Made With Awesome – Original Slogan Tees

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Japanese horror, Made With Awesome, funny tees, madewithawesome.com, nerd tee, slogan t-shirts, unicorn

Slogan tees. You know, you’ve seen them all, every single ‘dad joke’ out there has been printed on a t-shirt by now, whatever resembles a one-liner has probably made it on to a tee somewhere sometime. But a new brand at www.MadeWithAwesome.com have taken a new slant on the tradition of humour tees and have come up with a few funnies you most likely haven’t heard before. Let’s just say their humour is off the wall, strange to say the least, not so much all out weird as slightly demented with a knowing wink and a smirk on the side. MWA are well aware how awash the funny slogan t-shirt market is these days and you can tell, their concepts are both refreshingly original and surreal in their approach.

Evan Ferstenfeld and Roni Lagin the genuinely crazy (call a psychiatrist please) pair behind the label have deliberately taken this crowded niche head-on, which takes a great deal of courage and a wholesome dose of insanity to make it work, but, to be honest, they might just get away with it. It’s not that their jokes are the funniest in the world, I’m not rolling around the floor in hysterics here, but I can certainly feel a giggle or two rising, which is quite an achievement considering the fact I’ve seen 1000s of funny slogan t-shirts in my time writing for Buy Tees. What is most refreshing about MWA’s line of slogan and graphic tees (yes they have a few – I’d like to see far more), is that their designs leave you scratching your head, and wondering if the human race is really that dumb these days? Surrealism for the common man (and woman) is a succinct way of placing this brand’s ideology, if it’s weird, if it’s funny, and if it hasn’t been done before I’m sure Made With Awesome will give the idea a good going over. Ferstenfeld and Lagin (no they don’t run a law firm on the side) made their name(s) in the world of tees via the mighty Threadless network. Two of their winning tees there include Lagin’s A Very Naughty Bear and Ferstenfeld’s Food Fight are amongst a total 15 winners at both Threadless and their sister site TypeTees plus a prestigious 2007 Slogan Of The Year Bestee Award.

Their past successes should more than assure everyone but the most skeptic t-shirt fans out there that MWA mean business, let’s take a look at exactly what they’re up to right now. read more

Fontastic T-Shirts at Type Tees?

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     T-shirt Hell, Threadless, funny t shirts, funny tees, joke tees, jokes, slogan shirts, slogan t-shirts, slogan tees, text t-shirts, type tees, typetees.com, typographic t-shirts

Threadless.com have spread their wings, expanded their empire, and generally made their next play for dominion over the t-shirt market with their latest venture TypeTees.com (along side The Select Series and Threadless Kids – yes yes I will get around to them one day). I have to admit I’ve been holding back on this review, the fact is I’ve had some crummy experiences in the past with Threadless, it’s quite a brutal place if you’re thinking of submitting a design, I’ve seen some rather similar ones to my own scrape through when mine have hardly made it past the first stage.

What’s more a lot of their best artists have naturally come to the conclusion that if their work is making enough sales to support the staff and directors of a multi-million dollar operation why not set out on their own? Plenty have, plenty more have been ‘poached’ by the competition and literally treated like artistic royalty, sure they’re not exactly riding around in limos (yet) but those with the business savvy to make the grade have managed to get a far fairer slice of the pie when it comes to profits.

The fact is that for most of us humble designers it’s more a case of who you know (and how many) rather than what you do. It’s become a numbers game and that’s no surprise considering the size of the operation. If you have an army of friends and fans on Twitter or Facebook you might just make the grade – I mean – you’ll still need to create something stunning but a legion bigging you up will always start a wave of positivity given the right conditions. Timing, markets, originality, it all comes into play… but this isn’t another griping review of Threadless, it’s a feature on Type Tees, and seeing as the ballpark is wide open on this one, if you have a flair for one-liners you might just be in with a chance at this still relatively early stage of the game. You don’t need to be a typgraphic expert, you don’t need to be able to draw, you just need to make wise cracks until the sun goes down and all will be well with you and the world of Type Tees!

So, the other reason I’ve been slow off the mark is that text t-shirts aren’t really my favourite things in the world, perhaps it’s trauma brought on by a branding burn out, at school and college so many kids wore Nike and Adidas that if an alien had landed and walked in the canteen they’d have assumed all our parents had very little imagination and called us all by the same names. But these aren’t sports brands, these are, for the main part, jokes. There’s the other problem, once you know it you don’t usually want to hear the same joke twice – unless you didn’t get it the first time – but hey some people like to make strangers laugh, so who am I to get in the way of a few anonymous chuckles? No one, just a miserable git with a graphic t-shirt fetish that’s all.

Moving briskly along here’s the low down if you have a joke burning in the back of your mind and you fancy making a few spare bucks. A very healthy $500 in fact, not bad if you’re a pub bore with a few hundred corny jibes you can knock out – one of them is bound to grab some attention. Okay that’s unfair but when I think of all the worst t-shirts I’ve ever seen they’re nine out of ten times a dodgy joke like “I’m With Stupid”, the only idea I’ve ever had for a slogan tee was way back when fashion casualties were wearing big bold lettered print tees with the words “Rave On” in the UK – we are going way back here. I was s**tfaced with a mate at an illegal rave in South London when two of them walked through the door with red faces, soaking in sweat, necking vodka and cokes at the bar like it was free – anyway I made a joke that the tees should have said “Brave On’. Cruel I know, but I doubt they’d have preferred my alternative anyway.

So to cut a long story short – let’s see if we can have a larf at Type Tees :p read more