Griffin Tee

The beautifully drawn (almost like an old Mexican woodcut) Griffin Tee by Gaunty is on offer now for $12 each. S-XL for girls and guys.

Mr Myself Tee

A cute and bubbly style shirt by mon’ry is on offer for the week at $18 each. S-XL for girls and guys.

Get voting for the next one at www.loviu.com!

The fact is I’m snowed under with a million things to do at the moment. What with my personal blog, my new arts blog at ArtUrban.co.uk and now the latest addition to the Bainsey network, RateTshirts.com. I’ve had this domain sitting around for years, I thought it might have sold by now, but thinking about it I’m glad it didn’t. It means I can still keep a hand in as far as t-shirt design goes, sharing my love for the latest and greatest in t-shirt design and so can all of you!

Come and check out RateTshirts.com today, yes it’s a Rumplo/Awesomer clone but damn do you know how much competition there is to get on those sites these days? Besides, if RT takes off it should rank just as well on Google seeing as it does what it says on the label hah. Anyway Threadless, Design By Humans, t-shirt community and indie t-shirt designers, anyone with a smidgeon of talent in the field are welcome to submit their own designs to Rate T-shirts.

Check it out now!

http://www.ratetshirts.com

Take closer look at this big hearted but rather gory addition to Tilteed’s fast growing selection of fab tees.

I have to admit I’ve seen the idea before, there’s a long tradition of using an anatomical heart in place of the usual smoochy slushy Valentine’s version, but I do like the cartoon-feel of the lines in this design, plus the muted hues and choice of t-shirt colour helps many to hold back the gag reflex I am sure! If you or someone you know has a heart this big then why not buy a tee yourself before the discounts end – with free shipping it’s rather a bargain at the moment. Whilst I’m at it check out all the latest winners at Tilteed, they’re amassing rather a nice collection as it turns out. My gf Chris is still waiting for her favourites to win but that’s another story!

Get down there now and vote, shop, submit, it’s all good :D

We received a request recently (sorry have been on the razzle all weekend) for a review from Miss Etti, one of the crazy people at Shirt Fight and couldn’t resist the chance to open up your eyes to this relatively new t-shirt contest site offering weekly themed design competitions aptly named “Shirt Fights”. They’ve already got a few winners under their belt and have plenty more in the running. The site is slick yet friendly and they go out on a limb to make sure their community gets the full lowdown on each of their winning designers.

Check out their interview with Evanimal – their first winner and their hand picked top 10 heavyweights. SF offer a whopping $500 for a winning design so if you have the talent and are out of pocket it’s well worth knocking out a tee and seeing if it lasts the gruelling rounds. There are plenty of ways of keeping up-to-date with all the latest happenings at SF including Twitter, Facebook, RSS and the blog. However as you may have guessed we’re going to focus on the t-shirts, that is why you’re here after all?

Spirit Quest – Only $15!

Spirit Quest is SF’s latest winner, it’s on sale now for just $15, so if you’re looking for a budget alternative to “doing a Jim” – i.e Jim Morrisson wandering off from The Doors in the middle of the desert and following a bald Indian into a cave (yes I’m quoting the Oliver Stone version of events here) – well this is most likely your best best to get a little D.I.Y shamanism in on the sly. It’s a simple but effective design by Zipperking (let’s not even get into why they chose that as their username) with some very attractive detailing, wild vector extravagance (or is it a Photoshop brush?) for the effervescent spirit rising on high, rather ectoplasmic in style and a smooth tonal range gliding into a turquoise blue. Smart hippy, minimalist stoner attire.

You Might Need More Than A Nightlight This Time

Very reminiscent of Maurice Sendak‘s children’s book Where The Wild Things Are, I used to love that in my most formative years, You Might Need More Than A Nightlight This Time plays upon those very same childhood fears, although I’d say there was a good deal of psychedelic influence in this design too. Evananimal has managed to maintain a sense of humour in the artwork and I appreciate the detail of a lad peeking from under their covers to view the oncoming cartoon nightmare. Trippy without being dippy, scary but not too much, an explosion of colour tamed by a master of line and contour.

Vote For Zilladelic

Amazing design terrible t-shirt colour. Something that can be easily remedied I’m sure. Zilladelic is a great example of old school comic art at its best, way before the cutesy doe-eyed elfin figures of so much of Manga and Anime, the Japanese did a damn good job of mimicking DC and Marvel style comic art, whilst adding their own inimitable blend of weird and wonderful mythology. Now if someone could just get the message across to TNT138 that lurid day-glo green isn’t the most popular of t-shirt colours we may witness another future winner here!

