STAR T-Shirt Design Competition

• Designs can be as simple as a STAR event display and logo although such shirts are floating around already, or they can be more related to some aspect of what it’s like to be in the collaboration or a physics concept. It doesn’t have to be comprehensible to those outside of STAR, but it should at least be widely understandable within the entire STAR collaboration.

• Although the contest is aimed toward STAR Juniors, any interested person or group of people in STAR can participate (collaboration is encouraged, but credit should be clearly given to all designers in the submission email).

• Designs can be submitted by emailing Xiaoyu, Yu, and myself with png, jpg, or pdf images for the front and back designs. The images do not need to appear on a shirt mockup at the time of submission. Please also include a short description of the images in words to give any necessary context to those voting on the submission later. Any questions can also be emailed to us before the deadline.

• Designs must be free of copyrighted material or other intellectual property (IP) that is not free for public use. They must also not contain any offensive content, like violent or pornographic material, or derogatory or non-inclusive language. The Juniors Reps retain the right to refuse an entry into the contest with a written explanation to the entrant. After review by the Juniors Reps, approved designs will be added to the drupal page.

• We will not make any claim to ownership of an entrant's IP other than its use on STAR shirts or other STAR memorabilia printed now and at any point in the future.

• The deadline for submission is 10/15/23 at 23:59 ET, just before Juniors Day. (Note: ET, not local time in Cairo).

• The collaboration will then have the opportunity to vote on the submissions, and the winner will be announced soon after that.

• The prize for winning will be the satisfaction of having your design worn by your esteemed colleagues.

Submission descriptions:

1. In the front, I simply insert STAR logo so that people can wear it in multiple occasions. When you put on your jacket, it looks like a normal T shirt.
   In the back, at the top I use striking red color to indicate the STAR collaboration, 24 stands for 24 years of STAR.

   The body picture is based on the well know quark gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions, which is the physics we are studying at STAR. Among those free quarks and gluons, several memorable pictures are “frozen out”. It means what has been created by STAR collaboration is not only the QGP, but also numerous outstanding scientists and engineers. The STAR detector is about to shut down after 2025, but it doesn’t mean STAR will disappear, because STAR is us ;)
    

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3. The inspiration was a mixture of the general "low-poly" style of drawings and the gothic-style stained-glass windows. I think the front [of the shirt] will be a better choice [for the design].
    
4. N/A
    
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6. N/A
    
7. Each row in the figure represents a week of emails to one of the PWG mailing lists, with peak heights corresponding to number of emails at that point in the week (the attached image was produced in late summer, with the most recent week being at the bottom, going earlier toward the top). If selected, the code will be rerun on the STAR-Talks mailing list to make it general to the entire collaboration. The neat thing is that you can clearly see weeks where contributions were due for e.g. Quark Matter, etc. (these weeks could alternatively be denoted explicitly on the shirt). The style of the shirt is along the same lines as the famous Joy Division shirt, taken from a plot of radio pulsar signals, which is a fun physics connection (especially for the “STAR” Collaboration ;)). Please see this article for a nice writeup: https://theconversation.com/joy-division-40-years-on-from-unknown-pleasures-astronomers-have-revisited-the-pulsar-from-the-iconic-album-cover-119861.

   On the back, a STAR logo could be added as well.
    

Polls (closing 3/7/2024):
Which size would you like? https://strawpoll.com/NoZr3EqBey3

Which of the above excellent submissions do you like best? https://drupal.star.bnl.gov/STAR/polls/std/2024/Feb/tshirtdesign_voting