectations! The Top 10 finalists were posting for online voting, which was fiercely competitive, with 3,664 votes being cast by folks all around the country.
When the voting concluded at midnight, October 8th, Luis Flores from Seven Lakes High School had the most votes by a narrow margin of just 13 votes over the 2nd place entry, submitted by Dillon Key of Cinco Ranch High School. Luis has won $500 cash, PLUS his design will become the official 2008 Culture Shapers t-shirt, distributed to 1,500+ entrants throughout the 2008 Culture Shapers Visual Arts Contest!
The winning design is posted below, along with the Top 5 Runners-Up.
Congratulations to everyone who entered or voted in this year’s contest! We appreciate your patience through the intense web traffic and technical issues that arise as a result of the massive traffic. Thank you for participating!
The Winning Design…
Luis Flores
Seven Lakes High School
Katy ISD
The Top 5 Runners-Up…
 Dillon Key Cinco Ranch HS |  Mustufu Zaidi Alief Hastings HS |  Taylor Walla Seven Lakes HS |  Gregory Howard Barbara Jordan HS |  Chinedu Onochie Clear Springs HS |
A note to all who participated…
First of all, a huge “thank you” to every student who entered the 2008 T-Shirt Contest. We saw some of the most amazing designs this year, and were completely overwhelmed by the 112 total entries!
The designs we saw were simply fantastic, but unfortunately many did not adhere to the requirement that the artwork must be created in vector format, rather than in pixel format, such as Photoshop creates. This is a limitation of the t-shirt printing process. Pixel-based designs result in jagged edges and fuzzy lines when the screen is applied during the t-shirt printing process. Vector artwork may be resized to any size while maintaining sharp lines and text.
The only way to create a vector file in Photoshop is to use the pen tool to create your design, then save that path. Finally, export the path to Illustrator. We hope that as a result of posting these details, many of you will explore the possibilities available to vector illustrators!
But overall, this was some of the best work that we’ve seen, and we hope that each of you continue to develop and pursue your graphic design skills.
Thank you all once again for participating!
Why the results took so long…
We have been working intensely since the contest ended to sort through the data from the poll alongside technicians from Micropoll. There was a significant discrepancy between the results displayed at midnight (see screenshot) and the results displayed since then.
In addition to working with the technicians from Micropoll, we also conducted a second poll of the Culture Shapers staff and Board of Directors. Luis Flores’ design also won this second poll by a narrow margin.
Based on the results of our second poll, along with the results of the online voting as of midnight, we are comfortable declaring Luis Flores the winner of this year’s t-shirt design contest.
Thank you to Micropoll for taking the time to sort out this complicated technical issue, and to all of you who submitted your concerns and ideas throughout the days following.
Last Year’s Winning Design, by Hung Pham of Clear Creek High School!
Previous designs…
