How will graduation/election swag work with the changes to the "graduation" process?

Question

Hooray, Design-Independent Graduation is happening! Sites that have been deserving of graduation all over SE are getting their elections and (hopefully eventually) getting the "Beta" label removed from their site name.

Part of the graduation and election process is the Swag sent to users who are top users on the site and who run in the election.

We still create site-specific swag when a site graduates, and send along a package to the top users. For generic Stack Exchange swag, there are a number of scenarios where we'll send along a t-shirt or stickers to say "thanks". You can't purchase them, but don't let that crush your dreams forever. (from 2014)

It seems that the "Graduation Swag" still needs to wait for site design, as the swag is dependent on the artwork designed for the site.

Will Election Swag also need to wait for this? The election swag seems to be a bit "unofficial" so, I'm not sure whether it's specific to the site or not (though it seems it is not necessarily site-specific).

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Or is Swag even still a thing?

Is SE still sending out swag to top users who participate during the Beta phase when the site graduates?

On Movies & TV, which graduated in January, there's this question on Meta:

Is there any news about the graduation swag?

As part of the site's graduation over 3 months ago there was promise for certain graduation swag to be delivered to the top users of the site during graduation (the first 2 user pages, that is, i.e. the top 72 users by reputation). This swag was supposed to be based on Kurtis Beavers' amazing design, especially a very nice T-shirt in the site's colors and featuring those neat little movie images (earlier pictures also had a coffee mug).

As far as I know, none of this has ever been received. This swag was sent out in December 2015 and I very much enjoy it.

Swag does still seem to be a part of the site design process, though... the Chemistry site's recent site design post (from April) includes artwork and the promise of swag, as does Network Engineering (also April). I don't know the status on these two but I would hazard to guess they've not received it, either. Both sites have received their swag - Chemistry on Feb 12, 2016 and Network Engineering on February 5, 2016.

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As a note, this comes from a place of love. I don't participate on SE to get swag but it's certainly a fun thing to get if you're eligible (particularly as the site designs are often so awesome, it'd be great to get some stickers and a shirt!).

I'm interested to see if SE has any thoughts on how to address this with the current (and likely future) changes to the SE "graduation" process...

Answer 1

We have full intentions to continue creating swag for graduated sites who have received their new design, but at the moment it just happens to be an incredibly low priority because of the huge design backlog right now - there are a bunch of sites still waiting for their graduation design and some sites that are still pending design updates for the new profile page. The design team is busy, and getting them to put things onto swag items so they can be made and shipped isn't exactly at the top of their list.

There are still many sites out there which have their full design and still haven't gotten their top user swag. When we do get that stuff in stock, they'll hear from us about how to go about getting their swag via a Meta post.

As far as moderators go, we currently send them standard Stack Exchange branded swag upon winning the election. Once their site-specific swag is ready to go, they'll receive that along with the other top users.

Bottom line: Don't expect any new graduation swag to start popping up until the design backlog gets cleared out and they have more time to spend on other things.

Answer 2

As far as I know, Worldbuilding is now the oldest site with a design but no swag. We got our design in spring 2016. When we asked about swag a year and a half later, Grace Note wrote the following on our meta:

We've gone to check with the design team - unfortunately, there are currently no plans to work on site swag in the near future. We'd like to provide a clearer answer or even just how far down the road it might be, but it simply doesn't fit anywhere in priority amongst all the other design elements we have going on right now. (October 31, 2017)

A couple months ago, we got permission to use the site art to make our own swag (at our expense). We're currently trying to gather enough commitments to make the economics work. (International postage is a huge barrier.) I suspect that, were site swag coming back soon, they would have said something when we asked about this. (I wasn't directly involved in this discussion, but I have no reason to doubt the people who were.)

SE had good swag intentions (see animuson's answer from almost four years ago), but it looks like things changed -- there are lots of sites, rolling out the new designs is a high design priority, there aren't as many designers as there used to be, and they're in the midst of reworking how they do the swag that they do produce. I hope site-specific swag comes back some day, but I'm not surprised that it's not happening now.