My job includes managing Sun’s sponsorship of a few external-to-Sun
events, like the American Heart Association’s Silicon Valley
Heart Walk (see my
September 21, 2008 blog entry), and the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (see my
October 14, 2008 blog entry).
The team usually designs a tshirt as part of event preparation.
Tshirts are good advertising and a popular giveaway, plus they make us
easy to find in a crowd.
In a big company, some decisions are easy. We don’t need to go looking
for a tshirt manufacturer because Sun has a preferred vendor. This means that
vendor selection, terms, payment, and method of shipment are already sorted out. The
event team can focus on other questions like shirt quantity, quality, cost, and
design. My event budget tells me how much I can spend. The number of event
participants tells me the rough quantity of shirts to order. There are some
tradeoffs I can make, such as raising shirt quality in exchange for fewer
shirts overall. That leaves mostly decisions about design.
Below are pictures of two sets of Sun tshirts that were very popular. (I know we have
a winner when people offer to buy the shirt from our backs!) In both cases,
we reused most of the 2007 design for 2008. The 2007 Hopper shirt took months to
create because Tanya Jankot and I asked Sun Engineering staff around the world to
help us translate and find the fonts to write “Sun Women in Engineering”
in English, Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin, Czech, and Russian (the languages of
Sun’s biggest Engineering centers). I think Sun’s 2008 Heart Walk shirt was a hit
just because teal is a flattering color for most people.
Some of the tshirt decisions we made in 2008:
- Sun’s 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing shirt:
- Kept the black fabric color.
- Provided different base shirts for women and men. Picked a softer fabric and
more form-fitting shape for the women’s shirts. (We tested several samples
until we found the best.) Used standard T-shape men’s shirts. - Updated the OpenSolaris logo and colors (from grey and orange to blues and
greens). - Kept one text/image design and printing size for both women’s and men’s shirts –
significant cost savings from this decision allowed us to make more shirts. - Picked the brightest colors (lime green and baby blue) from the OpenSolaris
“bubbles” logo for the text on the back. The photo below does not show how
very bright the printing ink colors are. - Put the chest logo higher up – more flattering for a woman.
- Sun’s 2008 Heart Walk shirt:
- Changed fabric color from baby blue to teal.
- Added a new event logo (designed by Sheri Kaneshiro) on the chest:
the Sun logo next to a white heart contining the words “Heart Walk”. - Changed ink color from green to white.
- Kept one design and printing size for all size shirts.
Some ordering tips:
- Ask the vendor to for unprinted sample shirts to feel and try on. This will
tell you whether the sizes run small or large. Two of the
common comments at the Hopper conference about Sun’s shirt were: “Cool design!”
and (after we gave the person a shirt): “Oooo, soooft!” - Always request a pre-production printed physical sample (in both smallest
women’s size and largest men’s size) from the vendor. We have seen the wrong logo
used, crooked printing, too-small printing, text too high or too low, and other
problems. An electronic image is good for basic design decisions but do request
a physical sample before approving production. - Consider your event population before deciding how many shirts of each
size to buy. At Hopper, we need 90% women’s sizes. The Heart Walk has more
men participating but also little kids, so we order 35% men’s large and extra-large
and the rest smaller. - Using one text/image design and printing size for all shirt sizes can yield
significant cost savings. - Once the pre-production sample is right, ask to ship the shirts directly from
production to the event.
2007 Grace Hopper
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Tanya in 2007 Grace Hopper Tshirt
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2008 Grace Hopper
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Heart Walk 2007
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Greg, Danny at Heart Walk 2008
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Paul, Sheri, Pat at Heart Walk 2008
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Images Copyright 2007 – 2008 by Katy Dickinson and Sheri Kaneshiro
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