Put Your Art on Creative Nerds Merch

How It Works

1. Make something original — a design that could live on a hoodie, tee, or tank. City pride is welcome, but not required.
2. Upload it to Dropbox or WeTransfer and grab the share link.
3. Email the link to contest@creativenerds.net using the format below, or use the entry helper at the bottom of this page.
4. 3 winning designs per city get picked by the Creative Nerds team and a community vote in Discord.
5. Winners get printed and added to the shop — and start earning 20% of every sale on their design.

Starting In 4 Cities

Round one is local. Enter under whichever city you actually live in or near — 3 designs will be chosen to represent each.

Eligibility & Rules

• You must currently live in or near the city you're entering under (Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington D.C., or New York City).
• Open to individual artists only — no design collectives, agencies, or team submissions.
• Entrants must be at least 16 years old. If you're under 18 and you win, a parent or guardian will need to sign off on the license terms before your design goes to print.
• One entry per person per contest round. If you want to swap your file after submitting, just email us again and say so.
• Creative Nerds staff, moderators, and their immediate family can enter for fun but aren't eligible to win.
• We'll only reach out to the artists we're seriously considering or selecting — if you don't hear back by the announcement date, that round didn't go your way, but nothing's stopping you from entering the next one.

Design Guidelines

• 100% original work. No tracing, no AI-generated art, no stock assets, no fan art of copyrighted characters, logos, or trademarks.
• Print-ready files. High-resolution PNG or vector (AI/EPS/SVG) preferred. If it's raster, aim for at least 4500×5400px at 300dpi with a transparent background — that's the same spec our own merch art is built to.
• Built for apparel. Design so it reads well as a single front-chest or full-back print. Keep colors print-safe — nothing that only looks right on a backlit screen.
• Keep it clean. No hate speech, explicit content, or anything illegal. We'll disqualify anything that isn't safe to print and sell.
• Tell us about it. A short 1–2 sentence description of the concept helps us (and voters) understand what we're looking at.

Rights & Payout

• You keep your copyright, always. Entering the contest doesn't sign away ownership of your art.
• If you win, you grant Creative Nerds an exclusive license to print and sell that design on merch for as long as it's part of the active shop lineup — meaning you agree not to sell that same design on competing merch while it's live with us. Once we retire it from the lineup, the exclusivity ends and it's fully yours again.
• Payout: winning artists earn 20% of the sale price on every unit sold of their design, paid out monthly.

Timeline — Round One

Submit Your Entry

Upload your art to Dropbox or WeTransfer first and have the share link ready. Fill this out and we'll open a pre-filled email to contest@creativenerds.net — you just hit send.