Vote For El Presidente’s Loco Robo

Now I know that robots have been done to death, just like skulls and all manner of other popular images in t-shirt design, but you have to admit this is about the strangest and most funky robot you’ve seen in a while. Totally crazy vectors, mad colours, mad love. It’s kind of a tribute to El Presidente, the self-elected leader of the gang at Shirt Fight, which is fair enough, someone has to run the site and deal with all the barmy t-shirt designers and fans there! Anyway I love it, it looks best on a black tee as far as I am concerned, it has everything you could want in a t-shirt, ufos, monsters, aliens, robots, lasers, a totally wacky showdown of colour and line that adds up to a marvellous cacophany of a design. El Presidente’s Loco Robo – great stuff from ElvinJohn18!

Take a look, submit a vote, buy a tee, design and submit a tee, it’s your choice at Shirtfight.com – just make sure you don’t try and design anything with your boxing gloves, and if you don’t mind a few bruises to your ego who knows you could be up $500 before you know it. Oh btw SF offer free shipping across the USA and are suposed to have pretty reasonable rates for the rest of the world. Oh you lucky Americans you.

You don’t have to sign up to vote but AUB will need an email addy, of course they say it’s to make sure there’s only one vote per person but:-

If you had a 100 different emails you could probably cheat.
I.P address tracking is a far better way of preventing cheating.
It’s a sneaky way of building up their mailing list, still can’t blame them I suppose.

Anyway it’s a great chance for your favourite t-shirt brand to get a heap load of exposure, well I say that but looking at AUB’s traffic statistics right now they’d all get around ten times more with a review on our blog but hey, the more the merrier. (Yes I’m not being as kind as I could but I had a rough night last night hah).

So here are the rules:- By voting in the Brand Battle, you are opting into the AlwaysUrban.com email list. Expect results and a pile of other emails to boot in your inbox?

Vote For Your Favourite Brand
You must enter a valid email
You only get to vote once
Voting ends 03 / 16 / 09

So let’s take a look at the tees AUB featured to entice you to vote…

Starlet at Bad As Hell Clothing by a.mar.illo

Wow, wow, wow, arooga. I feel like a wolf from an old Tex Avery toon, this tee is hot to trot, totally fine retro work, very very slick illustration, I’d be gutted if I found out this was ripped from an old book plate, it really is very very well conceived. I can’t read the slogan but I’m sure it’s either in Latin, Italian, or something sexy like that. If it isn’t, if it says something lame, well then I’ll have to retract my prior statement. Still very very hot! Nice tones too. You can buy Starlet by a.mar.illo here. A.mar.illo has done a few tees already, you may know this one called Surabaya Johnny which is a very strange kettle of fish, based on the city of the artist and looking like something out of an old war comic on acid, this guy definitely has a future! BTW he says it’s based on an old Kurt Weill song.

Column Tee (Women’s) at Breathe On Apparel

Erm, right. Yep the image is a little small so I’d work on making the store a little more accessible first. Most of the tees featured by BOA at AUB aren’t available anymore this was the only one I could find – Column Tee. I should really hand this part of the review over to Chris (but she’s not here right now), so hmm. Well it’s light blue, smothered in logo graphics, and essentially is a walking advert for the brand. I never get why t-shirt designers think that people want to wear this kind of thing, I mean, you know when you see guys walking along the road wearing a sandwich board advertising a sale on at a local store, or cheap food at Greasy Joes, I mean they get paid to do that right? If this was a free tee it would be a great idea, the sort you get thrown at you on a corporate training weekend, or when your manager is having a stockroom clear out. But really, I get it, the company is called Breathe On Apparel, and there it is all over the shirt. Hmm. Anyway if you’d like to provide some free advertising space to this label and pay for the honour, click here.

Pee Tee by Someone Clothing

OMG this shirt rules, it’s like a Banksy in the making. If you’re going to include your logo, this is the way to do it. Conceptually this is a winner, although I don’t know if I’d have the guts to wear it. I really think they need a women’s version, she could be squatting in a skirt just to make it tasteful hah, still, amazing. It’s available in a selection of colours like banana and blue, cream and brown, black and white, but all the pics on the site are in b/w – arty but not too helpful. I can’t slate these guys though, their site is simple as it gets but yet they’ve managed to make it a total head trip to visit, I mean you know, weird, and I love weird. Duh. Of course I do, most of the tees I lavish praise on are for weirdos, but this one must be the king of bizarro world, I mean, calling it pee, the pee tee, that has to be some kind of twisted genius. Graffiti tees, that’s what I’d have called the label, but yes that’s too literal, still, it’s like wearing a stencil from the an NYC Subway carriage door. Cool, cooler than cool. Frozen.

Model Chick at Syditty Clothing

Well, I am sure they have some amazing tees for girls at Syditty Clothing, BUT, what is up with women’s tee designers? Are they all using the same photographer? This image and all their store images are so small that I am starting to think that either:
a) Women have far better eyesight than men.
b) It’s some kind of “tasteful presentation” thing that eludes me, completely.
If you’ve spent all that time and effort proving your genius at vector design, let the world know about it! Slap up some enormous photos of your t-shirts, I even looked up Syditty on Flickr but nothing, nowt, nada, zip. Damn. Anyway I think, but I am not sure, but I think that this label has some rocking tees for women, but I really can’t tell.

