Now accepting 2013 CAR Conference T-shirt designs

The journalists who attend the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference do many things for their newsrooms: They analyze data, build websites, write stories, scrape and acquire records.

To honor this work, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting will sell a T-shirt celebrating the data geek in us all, and you'll help design it. Proceeds from the shirt will help raise funds for future NICAR training events.

For CAR 2012, you regaled us with your designs, SQL and puns. It was an epic competition, but two T-shirts rule them all. We're opening the competition once again - what will you think of next?

We’ll accept T-shirt ideas through the month of November. Designs will be posted online as we get them.  Members will be able to vote on the new T-shirt in early December. In addition to bragging rights, the creator of the winning T gets a free shirt and $50 in the IRE Store. The winning design will be on sale at the 2013 CAR Conference in Louisville, future training events and the IRE store.

All ideas are welcome, from a simple yet classic design with NICAR on it to bad SQL puns (SELECT * FROM tshirts WHERE tshirts.thisone = “Awesome”). There are only a few guidelines:

• The T-shirt should include NICAR or National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting somewhere on it, but shouldn’t be designed specifically for the 2013 CAR Conference.
• It must be work appropriate.
• There are no restrictions on colors or design, but keep in mind the more detailed/multi-colored the graphic work the costlier it will be for NICAR to print the shirts.
• By sending in the suggestion to NICAR you don’t retain rights to the final T-shirt. (This does not include bragging rights, which the creator will maintain in perpetuity.)

Have just the germ of an idea? Send in the text to us. Have a full-fledged graphical display to share? We’ll take JPGs, GIFs, PDFs or any other format you can come up with. So think up something great and send your suggestions to Jaimi Dowdell at Jaimi@ire.org or Tony Schick at Tony@ire.org.

NICAR, a program of IRE  and the Missouri School of Journalism, was founded in 1989 and has trained thousands of journalists in the practical skills of finding, prying loose and analyzing electronic information.