My One Chance At An iPad, Gone

One day a year, my office closes and spends the day helping the community--we call it 'Community Service Day'!  CSD is one of my favorite days out of the year (rivals the Halloween Party and possibly Marathon Monday), and this year, Digitas held an internal t-shirt design contest which the winning design would win an iiiiPAADDD (iPad).  From my long history of late technology adoption, specifically products that start with an 'i' (I have yet to own an iPod and my phone looks like a toy), this was my ONE chance at owning an iPad and proving to society that I too can be cool.

Lucky for my office, I have experience designing t-shirts (from 6 years ago in high school when I designed Carnival and Skip Day shirts).  Some lessons I learned: 1) The more colors you use the more expensive your t-shirt will be 2) Intricate T-shirt designs don't always look the way they do in your photo.  Conscious of these requirements and avoiding a design that looks generic non-profity, I decided to make shirts inspired by MAD MEN!

Yes, I am obsessed with Don Draper, but how funny (I mean 'cool') would it be to see 700+ people in skinny black ties and pearls getting all sweaty and dirty from gardening and painting murals.  I agree the one lame factor of the design is that they are a bit hipster/emo-like, but that is not what I am going for.  I am going for playful, outrageous... 60s.  Girls could have colored in the pearls with markers.

The winner was announced last Friday, and I didn't win (big surprise).  I heard the Mad Men shirt came close to being a finalist, which makes me really happy that someone else shares my sense of humor or is also crazy.  

Here are the Mad Men shirt designs:

This was my alternative sane design, which I provided different color options:

I might have been more successful if I didn't restrict myself to cutting costs by using fewer colors and creating images that were solid shapes.  Maybe next year, and hopefully by then the iEverything will be out.