Pidgin merchandise

[Mark Doliner]

For a while now some of us have wanted to sell Pidgin-themed t-shirts
and stuff [1][2].  I've been doing a little work in that direction
recently.  For a first iteration I'm trying to set up a shop at
zazzle.com.  It's a website where you design stuff and other people
buy it.  Zazzle takes care of printing stuff and shipping it to
people, and you get a percentage commission.  In this case the
commission would go to Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc.  If the Zazzle
store works out well then we might also create a store at
spreadshirt.com (going off the assumption that Zazzle ships from the
US but shreadshirt can ship from Europe, which would probably make
things cheaper or easier to receive if you live in Europe).

There are two reasons I want to see stuff:

1. Free advertising!  Our logo is cute, why not get people to wear it
around town?  It makes our brand happier.  I know I know, some of you
don't give a damn whether people use Pidgin.  But I do.  More users =
more important project = more developer interest = more developers =
faster development and better product.
2. A little more income.  It's not clear what we would do with this
money.  IM Freedom Inc currently has a few thousand dollars from our
devs mentoring for Google Summer of Code (thank you mentors!), and we
could afford to pay for a beefier server if we need to, but it's kinda
scary using a finite source of money to pay for an ongoing expense.
If we had a little money coming in from merchandise it would be less
scary.

One problem I've had is that our images aren't very big.  When
printing stuff onto a t-shirt you really want to use a freaking
gigantic image.  So I made an svg version of our "Pidgin" text
(attached).  I think it looks pretty good.  I made it by tracing over
the png version in Inkscape (Inkscape is awesome, by the way), and I
left the png version as a layer in the svg, so if it looks a little
goofy then make sure you've turned off that layer.

What I don't have is an vector image (or even a large non-vector
image) of the Pidgin bird logo.  The biggest one I could find is from
http://pidgin.im/, and that's really pretty tiny.  I could make one,
but the bird is significantly more complex than the Pidgin text, and
it would take some time.

1. Sean (or anyone), do you have a vector image of our Pidgin bird?
If so can you please send it to me?
2. Does anyone have suggestions on t-shirt designs or other
merchandise you'd like to see?  It's probably better to send these
directly to me rather than to the list.

The current shop is at http://www.zazzle.com/IMFreedom  The
commissions are currently set at 99% because I don't want people to
buy anything because I think the Pidgin bird logo is probably a bit
fuzzy/pixelated.  But if you want to buy a $1000 mousepad more power
to ya :-)

-Mark

[1] http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Merchandise
[2] http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2083
[3] http://imfreedom.org/
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