Hi there guys and girls .

Its time for another thrilling Springleap OPEN THEME competition!
NO specific theme, only regular guidelines apply! You know the drill NO OBSCENITY, NO HATE SPEECH…all that jazz.

This is your chance to show us your creativity on your own terms. Don’t be shy – just put it out there! Let the world be your inspiration. We wanna see what lives within your artistic mind.

You can submit up to 5 designs so go wild! The more designs you submit the greater chances you have of winning!

So, get designing peeps. The time is now to show us what you got!

One winner will receive

… 4 printed t-shirts, a cash prize – US$500 (R4000)

DATES TO DIARISE:

Submissions for designs open: 14 December 2021

Submissions for designs close:  17 January 2021

Voting starts: 19 January 2021

Voting ends:  05 February 2021

Winner is announced: 06 February 2021

You could be the next winner on Springleap.com and gain exposure for yourself! You also stand a chance of winning amazing prizes and loads of cash .

Winners will now be chosen using votes as an indicator. The top 10 voted designs will get the golden stamp of approval and go in for review . The final verdict will come down to our esteemed design panel here at Springleap . For those that don’t win, you still stand a chance to have your designs printed! We’ll be keeping all top 10 designs in our re-seller catalogue and who knows we could be printing and selling your designs nationwide!

Everyone WINS!!

In order to get started on your designs download the Springleap t-shirt Submission Kit and get started right away!

Confused or uncertain about anything?

Post your questions about the OPEN THEME competition below or click our online support button to the left of our header.

Good Luck and Happy Designing!

The Springleap.com Team

Now here is some amazing art that will make you go dotty!

Put your hands together for ink art ‘stippling’ guru Miguel Endara.

The art of stippling is when you create a design by painstakingly ‘dotting’ a page using an ink pen. This is a design style that is most certainly not for the impatient types, it takes hours upon hours to achieve an effect that looks even half decent. Thats right boys and girls, the designs you see here are not sketched...they are dotted (stippled).

Stippling is by no means a ‘new ink art’ technique. Heck, I’m sure most of us have made a rudimentary attempt at stippling in art class, or randomly when we are doodling at home.
However, there seems to be a definite resurgence in the style by artists who mean business and who take on very high-difficulty projects…like our man Miguel!

The design that has been created in this video is entitled "Hero" and features the face of Miguel’s father. How many dots did it take Miguel to create this piece? Try a mind-boggling 3.2 million ink dots (closer to an exact number of 3,213,000).
The entire process took him 210 hours, with a dot rate of around 4.25 dots per second.

The first time I saw the art of stippling done on any form of technical level was a good ten years ago, by my cousin’s best friend. She had also created a face using stippling for her buddies birthday and I was pretty impressed.
To speak honestly, and I mean no offence to her, but Miguel Endara’s Hero design is on a whole different level and has revitalized my interest in stippling!

I would love to see stippling used to create an awesome t-shirt design on Springleap.com
Now that I think about it, what would be an easier technique – stippling on paper and then scanning, or stippling directly onto a tablet?
Shame maybe this would be too abusive for a tablet….it would hate you afterwards :P

Just in case you are interested Miguel not only created the design, but he also put together the video, which I thoroughly enjoyed watching….nicely done sir!
The music he used was also really cool: Noctuary by Bonobo

If you would like to see more design from the nimble hand of Miguel Endara, please cruise across to his website.
I highly suggest that you do, becuase you can really zoom in nicely and see all the crazy dottery ;)

Get stippling :D

Tiago Hoisel is an artistic dynamo!

This insanely talented designer began his professional career after graduating from the University of Estado da Bahia in graphic design. Ever since then his skills have increased exponentially with a transition into the world of digital design which has amplified his power to new heights of awesome! He has now been smashing the norms of the design world for a good 5 years.
While I suppose this may not seem like a very long time for some, it is obvious that he is one of these geniuses that are not confined by the pathetic human concept of time, hehe.

Tiago was born in Salvador and grew up in a relatively sleepy little town called Ilhéus. He worked as an illustrator at an image retouching studio back in 2008 but has subsequently moved to São Paulo, where he runs his own studio together with 4 elite design partners, who are reshaping the world of illustration as we know it, one sexy pixel at a time!

It seems that his main weapon of choice is Adobe Photoshop. He employs this mighty piece of software to full benefit by making use of its amazing brushes. This allows him to create a more vivid and striking final product.

You will no doubt see that his illustrations are full of their own unique humour. Tiago Hoisel is a designer who has the ability to take even a cartoon character and bring out its own innate ‘realness’! He creates his own weird and wonderful style that borders on both the world of realism and surreal. Tiago is very much in-tune with the world around him and takes much of his inspiration from his surroundings and the people he meets. Even the madness of his dreams finds its way into the real world and is conjured to life through masterful illustration.

