Virtualmeet.net

The Catalyst Gym members competing in the upcoming December 5-7th powerlifting meet wanted shirts to go with it, so I rolled up my sleeves and finalized the new logo celebrating our union of weightlifting, powerlifting and bench press meets (Chris, thanks for the push!).

The new shirt features the snatch, the deadlift and the bench press against the now familiar map of the world symbolizing both our sports and us coming together on the virtual arena. The new shirt also captures the essence of what Virtualmeet.net is about: the ability to compete anywhere without the "geographically dispersed" mumbo jumbo. In contrast with the previous powerlifting-only logo shirt, the figures have been made larger to make the shirt image more powerful.

Unlike the previous shirt, I have also added a small commission to the price so by buying one you will actually give me a small contribution towards the server hosting costs (or perhaps an energy drink to give me some more oomph during the late night coding).  ;D

Available via our store at Spreadshirt.com (http://virtualmeet.spreadshirt.com/). Many colors, women's and men's cuts... there's also some sweatshirts in there.

Update: I made a last minute switch of printing service from Printfection to Spreadshirt.com (updated the above post accordingly). The main reason for this move was that Printfection only pays out their commission using cheques (which are slow and really expensive to cash for such small amounts plus forces me to convert from dollars into euros despite having US based servers etc.). Spreadshirt has a good reputation, so the product quality should continue to be stellar (all feedback welcome!).

On the positive side, this change also led to the prices dropping by about $2 for the T-shirts and the addition of some additional items such as V-necks and sweatshirts.

Another update: prompted by a member request to print on a larger variety of materials, I have decided to make yet another change, i.e. vectorizing the logo printed on the shirts. No shirts have yet been sold, so this will not affect any previous orders.

The T-shirts will be back tomorrow. And that my dear friends, should be the last change done to the shirts. :D

The design has now been vectorized and polished up a bit more in the process. This means I can now scale it up and down without loosing quality which will make life much easier when generating posters, stickers, shirts and whatnot.

The vector files have to meet some fairly tight specs to be printable, so the design is now queued for manual confirmation. According to Spreadshirt, this will happen within 48 hours. This was a bit of a letdown as I had hoped to get the shirts back up tonight, but not much that can be done. The shirts should thus be available no later than Monday, provided Spreadshirts can keep their schedule. At the moment, I don't know whether the change to vector will affect prices or not as the printing method is different (and better) than that used for raster images. Remains to be seen.

Again, sorry for the constant barrage of changes. In retrospect I should have done the research before releasing the shirts... but I believe the changes will be worth it, painful as they may be now. Thanks for your patience.

The shirts are now back and available!

To make a long story short, the vectorized format did not work out due to the printing limitation that each element be a minimum of 0.059 inches in size. Specifically, this would have necessitated a much simpler pixel map background as the current one needed to be blown up by 168% to meet the requirements. The logo font would also have had to be simplified. Unacceptable trade-offs.

So I went back to saving a pixel image in exactly the required size. Thanks to the vectorizing, the figures are even better than before so the process was by no means a waste of time.

So... get them at http://virtualmeet.spreadshirt.com. Just bought three shirts myself.

As usual, all shirt feedback is welcome in the Feedback forum.