Ink-Hound.com is a new t-shirt competition site. They say they are going to release a new t-shirt and cap (yes they do caps too) every two or three days and these will be selected from the top rated designs submitted by users of the site. They already have a few well known names from the t-shirt competition circuit such as Wotto, Mathiole and a.mar.illo involved. The designers get $2 for every item sold and when that print run is over the designer gets the rights to his artwork back. Pretty sweet. It’s like a cross between Design by Humans and TeeFury.

There are a few excellent design competitions out there, but we are aiming to achieve something different. We will not only allow the community to help choose the art that gets printed, but we will have a focus on very limited runs, artists’ rights, and sustainability.

These are a few points that make them stand out from the crowd:

using clean printing techniques with organic inks and offering organic tee options. Also, a portion of each sale will go to charity.

offering a wide variety of apparel options: fitted hats, mens and womens fitted tees, traditional fit tees, mens and womens organic tees, long sleeve tees, and hoodies. T-shirts will sell for $12 and hats for only $16!

They have many great points and features but their website is confusing and quite frankly looks amateurish. The image quality of even the t-shirts is pretty low which is not ideal for a site that is basically trying to sell images. There seems to be no uniformity but rather a hodge podge of design ideas thrown together without much thought. There is a low-res flash panel at the bottom that  makes the submissions look worse than they are. The designs are available on several types of apparel but you can’t see what most of the other items look like even without the designs on them. Normally I would be wary of using my credit card on a site that looks like it was put together in ten minutes but as I am familiar with the designers I can trust it. It’s a new site though and apart from the fact that it looks like a site that was created before before people heard of css I like what they are trying to do. Hopefully they will re-plan and redesign the site before they scare away too many potential customers.

To celebrate the launch everything is on sale and you can get a tee like the following a.mar.illo design for just $6. (You have to add to cart from the shop page before you click on the design.) This is a time limited offer though so don’t wait.