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Project Open Squish

Ever thought about designing a Squishable? It's fun! There are a lot of talented designers in the Squishy Nation, and Project Open Squish is here to get your voices heard. Have a design you think might work? This is your chance!

Here's how it works: submit your design and, if it gets accepted, the Squishy Community will vote on which will go on to prototype! The winners get fame and (a reasonable amount of) fortune! And, if we can make it work as a prototype, we will add it to the Squishable line! Are you a plush designer? Cool! Are you an artist who has never touched plush before? Awesome! Give it a try! You can submit as many designs as you want! You might find that toy design is your destiny.

Please note: We are not currently accepting designs for the Squishables lines: Boozy Buds, Undercover Squishables, or GO! because our internal Art Team already has many, many secret designs for the future in the works!

How does it work?

Idea, Design, Submit, Score, Win!

If you win:

If your design gets prototyped as a 15in Squishable, you get:

  • $500 cash!
  • $100 Squishable.com gift card!
  • A plush of your design!
  • If we add it to the line, your name on the hangtag!

If your design gets prototyped as a 7in Mini Squishable, you get:

  • $250 cash!
  • $50 Squishable.com gift certificate!
  • A plush of your design!
  • If we add it to the line, your name on the hangtag!

What do I need to submit?

1. An original idea! 2. A design with a 360 degree view! 3. Hi-resolution jpeg image. 4. At least 18 years old!
photoshop illustrator jpg

It can be intimidating, we know, but if a design isn't quite ready to go up for voting, we provide one-on-one feedback on each design to try and make it the best it can possibly be! Some common problems that we find with artwork that you can preemptively consider before submitting:

  • The artwork is not in the right format!
  • The linework of the artwork is too rough or sketchy. It just needs some polish!
  • The character is too similar to a current, retired, or in process design!
  • The character is too similar, or copied, from someone else’s work. :(
  • The design is too complex to be created in plush form. It needs a little simplification!
  • The design is somehow inappropriate or not kid-friendly. Oopsie!

Ready to go???

submissions are on hold button

I still have Questions!

Well, we have answers! Probably! Below are some of the most common questions we get about Project Open Squish, but click right here to be taken to the FULL FAQ! :)

How does voting work?

If we think that your design will make a good plush, and if it passes all the requirements, then the Squishy fan community will vote on which designs make it into Squishy round-ness! Tell your friends! Tell your fans! And don't forget to answer the questions that voters ask you on your design's page! At the end of the round, the highest scorer(s) (who make it over the minimum scoring threshold…yes, sometimes there are multiple winners in a round!) will be sent for prototype!

Why did you reject my design?

There are many reasons why your design may have been rejected. We get thousands of submissions, and we unfortunately cannot accept everyone, even though we wish we could! We have been running Open Squish for over 10 years now, and we do get so many submissions that acceptances are highly competitive! Some fans are only accepted after trying and practicing for years! It takes a lot of time and practice to get to the professional-level designs that do best in voting. But if you are rejected we do want to encourage you keep working on your skills and try again!

Here are a few tips to better help you in future submissions. Make sure the art for your future designs is very clean and neat; simple clearly defined lines work best. We highly recommend using flat, solid colors and clean, thin black outlines. Digital artwork is also usually the most popular with voters. For inspiration, please check out our In-Process page for some great examples of clean, simple designs. Also make sure that you submit 360s views, because we need to see the side/back/etc. in order to run the design. The best-voted designs are usually digital, but we also accept hand-drawn designs. We use Photoshop here, as well as other Adobe Creative Cloud programs like Illustrator, along with Wacom Intuos tablets. There are plenty of online tutorials that are helpful for when you are just starting out. Digital drawing takes a lot of practice, but the more you do it, the better you will get for sure! And if you do decide to submit hand-drawn designs, as we said above, just make sure to keep them very neat and clean, and scan them in for optimal results.

I submitted a while ago. Why haven't I heard feedback yet?

We have an amazingly huge amount of awesome Project Open Squish submissions, and we try to get you feedback within one month of submission (or sometimes sooner if we can)! We go through them every day, but it can take a little while to get through the volume! Rest assured that we did receive your design and will get back to you with information as soon as we possibly can!

What is a Golden Ticket?

So, a Golden Ticket is when a design didn't hit the voting threshold to win, but we at Squishable HQ thought that it was an especially strong design that we wanted to "win" anyway. The design will go through the payment and prototyping process exactly the same as when someone is voted a winner in Open Squish (only we chose it, instead of the fans). We don't do it very often, but we can Golden Ticket something at any time (occasionally even months or years after they run!). Sometimes we can't get a design just right at HQ, and we realize that one of our Open Squish designers has already nailed it! Or, we just love something SO much, that we just need to give it a try!

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