Honorable Mention

Jan submitted an entry to the BlogPaws T-Shirt Design Contest in July. She thought she would be competing against some real graphic artists - those who have the knowledge, talent and software, plus an extra dollop of creativity. She was correct.

Yesterday Jan received some good news from BlogPaws co-founder Tom Collins. Her t-shirt design for BlogPaws received an Honorable Mention.

Buddy,, well-known for his pop into the mind and out of the mouth remarks, counted the designs on the page - 1 winner, 4 Runners Up and 5 Honorable Mentions - and innocently asked, "So there were only ten entries?"  (Pay no attention to Buddy. We have no idea how many entries there were.)

Entries were supposed to reflect BlogPaws. So Jan did some thinking. The house filled with smoke. (Okay, we're exaggerating about the smoke.)

To Jan, the central theme of BlogPaws is the animals, so she dug into photos she's taken of pets that have gone through the local shelter and picked 3 dogs and 3 cats. She misunderstood the instructions about colors and made her design black and white, but an artistic friend agreed it was more dramatic in black and white.

We would like to congratulate the winner, Papua Piig. (The pet's name, not the human's.) And congratulations to all the winners.You can view the10 designs at BlogPaws 2011 T-Shirt Design Contest.

From the beginning Jan had a Plan B. She emailed Tom Collins and was assured there would not be any conflict if she removed the BlogPaws text and put the design in her Zazzle store.

Tom graciously recalls, “When Jan asked about re-purposing her design to promote the adoption of shelter pets, we saw it as a wonderful added benefit from the contest, Since ‘Be the Change for Pets’ is one of the core themes of our BlogPaws conferences and community, Jan’s creative talent and her commitment to helping pets fit right in!”  

There is a design with a light background for dark apparel which can also be used on light colors. (The actual background of this graphic is transparent.)  If you'd like, you can view them both here.

Thanks, BlogPaws, for holding the t-shirt contest.  It was fun.  Well, it was fun for us.  Jan had to work.

And speaking of work, Jan has a project relating to our designs, which will consume a lot of her time for a while - not to mention hinder our blogging time. Plus, she has been preparing to reopen another blog soon with some new goodies.  So we might not be able to leave many comments for a while.  Rest assured, though, we will be hovering around Blogsville, as Amber DeWeenie calls it. 

Update: We heard from Tom Collins a couple hours after posting this. He tried to leave a comment and Blogger wouldn't let him. But he posted this on BlogPaw's Facebook page -

Check out Jan's creative repurposing of her design to promote shelter pet adoption! What a great, unexpected payoff for our contest!

And no, Buddy, there were not "only ten entries"! We had a tough time getting the winning group down to ten finalists and you should be very proud of Jan. ;-D

Thanks, Tom.