ansharp wrote:You and your friends can look at my total posts and look into my reputation and see that I'm not a troll. As I stated, there are many bad entries and many that get printed that I hold my tongue about or offer constructive criticism. For me to get offended over a design is a rare thing, but this design was distasteful to me from the moment I saw it. SO, instead of secretly hating it, I decided to post here and clearly point out why I find it offensive to MY sense of aesthetics. Did I say other people should be offended? No, but I am. If people are allowed to stop by and say "Hey, I love zombies, so you GMV," then I should be allowed to say "Hey, I don't like this shirt for these following reasons..." without everyone getting all up in a puff about it. Perhaps if the artist didn't have a history of negativity and elitism, I would have felt being nice and making suggestions would work. That, however, is not the case. If stating my honest opinion in the way I see best makes me an "a**hole" as you so eloquently put it, then so be it. Please attack and insult me with more poor spelling and incorrect grammar. I will not respond because it will get us nowhere.
By the way, I'm not a sir.
I can't remember the exact goings-on when ds made those comments, but from what I've observed in the derbies, those remarks would be the exception and not the norm. For the most part, he's been a nice guy around here. Perhaps he's displayed "negativity and elitism" a couple times in the past, but I certainly don't think he's had an entire history of it. 
(Edit: Ok, my memory may be a bit fuzzy so maybe there were more of those comments than I remember, but I feel that ds is a nice guy now, even if he acted like a jerk in the past...)
I agree that it's entirely within your rights to dislike this shirt, and I'd especially like to point out that you gave reasons for it, which is much better than the hundreds of genuinely hateful and unconstructive comments that get dropped in these forums. ansharp is definitely not a troll.
As to your concerns specifically - the printable area and the overall shape are really the only ones I agree with. Colours could have been better, but it's not that bad IMO. The only large expanse of ink is lower on the shirt so I don't think it would be as big a problem, and the ink-coverage problem isn't any worse than some other recent prints.
I saw the word "Zombie" right away and I don't see how this one makes any less sense outside the context of the derby than any other submission thus far. What is there to get? tgentry's "52 Pickup!" is one of my favourites in the derby because I'm an avid card player, but it suffers even more from "legibility". Spin it a different way and it's a positive - it's subtle. I don't think anyone would, from a glance, "get" the card shirt outside the context of the derby.
Memes are memes. Meh.
I absolutely agree that submissions outside the printing boundaries should be rejected right away. I also agree that the placement is a bit... strange and unflattering.
I do applaud ds for his unique (if meme-ish) application of the humans-forming-letters idea. The zombie positions don't look contrived at all and form very recognizable letters (to me, at least). Personally, I'm not a big fan of zombie shirts. Speaking of which, I should really put my Zombie Hunting up on tee trade...
So, uhhh, in conclusion - I think ansharp was relatively respectful in her comment (have you guys been paying attention to all the carp comments on woot?) and even though I don't agree with most of her points, I still think she is a great person. I like this design (though not enough to buy it) and I think it should be resized to within boundaries and resubmitted.
Now to see how many people I offended in my attempt at staying neutral...
illuminator wrote:@enin:
The design template DID change a bit, this one below is the same design on woot's Adobe Illustrator template available on the submission page right now.
Woah... seriously? Woot didn't announce any changes to the template (or am I blind?) so I've been assuming that I have the most recent version. The bounding box on my template is nowhere near that large.
