Here at One Village Coffee HQ, we’re constantly developing ways to further international education and look good at the same time. After doing some research, we discovered that most of you tend to wear shirts. With that in mind, we’re pleased to launch the One Village T Shirt Design Contest. And the international education part? All the profits from the winning shirt design will go straight to the Intercontinental Education Community Centerin Nigeria which we’re supporting this quarter.So, let’s jump right in. The rules:

• Maximum size: 12 inches high, 10 inches wide
• Format: vector PDF or EPS (see more about this acronym nonsense below)
• Color: Your entire design must be printed in a single color. You may suggest an ink and shirt color with your submission.
• Deadline: 12/30/2011

So what are we looking for in a shirt? Just show us what One Village means to you. Good coffee. Local connections. Global community. Whatever you love about us. Beyond that, we tend to like submissions that somehow incorporate something that traces back to our company (our name, our website, a sketch of Woody’s face), but don’t worry too much about it. If we really love your design, but we just want to add something to it about our company, we’ll be in touch with you about that.

Apart from fame beyond belief and superhuman strength, the winner will receive every single one of the following:

• Your winning design printed upon a wonderfully soft T shirt! We’ll send you one.
• Your shirt will also be available for sale at our online store.
• A 3 month supply of our coffee. That’s 4 12oz. bags of your choice of coffee every single month. And a brand new One Village Coffee mug to drink it in. Yeah. Over $200 worth of liquid awesomeness. Boom goes the dynamite.

Ready to submit? Let’s do this.

1. Email your submission as an attachment to shirtcontest@onevillagecoffee.com by the end of the day on December 30, 2011.
2. In your email, include your name and a color suggestion for both the ink and the shirt fabric.
3. You’re welcome to include a phone number or different email address if you’d prefer that we contact you that way.

Got a ton of great ideas? No problem, multiple submissions are totally allowed. Please just submit them each in a separate email. If you have any questions at all about the contest, the rules, your design, or life in general, please send those over to shirtcontest@onevillagecoffee.com and we’d love to answer them or let you know if anything’s up with your design before you submit it.

Oh, and about that EPS/PDF stuff. If you have no idea what we’re talking about, it means your design must be a certain format called a vector graphic, rather than a regular image. Basically, a vector is made out of shapes, lines, and colors so that it can be resized to any size, while a regular bitmap image has a specific size. In general, if you’re using a program like Photoshop, GIMP, or Microsoft Paint you’re probably not creating a vector image and we won’t be able to print it and it will be very sad. There are a few programs that are great for creating vector images. Some good ones are Inkscape (totally free) and Adobe Illustrator (totally not free). But we’d be happy to answer any questions you may have about any of that or double check anything you’re working on. Just shoot your question and/or attached work in progress to shirtcontest@onevillagecoffee.com and we’ll get back to you ASAP to let you know what’s up.

Note: It’s not just a caffeine high. That date did actually change from what it used to be. We pushed back the deadline due to some site issues that prevented many people from reading this here blog post. So you should now have plenty of time to start over after that horrible coffee spill incident involving your winning design sketch.