Ugmonk Opens For Business

Jeff Sheldon of Ugmonk.com has just announced the release of his first three tees at his new designer t-shirt store. At the moment there are but three t-shirts on offer, but I have been assured plenty more are on the way. I wouldn’t normally feature a store with so little to offer (so far), however these tees do offer a slick and rather classic New York / Bauhaus Typography style that you don’t see around as much these days. Saying that they’re based in Vermont, which makes me think that Vermont may have less of a laid-back hippy fashion scene than I’d previously assumed.

Jeff created Ugmonk in response to the high saturation of cluttered design in the t-shirt fashion market, stripping back the redundant extremities of the over embellished style common to many labels at the moment, providing a stripped-back alternative, relying on the eternal qualities of line and composition. The first 100 of each of his designs include a limited edition screen-printed tag which is a very nice touch.

Jeff’s Lowercase T-Shirt is rather self-explanatory, I’m not quite sure which font he’s used here, but it does reiterate the classic clean look I mentioned earlier, Jeff is all about design, there’s no message, just a whole lot of attention to detail and quality of production. This has to be one of the smartest prints I’ve seen in a while. It would’ve been so easy to have got this wrong and ended up with some kind of smudgy Sesame Street style piece. But he’s managed to overcome any of my doubts with a cool and confident solid t-shirt design that I can easily imagine strutting up a catwalk as part of some high-priced combo draped on a leggy model. Saying that it still has a very unisexual appeal, cosmopolitan yet perfunctory in presentation. Check out this close-up to see the work in full-effect.

Math Problem works along a similar vein, offering the same format in a different font, reintroducing us to the beauty of numbers. Once again he’s managed to side-step any notions of childlike appeal, using bold clean and formal line to head the message home. I’m not sure how much of a math’s problem he’s offering here. I know I’m awful at mathematics, strangely I was well ahead of my years until around my early teens (perhaps girls were more of a personal priority than logarithms), and I’m sure there are rather a lot of airheads in the fashion world, but even I know that two plus three equals five. It may have been more amusing to deliberately offer an incorrect solution, or that may just be another idea for the future, ‘Missed Digit’ perhaps?

Path To Nowhere takes a rather different tack, I’m not quite so keen on this one, perhaps I’m the wrong guy to ask, I went through a spell of drawing labyrinths as a teenager. I had even painted a pair on the boots of a girlfriend-to-be before i scarpered off to college, (we finally got it together and are still with each other now). Labyrinths are fascinating, and many don’t lead anywhere, unlike the traditional mazes you’ll find in most European Regency gardens, labyrinths are mostly carved from rock, many by nature herself. To be labyrinthine would have been considered complex and thoughtful in the past, now it’s a characteristic merely viewed as madness. People don’t have time to waste on the follies of self-exploration, which is a sad old state of affairs.

However, the careful layout and clean lines save the design, ever so slightly reminiscent of the original London Underground Tube map, if it followed the random patterns formed by a kitten playing with a ball of twine. I think a greater selection of colours might bring Path To Nowhere to fruition. I know that Jeff hates clutter, but sometimes directness is not enough in itself.

I hope to see a lot more from Jeff in the future, Ugmonk.com has laid its claim on this particularly attractive niche in the designer t-shirt market, we can only wait and see how this novel collection will expand and proliferate over the coming months.