Making My Own Hacktoberfest T-Shirts

原始链接: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/making-my-own-hacktoberfest-t-shirts/

The author laments the loss of DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest t-shirts, given away from 2014-2022, and seeks to recreate their own after their old ones wore out. They acknowledge DigitalOcean's rule against creating merchandise with their logo but argue that personal use isn't merchandise. Finding high-resolution versions of the older t-shirt designs has been challenging. Design agency Kotis did the designs from 2015-2020, but the available images are low-resolution. Dribbble offers slightly better quality logos, and the official Hacktoberfest website has embedded logos, some in scalable vector format (SVG). However, logos for 2014, 2015, 2021, and the 2022 comic shirt are missing. The author encourages anyone with access to high-resolution images, especially vector versions of the missing logos, to share them. If they can't find them, they plan to design their own t-shirt for personal use.

Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023.

I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only wears free conference t-shirts.

Sadly, after several years of constant catwalk modelling, my beloved Hacktoberfest shirts are full of holes. I couldn't find any for sale on eBay or Vinted - so I decided to make my own.

Note: DigitalOcean's Brand Guidelines say that you shouldn't create physical merchandise or sell any products featuring the logo. Well, I'm not selling these nor, do I think, they are merchandise. Hacktoberfest aren't using these to incentivise anyone any more. They're just cool t-shirts.

There are lots of photos of the t-shirts but it is surprisingly hard to find the original assets.

Low Resolution

Kotis - a design agency - did the Hacktoberfest swag from 2015-2020. They have a brand portfolio with the t-shirt icons. Sadly, all a bit low resolution for printing, but good for getting accurate background colours for the material.

Similarly, there are a few low resolution promo shots of the t-shirts or their logos:

AI upscaling looked typically rubbish.

Higher Resolution Bitmaps

Some designers have their logo designs on Dribbble. Not very high resolution, but good enough for stickers.

Archived Logos

The official Hacktoberfest website had some logos embedded on it:

These are the best available logos. The SVGs are suitable for printing at any size, the PNGs may be harder.

The following are missing 2014, 2015, 2021, 2022 (comic). There are photos of the shirts, and some low-resolution artwork available, all of which are too low quality to be printed. If you know how to get high-resolution images of them - please leave a comment!

2021

There are some elements out there. For example:

2014

There's not much available about the first t-shirt. There's a version of the logo used and some photos but that's about it.

If you want to compare the logos to the originals, and see what colour fabric they used, there are lots of photo online:

If I can't find the missing logos, I'll create my own design for my own personal use. Something like this:

Two t-shirts with the various Hacktoberfest logos stacked on them.

If you have a source for vectors of the missing logos, please drop me a comment.