News on the t-shirt front.

Just a few pieces of news to pass your way. First of all I am building a queue of expectant t-shirt reviewees here (will review them all eventually - I promise!), that old Internet magic must be kicking in, I’ve never understood how you make a site popular, so I’ve stuck with providing as much original and worthwhile content as I can. I know there are a few reviewers out there who might not appreciate my approach, as the old school of t-shirt junkies seem to like the pic and link format, or rather they like to avoid whole concept of reviewing t-shirts altogether. Which to me seems ridiculous. Why treat t-shirts any differently than any other art form? People will read reams of detailed notes on which celebrity wore what and where. I found myself lost on a very girlie celebrity-obsessed blog the other day, I can’t even recall the name of it, I was trying to locate a useful article about t-shirts (which had been deleted by the looks of it) and found myself faced with a piece on Johnny Depp and his new clean cut look. Read more

Invisible Friends, Broken Icons and Dead Rock Stars.

Invisible Friend is the kind of friend I’d like, as long as it’s not the crazy kind that will end up putting you in a safe ward for a few months until it’s decided to leave. Nor the kind my sister had as a child either, we were both only a few years old and she’d spend most nights nattering on to her invisible friend, she’d named it “Witch”, and whenever I’d pretend I had an invisible wizard, she’d insist her witch had killed it. I couldn’t see the point of continuing so I let her have the monopoly on fantasy friendships. Things have turned round now, I’m the crazy sibling, she’s the respectable one, I rant all night about t-shirts, whilst she waits for daylight and only talks to people she can actually see.

Invisible-Friend.co.uk first caught my eye when I spotted their sponsored link on Google, I don’t normally follow paid-for links, past experience has taught me that most Google Ads lead you on a wild goose chase, resulting in a page of search results from an inferior search engine. This time it was different, I can’t remember the link text, but the name drew me in, and I wasn’t disappointed. Now I have to be cruel to be kind but I do think the web-site needs a little work, I’d rather get straight to the collection on the home-page, but I can understand why they’d want to prepare you, they have an incredibly strong and graphic style that might scare the pants off the more lily-livered t-shirt punters out there. Read more

Sex and Death at Threadless

That title should pull in the punters… I’ve just submitted my first design to Threadless.com - gawd knows if I have got it right, their submissions process seems to be the most complicated yet, no wonder the prizes are so high! I’m not in it for the money, but as I was saying to a fellow t-shirt nutter today, it has to be worth it just for PR alone, I’m talking publicity here, no Google rankings, although the two go hand-in-hand I suppose.

I received an email from Threadless.com describing their latest competition and I was pulled in head first. The theme is Sex and Death and the competition is on behalf of Fray.com - a true stories site - I’ll probably need a true story for my submission as I just went ahead and drew the first thing that came into my mind, and here it is… Read more