Fantastic Blognanza!

Welcome to my second installment of ‘Threadless Numbers’; if you missed the first (on submission scores and comments), you can still read it here.

The ProblemEven though the Threadless t-shirt design competition is open to all, those who actually get their designs printed could be primarily professional designers who have little actual involvement in the Threadless community, which would be antithetical to Threadless’ image as ‘design by the people, for the people’. Is this the case?

The AnswerBecause there are two parts to the problem (1) professional designers winning and 2) not being involved in the community), the answer is also two-fold.

Do Professional Designers Rule Threadless?Well… yes and no, but mostly not really. Pros (heuristically classified as ‘those members of Threadless who link to a designer’s portfolio or something similar on their profile’) might account for a greater total number of winning designs, but professionals and amateurs on average win about the same number of times.

Professional designers account for a greater total number of printed designs than do amateur designers. On the other hand, the number of designs printed on average by a member of either group is pretty much the same.

Even though the mean number of designs printed by professional designers (out of the 102 most recent winning designers as of May 6, 2007) is slightly higher, that difference is not statistically significant. Which means that the above graph is pretty much pointless… but whatever. It’s nice because it illustrates one point: it’s really hard to tell who on Threadless is a professional!

I judged whether each winner is a professional designer by whether or not they had a link to their professional design website in their profile. That data point at 14 printed designs is Glenn Jones, a.k.a. Glennz; even though he didn’t link to a website as of my research (and it still isn’t clear from his site that he is a professional), Glenn is the creative director of Dashwood Design, a graphic design company in Auckland, New Zealand.

Are Professional Designers Really a Part of Threadless’ Community?So professional designers don’t really win Threadless’ design competition any more than amateurs (even though they account for most of the winning designs); but do they really play as large a role in the community?

Why, yes they are! In fact, professional designers play an even larger role in Threadless’ community than do their amateur counterparts! Why might this be? I have several theories concerning this fact: that both a) professional designers are a welcome part of the community (I will return to this point shortly) and that b) the community is composed largely of professional designers!

My support for a comes largely from this Threadless blog post asking about opinions on professionals submitting to Threadless: only 15 responses (which is pretty meager), all of which are positive. And within those responses, eskimokiss a.k.a. Pascal Hoayek hit the nail on the head (I believe) as to why b might be the case: Threadless began with ‘a group of “professional” designers releasing some creative energy by designing t-shirts’. So Threadless may not be exactly ‘by the people, for the people’, but more ‘by designers, for designers’. With its growing popularity, however, (and the pool of non-professional designers who might be interested in Threadless is greater than the professionals) it seems to be partially shifting toward ‘by designers, for the people’. Threadless Select and their recent decision to let ‘winning designers select a certain number of shirts to be printed every month, regardless of the voting results’ (Walker 2007) may be responses to this trend.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering who scored 55095 submissions… it’s Ronin60 a.k.a. Cameron McEwan, member of Threadless number 7007 since June 20, 2002. He’s scored over 3000 more subs since May 6, 2007.

Implications and the FutureIn sum, what all of this means is that professionals and amateurs have an equal shot at winning Threadless’ t-shirt design contest, and that professional designers participate heavily in Threadless’ community. Submitting designs is not the full extent of their contribution.

It will be interesting to see how things change; whether the printed designs will start to lean more toward either professionals or amateurs, or whether it will stay relatively balanced. I’m even more interested in whether more professional designers will show up who just submit entries and don’t do much else. On the other hand, participation in the community may well improve a designer’s chances of getting printed, so non-participatory profesisonals might not have as high odds of winning as do participators.

Interesting Things about the Data (and Problems)May as well put this behind a cut… even though it actually is interesting! (To me.) And I only mention a p-value once, so it’s hardly more technical than the above discussion.

Continue reading ‘Threadless Numbers #2: What’s the difference between professional and amateur designers on Threadless?’