Are you a designer on a budget? Right when you are starting out, many people don’t have a lot money for their ventures. Sure you can sell yourself at some cheap contest sites, but to be honest, it’s not worth it. The concept behind a T-Shirt contest is pretty cool, the 3 biggest shirt contests have a huge audience and you recieve good money. Besides that you can get a few of your own shirts for free.

Threadless

Threadless is the mother of t-shirt contests, they have been around for a very long time and the competition at this place is very high. Nevertheless you always have the chance to win, and the prizes given away are some of the biggest around. They have a certain style that they prefere and in case you want to win, you just have to look at their winning designs and work according to those. So either be fun and whitty, have some cute or killer illustration skills, or make people think. The greatest thing about threadless is the huge community behind it and all the awards that are given at the end of the year. Their special contest are awesome as well, giving out killer prizes.

La Fraise

La Fraise is the European version of threadless, giving away good money while having less competition than the american threadless. Overall I think the shirt quality over at La Fraise is more of my taste and I prefere the site to threadless. The designs picked are different from what you see at threadless and I really prefere the style, this is probably cause I am european myself

Design by Humans

Design by Humans picks one Shirt each day and at the weekend they pick the winner of the week, netting you a few extra dollars in case you win this. dbh is the most democratic of all those sites, as any design can win given it’s artsy and the people there love it. In case you are starting out this is one of the best sites to hit.