Apr

Reviews of the Camden T-Shirt Competition for XFM and H&M

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H&M, XFM, t-shirt competition, t-shirt review, t-shirts designs

OK, so this won’t be the most objective of reviews, I know, so don’t start piling in with the complaints. If you want us to review your t-shirt, then submit your design info today! If there’s one thing we all hate about the Net it has to be arriving at an empty blog, no one more than the webmaster who owns it (apart from perhaps search engine spiders). So to start the ball rolling I’m going to review a couple of my own t-shirts (starting with Camden Rocks!) – that can show an example of what to expect for the future. I will be breaking my own rules again by reviewing tee shirts that aren’t available for sale to the public, however, to avoid any accusations of blatant opportunism, I think it best to make that exception this one time!

Camden Rocks! (H&M / XFM promotional merchandise).

Unfortunately by the time I had heard about the recent t-shirt design competition at XFM.co.uk it seemed the competition was already over, I ranted in a few emails but to be honest I think a little nepotism is sprawling round the corridors of XFM Radio’s headquarters. I submitted my design 3 days before the deadline, and he designs there absolutely sucked, that’s not a personal opinion, it is plain and simple truth. Take a look at all the submissions here.

Here were a few of my competitors’ designs:

If you know Camden in London UK you might notice a few familiar themes, for example – anarchy punk, and the recent fire at the market. However some of these designs stoop to the lowest of the low, first of all there’s clipart crazy Matthew Gates, who seems to think that Camden Town has connections with Native American Indians and pirates, I must visit again soon, seems I have missed some big changes there, or perhaps he simply picked the first couple of images he could find on his hard drive and posted them off. Andrea Pretlove at least show a little more authenticity, she’s either appropriated or taken a few shots of Camden and created an effective (if not a little pedestrian) monochrome theme, unlike Halimo Geesey (is that their real name?), who has decided to feature images of the London Eye and The Houses of Parliament in their tee shirt design. Unfortunately though the message is defiant, the research is lacking, it is best to know the subject before you tackle it as a t-shirt design!

My favourite would be Joy Nobis’ graffiti theme, however on closer inspection two things jump out at me that class this as a truly amateur design. First of all graffiti is a difficult thing to design, if you can’t do it yourself try to use graffiti style fonts and dingbats, even better find photos of examples of graffiti at Flickr or Google Image Search and then use Adobe Illustrator to quickly trace the outlines of each letter. Mix and match different examples of street tagging to create the text you need, change the colours, clean the outlines or add a grunge/splatter effect for more authenticity.

But whatever you do don’t just scribble the words with a felt-tip marker, even on paper it doesn’t look good. I have the greatest admiration for graffiti artists (Banksy is one of my all time favourites), I absolutely love air-brushed tees, if I could do it I would, but for the work involved, most of these artists can never expect to make a decent living, they’ll either overprice themselves out of the market, work to far too thin profit margins, or rush the work and create shoddy tees.

The second problem I have with Joy’s artwork is the actual message, or rather the glaringly obvious fact that there isn’t one, at all, not one iota. T-shirt art can work on a number of levels. Pure design, illustrative finesse and extravagant printing processes can help those more bent on creating ‘art’ rather than street wear, to avoid the idea of a message. I need to clarify this, a message needn’t be political or particularly meaningful, it is simply a fast and simple way to identify your buyers. Each word, each message, even the typeface and colour can effect the emotional reaction and eventual engagement of that audience. This isn’t a science, this is an art. One can master the basics of composition, colour, line, they may never become experts, however the beauty of modern design applications mean that almost anyone can produce a passable, and once in a blue moon, outstanding t-shirt design. However the impact of most designs isn’t based upon the skill of the artist (within limits – see above Camden t-shirts :/), but rather the conception of the message. Many t-shirts work on simple wordplay, one of my earliest designs was based on the common spelling mistake of leaving one letter ‘i’ out of the word ’senior citizen’. The Latin American twist gave me a great idea for a pensioner in a wheelchair wearing a Sombrero and hitting a Pinyata with his walking stick, you can find the tee shirt in my store. Anyway all I am saying is that wordplay and Surrealist techniques, and a scant knowledge of the Pop Art Movement can go a long way to improving anyone’s shirt artwork!

Here’s my submission, I read the brief, I know the town, I understand H&M’s (Hennes & Mauritz AB – a Swedish clothing company), I know the ethos of the place, I understand their objectives opening a new store so soon after the fire. It has to be a sign of solidarity, not a cheap marketing gimmick. I blended the rebellious tradition of Camdenites with the economic boom and influx of glamorous people, cars, shops and cafes that have arrived in more recent years. Hence as simple as it can get, the queen of Hollywood given the same treatment as the sex Pistol’s infamous take on Queen Elizabeth II during the 1977 Silver Jubilee.

I and a friend both emailed my design 3 days before the deadline, neither of us received a response, this seems like rather suspect behaviour when so few designs were submitted and of such low quality! If you agree the competition must have been a fix email camden@xfm.co.uk and tell them I sent you make sure you mention this blog post and if I win I’ll give away ten of my own t-shirts in an easy-peasy competition of my own. Make sure you subscribe to my feed so you’ll be at the front of the queue!

I’m giving this design away for free seeing as XFM have ignored me, if you’d like to download this design yourself to wear and not to sell, then go ahead!

Download Camden Rocks XFM T-Shirt Design for FREE! It’s enormous and a pure vector graphic in .png format at 300 dpi resolution which means it will print nicely on most shirts if your local printer has a dtg (direct transfer to garment) machine. Beware dial ups (are there still dial up users these days?) this image is over 6.5 MB file size!

Take it to your local printers and watch their jaws drop!

Read the next post for the next design.