Call for T-Shirt Designs: FOSDEM 2025 Nix Merchandise

Last year at FOSDEM, lots of people wanted to buy shirts from us, but we did not have any shirts to sell.
We would like to change this for this year, and produce some Nix-themed t-shirts with a custom design for FOSDEM 2025.

:art: The point of a custom design is not to explicitly name FOSDEM 2025, but to produce something that’s printable and simple, but a bit more fun and creative than just a black or white shirt with the snowflake logo.

:memo: It’s still early enough that we can get some input from the community on the exact design, so we’re asking you to participate and post your design proposals in this thread. The deadline for submissions is 2024-11-21T11:59:00Z (midday).

:gift: If we end of printing the design your created, we will give or send you a free shirt. If participating sounds like fun to you, please post your design(s). If there are any questions please also post them here or send me a pm.

:straight_ruler: We do not want to be overly strict or formal about the rules ahead of time, so we might have to fill in the details or add some rules as needed.

  • You can submit more than one design, but please be a bit mindful about how much space you’re taking up in this thread compared to other people. We will define rules about this if it becomes necessary.
  • Teams can participate. Please figure out how you want to split the reward, since we do not want to promise shipping more than one shirt.
  • Please produce files in a suitable vector-based format for printing. In this thread post something that renders as part of your post. We cannot pick your design if there is a technical or legal reason why we cannot print it in high quality.
9 Likes

Great idea. Thank you.

1 Like

You’ve got a buyer for two immediately.

I made a NixOS Anarchy “version 2” design, with “smash the state”.

This was the first version by kmein: GitHub - krebs/nix-anarchy: Smash the state. â’¶

My new design can be found here: nixos-anarchy-2/nixos-anarchy-2.svg at 94fb5f28cc6a647a8644180638197ca06566db02 · zmberber/nixos-anarchy-2 · GitHub

I decided to base it off of the classic “circle A” symbol, like this one used by anarchist movements as opposed to the punk style one used before.

I also used the NixOS logo font Vegur (even the precise version) for all text.

I also wanted to include the text “NixOS” itself somewhere so that people who see it but don’t know what it is might become interested and ask the person wearing the t-shirt about it or look it up online. Otherwise it might not look like a joke but just look like some stylized expression of anarchism and “smash the state” to outside people.

For those who haven’t got it yet, the joke is that “smash the state” has a double meaning: firstly “state” meant as a nation state, secondly “state” meant as mutable data that can of course change its state.

I have multiple layers in the svg file that make it possible to print the t-shirt via silk screen (makes the best quality printed t-shirts imo!!) on a black t-shirt with two colors.

I will also add more alternate versions for stickers.

I know that many, if not most, people still prefer the old one. Feel free to just print the old one.

Suggestions for changes to my logo are welcome!

2 Likes