I am so excited to announce that we have partnered up with P&B Textiles to host our first annual Textile Design Competition! One lucky winner will receive a licensing contract with P&B Textiles and a one year membership to Pattern Observer’s Textile Design Lab. We will also be awarding ten Semi-Finalist Winners a one year membership to The Textile Design Lab and additional runner-up prizes from our sponsors.
I encourage you to read all the rules and design guidelines on the competition website, but here are a few highlights:
- Designers are asked to create a textile design collection, consisting of a main pattern and a coordinating pattern, based upon one of the supplied creative briefs.
- Collections must be received by March 1, 2015.
- Ten Semi-Finalists will be chosen based upon the marketability and creativity of their collection and notified via email on 03/13/15. Their work will be featured on the Pattern Observer blog, alongside judge feedback and comments.
- Entrants must be legal residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia who are at least eighteen years old at the time of entry.
This community played an important role in the development of this competition so THANK YOU for being a part of this event! We listened to what you love, and don’t love, about design competitions and have crafted an event that everyone can benefit from through judge feedback and designer exposure.
One request that we were unable to fulfill was to allow designers from around the world to participate. As stated in this article by Natasha Shabani, “Internet contests, which are technically accessible worldwide, must comply with the laws of not only the 50 U.S. states but also each country in which someone could access the promotion.” This was a deeply disappointing discovery and I hope that those of you affected can understand how this would have been impossible for our small staff. If you want to read more about this topic I’ll post a few links below.
My hope is that everyone is able to benefit from this competition by reviewing the creative briefs developed by the P&B Textiles design team and reading their feedback on both the Semi-Finalists and Finalists collection. I look forward to sharing these award winning collections with you all on March 13, 2015!
You can read more about running online competitions here, here and here. Working with our lawyer was an eye-opening experience and we recommend consulting with a lawyer before running contests of your own!
