Jul

In-House Humour From Collapse Design

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collapse design, collapsedesign.co.uk, designer, designer tees, font, font t-shirts, text shirts, text tees, typography

Those in the graphic design trade have little to laugh about these days, clients want more and more yet want to pay less and less. In fact many of them think they can do a fine job on their own and end up making a mess of everything from company brochures to website design, but what can you do? Well if humour is still the best medicine then maybe you should try shopping around at the Collapse Design, they offer a fine range of design trade tees, every one of which has a proverbial tongue-in-cheek approach to the labour of love that is graphic arts.

British t-shirt label Collapse Design have a particular penchant for typographic jokes, well known typefaces such as Helvetica and Garamond get the full comedy treatment as this band of merry designers work their magic on familiar tools of the trade, as well as a few deft references to some of the more stressful aspects of the job. ‘Deadline’ features a zombie, ‘Helvetica’ is transformed into a creature of the feline persuasion and ‘Full Bleed’ gets the film-noir/Hitchcock treatment. If you’re sitting in your studio, or perhaps a small grey partitioned area of one right now, then you can probably do with some cheering up. So before you eventually go blind or watch your hands fall off from the worst case of RSI ever recorded, treat yourself to a laugh and roll on over to www.collapse-design.co.uk. Even designers need cheering up once in a while;)

All of CD’s tees are available at their one-page store here, and are also organised as collections just to make it easier. The categories are Slogans, Animals, Weapons and Horror. What’s more they have a couple of designs on sale right now for just £10 each so make sure you take a look before they’re snapped up. As well as tees they offer a few other lines including stencils and badges in case you’re after the whole kaboodle. If you want to keep up with all the latest goings on at Collapse Design hook up with them at Facebook. In the meantime let’s peruse some of their in-house creations:-

Sex Drugs Helvetica Bold Tee

Also available in black this t-shirt speaks for itself (or rather types for itself), a nice slant on a now rather jaded piece of social historical diatribe, rebellion is one thing but how do you earn the money to afford to be an outsider if you don’t at least strive to do a bit of hard graft now and again. Some of the places I’ve worked in the past still give me a shudder down my spine, imagine the Russian Roulette scene from Deer Hunter but instead of guns they’re using outdated Apple Macs and broken Wacom tablets, now you’re getting there. Some design houses work like sweatshops, what am I saying almost all of them do! As far as the annual crop of wide-eyed graduate graphic designers are concerned most houses ‘rack ‘em and pack ‘em’. Cram as many idiots in an cold and empty warehouse as they can and shout at them until they’ve completed yet another multi-million dollar campaign for one of a multitude of faceless corporations. The only thing that keeps most of them going at that age are the excesses waiting in store for them on what should constitute the weekend, or at the very least a Saturday night. Although it’s most likely a Wednesday if they’re on a rota, which just about every graphic ground-worker will be, so when you’ve got paid, splurge, splurge like never before, consume whatever substances you can get hold of and jump on the nearest attractive body, because tomorrow the whole evil merry-go-round begins again. A classic type tee in sizes small to XL – £16.50 which includes shipping to anywhere in the world!

Deadline Tee

The Deadline tee (also available in green) is a very nice piece of wordplay. As for the subject? A common problem for many designers is ultimately time, or rather time constraints, and this design says it all. Most clients are in a rush, they never make it easy, they want their design asap, yet many will complicate the matter with constant indecision, or worse still offer continuous ‘creative input’. My partner’s company recently commissioned a designer to create their latest brochure, they asked my advice on the rough draft, and I could tell the guy who’d created the layout was obviously extremely tired and possibly stoned out of his gourd. He used an Arial font which as we all know is as generic as it gets, there were mistakes all over the place, the colours clashed, I offered some pointers but in truth I felt sorry for the designer, I knew exactly what he was going through. If you do commission a designer give them reasonable leeway to do what you require, otherwise you might find yourself creating a ‘zombie’ just like the one in this tee. Get Deadline for £16.50 which includes shipping to anywhere in the world in sizes small and large for the green version and medium to XL for the grey version.

Garamondog Tee

Garamondog inspired by the font Garamond is a rather sweet design offering a pithy slant on a very formal and rather stuffy font. I wondered why they chose a dalmatian, but in all honesty it kind of suits the idea down to the ground – i.e 101 Dalmations. This font first emerged in 1540, but after some confusion by the Belgians and French the original typeface was revived in the 1900′s and throughout the 20th Century, which for me explains why I see it as rather prim and proper and even a tad Victorian. Then again I could be way off, who knows maybe Collapse Design just own a Dalmatian ;) Either way it’s a fun and frolicking tee for all those who know their fonts inside out. The Garamondog t-shirt is available as green print on blue or pale green, in sizes small and medium for £16.50 which includes shipping to anywhere in the world.

Your Type Makes Me Sick Tee

Your Type Makes Me Sick is available on sale right now for just £10 in blue (large) for men and black (small to large) for women, but beware there’s very limited stock left for each colour. Remember this even include postage, so if you’re after a bargain I doubt you’ll find much better out there. This is a rather hilarious tee once again relying on the art of wordplay, as mentioned earlier one of the major ‘design killers’ as opposed to ‘killer designs’ that anyone in the industry has to keep an eye on is a dodgy font. Now unlike the American verbiage ‘Sick’ this uses the original (and correct) meaning – as in vomit. I’m not sure if I’ve ever puked at the sight of a bad font but I have probably come close in the past. Get hold of this bargain before it’s too late.

So there you go, in-house humour from the typographically obsessed Brits at Collapse Design, check out all their wares at www.collapse-design.co.uk.