I’m beyond blown away by this guy!
I take my hat off to this dude and I look forward to seeing how his skills evolve.

If you would like to see more of Tiago Hoisel’s fantastic artwork please visit his website and Techno Image page…you will not be sorry!

Born this way? Yes indeed this lady most certainly was!

Lady Gaga has become a music sensation of enormous influence over the past few years. Theer are few people who are not familiar with at least a bit of her work. Her showy style and belting voice has set her apart from
Capitalising on ‘shock’ performance and outrageous fashion she exploded onto the scene and became one of those artists that you feel compelled to see what she does next.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (aka: Lady Gaga) grew up in New York and started her musical journey from a young age. She started bashing away at a piano at the tender age of 4 and wrote her first ballad at 13. A year later she took her first step into the often soul-crushing world of ‘open mike night’. After being scouted by Akon her career has soared on wings lashed with jet engines.

She has won herself 5 Grammy Music Awards and 13 MTV Video Music Awards. She has also landed herself at the top of Forbes Celebrity 100 list....BOOOOM!

I could harp on about her career and achievements until the cows come home, but I will rather supply you with a link to her full career/life history ;)

Perhaps the most central attraction of Lady Gaga, besides her incredible voice, is her outrageous wardrobe. With influences from artist like Queen, Madonna, Michael Jackson and David Bowie there should be no surprise at her uniquely flamboyant style.

Let’s take a look at the Top 15 Lady Gaga outfits that have made us all laugh, cry, raise our eyebrows, drool, gasp…and most importantly, smile ear-to-ear!

1. Lady Vampire Chunkybutt      2. Lady Superhero          3. Lady B&W Thatched Roof

4. Lady Gaga-gorgeous

5. Lady Meat Pack (My fav of the top 15 Lady Gaga outfits)  6. Lady Kermit

7. Lady Bubblicious                                  8. Lady Poodle Queen

9. Lady Zipper Grope                                10. Lady Goth Bunny

11. Lady Pink Animal            12. Lady Skeletor                13. Lady XXX-Nun

14. Lady Phantom of the Opera                   15. Lady Bloody Gibbs

While this may be the Top 15 Lady Gaga outfits for us, I’m undoubtedly sure that you all have your own personal favourites. If you have any other awesome pictures of Lady Gaga we would love to see them.

What do you love about this mega powerful and uber talented performer?

Packaging design is indeed a frightening beast in the world of design!

It doesn’t matter how much experience a design team has, or how much money you throw at a project, it seems every now and then even the greatest designers trip, stumble and fall face first into a blender….woops, maybe that was a tad graphic, sorry ;)

The latest example of bad packaging design comes from none other than mega-brand Coca-Cola who recently released their new ‘festive season’ can. What the heck were they thinking?

The new Coca-Cola festive can takes a bold step where no Coke can had gone before….all white.
Yes that’s right. Coca Cola ditched their iconic red in favour of an aluminium can that was wrapped completely in white. Talk about crazy!

Honestly I think the Coca-Cola marketing executives had their hearts in the right place – the design was not only festive, but also intended to raise awareness for polar bears amid the heightened concern of global warming and its impact on their natural environments. Coca-Cola has donated 3 million dollars to the World Wildlife Fund (nice one guys) in order to bolster conservation efforts for these beautiful animals. You will see the can is emblazoned with a family of cute polar bears that track across the bottom of the can.

Firstly you can barely see the bears against the white of the can and secondly the can itself looks extremely close to the Diet Coke can design.
In fact there have been many customers who have complained to store manager that they have no regular Coke, only to be shocked by the discovery of such a vastly ‘different’ design. There have been a few cases of customers going home and drinking regular coke, thinking it was diet, and getting rather vexed at the discovery only a few days later. As far as I know diabetics drink Diet Coke, imagine how annoyed you would be if you realised you had been guzzling down copious amounts of sugary-death!

Some people even complain that the Coke tastes different in a white can, this is obviously rubbish, but hey….it’s amazing what the mind can do and how much sway it holds over how we perceive taste.

Well, it’s not only Coca-Cola who created bad packaging design for cola cans in the past. Just take a look at Pepsi’s super-bad new can design and you will see just what ugly is. Their super simplistic new design totally destroys the fun, energetic, design of the past. Talk about clinical and totally uninspiring. When will people learn that logo design doesn’t have to be completely minimal to be effective? This is taking it a bit too far!

Bad packaging design is all around us and it is seriously interesting that it’s not only the inexperienced companies that are making ‘epic fails’ in the design department, but even the big boys with some the most iconic work of all time.

While this is a pretty nasty blunder for Coca-Cola it’s nowhere near as big a mess up as the time when they tried to change the actual recipe of the drink itself, haha….now that was a supreme FAIL!