Ice Cream, The Recession and The Rising Masses

I was busy building up my database of my t-shirts on the Buy Tees blog, (yes a little bit shameless self-promotion can go a long way), when I received an email mentioning a new Threadless Clone, amusingly named IcecreamTshirts.com. I’ll be reviewing as many lesser-known Threadless.com style t-shirt voter sites shortly, I’ve built quite a substantial list so far and am more than open to other suggestions. In the meantime, perhaps it was their cute and friendly site design, or their laid-back approach to selling t-shirts, or the fact that this is the first dual language t-shirt voter site I’ve come across, whatever the reason, I couldn’t resist designing and submitting my latest work in to their capable hands (I hope they’ve washed them first, I wouldn’t want my shirt to get all sticky!).

For the few t-shirts submitted there (a major draw for any designer competing at the likes of DesignByHumans.com and Threadless.com), I have to admit the standard is high, not perhaps the most conceptual collection, but definitely well-crafted and conceived. It was late last night and I was listening (yes the TV is nearby but I treat it more like radio these days) to a string of doom-laden featurettes on everything from the fuel crisis, to threats of mass industrial action, fears of food shortages and power cuts by Winter, and the falling value of real-estate, when I found myself transported by the aid of memory and imagination back to my 1970s childhood where all this was an everyday occurrence. Due to the Middle-East conflict at the time (some things never change), the world was on a go-slow, oil, the lifeblood of a modern society, was in short supply.

I experienced at least year of blackouts, candle-lit dinner conversations, board games galore, and a whole gamut of activities hardly engaged in since the time of rationing. I enjoyed it, I loved the pace of life then, eventually even the most stressful entrepreneurial business-types in our street had to relax. For a start Britain’s workforce was on a 3-day week, so long and frugal weekends were always on the menu. People stopped in the street and talked together, everyone spent their spare days at the Family Lido where the kids would swim and their parents would soak up the sun in an attempt to keep warm in the unheated evenings around the unplugged television. It was great actually, I even experienced my first culture shock when the economy got moving again. Soon enough our street was filled with cars and property developers, TVs blared from every living-room, abandoned hopscotch chalk marks and ‘jumpers for goal posts’ littered the local rec, and yes, no one was talking anymore, normality had most certainly resumed.

I’ve always been rather disappointed by Britain since then, envious of European culture and its emphasis on community spirit and revolutionary zeal. Here, well here we simply look out for ourselves now, there isn’t such thing as a ‘neighbourhood’ anymore, or rather one you can rely on. Sure there are little gated-communities out there, executive home developments with shared car pools, town hall meetings to fight the latest bypass proposal, the odd neighbour feeding the cats for another whilst they recover in sunnier climes. Chris and I were hoping to go a little wild this weekend and buy some last-minute tickets for The Glastonbury Festival, but it wasn’t to be. We realised however many neighbours maybe on talking terms here, we couldn’t imagine leaving a four-storey Victorian villa by the sea, lovingly restored over the years, packed with expensive laptops, computers, antique furniture, retro collectibles, and three cats, to the whims of a relative stranger.

If this was the 70’s and I was 20 years older, I’d be on my way to Glastonbury now (yes they haven’t sold out because the Emo’s don’t like the idea of rapper Jay-Z taking the headline slot). I could’ve freaked out to my heart’s content and not worried about the cats or the house, and I wouldn’t have owned half the junk I do now, so all would’ve be right with the world. Instead I’m at home, sitting in front of my Mac yet again, writing about t-shirts. There are positives and negatives for everyday, I appreciate the convenience of modern life, I relish the opportunity to speak to a slice of the world about subjects dear to my heart, but I don’t think we will ever recapture those heady days of economic failure of the 1970s, and if we do we’ll more likely be less welcoming than we are now. Most of my grandparents were a little too young to remember the Spirit of the Blitz, and I’d rather not go through a World War to experience it firsthand, but I’m sure I witnessed a little taste of it some 30 odd years ago. Hence the inspiration for my latest t-shirt design:-

Strike!

Yet again a self-explanatory design, especially when you consider my potted-history of 1970s Britain. I did have a few problems with the submission process, when I clicked a link to their Terms of Use I realised I was actually reading their ‘Termos e Condições’, yes the whole thing was written in Portuguese. I managed to translate the page at Google and didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, the rules are similar to Threadless.com and many other t-shirt voting sites, although it seems only fair that they fully translate their English-speaking section of the store, not everyone will be as forgiving as me.

I had quite a bit of difficulty at first mapping out the perspective of the empty matchbox in this illustration, if i had a spare $175 I would’ve plunged for a neat little CAD add-on for Adobe Illustrator CS3, by HotDoor but I don’t and in all honesty if I did, I still think I’d resist, it seems an extortionate amount for so little advantage. There’s one cheaper alternative out there but I haven’t had a chance to try it out, it’s PerspectiveGrid by Andrew’s Vector Plug-ins for a very reasonable $15 if you’re interested check it out and let me know your opinions in the comments box.

Instead i mapped everything out with a free perspective plug-in that comes packaged with Adobe Fireworks CS3 and then imported the flat PNG file to Illustrator to trace. It’s come out pretty well in the end, if I do say so myself. I’ve stuck to what I know well, retro graphics, old Soviet and WW2 propagandist imagery, something to give the image that revolutionary zeal I was after. The matches and banner literally took a few minutes to create as vector images, the rest perhaps the majority of a day, but the colours were limited by what CMYK can offer, I have to study printing processes more deeply, or dig out my old colour wheel from art school and see what I’m missing. T-Shirt design definitely teaches you to make use of a limited palette, I must have deleted half of the image by the time it came to reducing it to the required maximum of 5 colours.

The prizes are very fair, offering a very reasonable €350 per batch of 200 t-shirts printed, essentially you’ll continue to receive an income of €1.75 per t-shirt which is about the same as a minimum you can expect from SpreadShirt.com and CafePress.com (as long as you’re not being unrealistically greedy about it). Plus they number each shirt and include your signature, so all credit due, they seem to be offering a very sound service indeed. You can see all their latest submissions here. Wish me luck, let’s hope they like my latest offering, if they do, I’ll post the link here, just incase you fancy voting for it!

Keep an eye out for my Threadless Clones review, I will be listing a wide selection of similar member vote-fuelled t-shirt stores available on-line in the very near future!