So there you have it, a completely biased round-up. Essentially I’d like Someone Clothing to win. Why?

There work is challenging and way out there. Plus, even though Bad As Hell Clothing has some sexy tees, they are more of a platform for designers (who hardly even acknowledge my efforts at raising awareness of their label). Someone Clothing need a boost. I am sure that once I’ve raved about Someone Clothing until I’m frothing at the mouth they’ll appreciate it, and maybe even link back here, hey I have to promote this blog somehow. Anyway, Someone Clothing is my first choice, then BAHC, then Syditty, and at the bottom of the pile BOA. But will I actually vote? Well, no, I’m not handing out my email address to another mailing list, my inbox is clogged up as it is hah. Okay I need food, a bath, a kip, and yes I promise the next post will be much less grisly lol.

Essentially for the first time fans and artists can be in business together. Each artist issues 50 ‘parts’ (shares) per design, parts cost $20 each which totals $1000 per t-shirt. Together, the artist’s supporters have to raise $1,000 to get the design of their choice fully supported. Each part earns the supporter 3 cents per sale, and each supporter receives a free limited edition t-shirt as part of the package.

The artist earns $500 for each fully-supported design, plus a free t-shirt and a whopping $2 per sale to top it off.

Buy Eye For An Eye T-shirt by Godmachine at Cameesa.com – This one’s a total trip, something between comic horror and a Grateful Dead album cover. Very spooky very cool.

Each buyer who purchases a t-shirt generates an income for Cameesa, the artist and their supporters, 20% of the funds going to the artist and supporters. I can’t quite tell what the printing limit for each t-shirt would be, but with my basic understanding of arithmetic it seems that a supporter would need at least 666.666 t-shirt sales to recoup their money which is rather ambitious, plus it seems to be just over the sign of the devil, someone call in Damien from The Omen perhaps he can explain this. However, you have to remember that each successful supporter also receives a free t-shirt worth $20 with free shipping so all in all it’s a pretty rad deal, you’re potentially gambling on buying a limited edition t-shirt and making some money, sounds great. Essentially this method should incentivise supporters/voters to promote their fave tee on social networks and blogs seeing as they can actually make some money out of it.

Buy Take Me To Your Reader T-shirt At Cameesa.com – I love wordplay as many of you know – I particularly appreciate the old school illustrative treatment and colouring in this design.

There are t-shirt designs out there that have built the financial backbone of certain crowdsourcing sites like Threadless.com, so it’s no wonder that Cameesa.com are thinking down this line. Furthermore they actually have some great designs on offer too, so there’s a good chance they might achieve their goals of a whole new format in t-shirt marketing. Skulls Are Still Kool! is currently the most popular t-shirt looking for support at Cameesa.com – it’s currently at 64% support so I’d hurry if you eager to get on board.

Support Skulls Are Still Kool T-Shirt At Cameesa.com – Hey that’s nice to know – it seems a lot of people at Cameesa agree with the artist Madeforyou who’s top of the supporters’ league right now with a whopping 64%.

I’ve picked out a few of my favourites but I’m sure you’ll find plenty more that you like either in Cameesa’s shop or support section. It’s a simple signup process if you do fancy showing some solidarity with an artist, what’s more if you submit a popular t-shirt you’re sure to find a far more dedicated fan base here than usual, seeing as they have a vested interest in seeing that you succeed.

Support One Tree At A Time By Villeast At Cameesa.com – This is a real beauty, I noticed it’s only notched up 14% support when I checked it out so there’s still plenty of room for your support in case you fancy chipping in.

Overall I’m very impressed, there’s some great strategy behind the whole crowdfunding concept here, a natural evolutionary jump from the competition, and going by the current quality of design available I can see this becoming a very popular idea. Who knows, Cameesa might even give Threadless a run for their money in the end. With the power of social networking and bookmarking I am sure there are a few potential supporters out there with the clout to give their
favourite design an enormous push. Take a look at your FaceBook and MySpace accounts, if they’re bulging with thousands of friends, this may be the
perfect opportunity for you!

It’s true we have similar services out there, there’s Rumplo.com for instance, a very popular t-shirt voting site, although I’d say it was a lot thinner in the ‘t-shirt community’ department, it’s still a mainstay with many t-shirt designers to get their works out there. Paul’s biggest gripe is the competitor site PleaseDress.me which turned up a few months later with a virtual ticker-tape parade as it arrived on the scene, compared to the rolling tumbleweed reception that ShirtSeek.com has received.

I don’t think the situation is quite as bad as Paul perceives, now I know no one trusts Alexa.com for accurate traffic statistics anymore, but even as a general guide I can tell you and Paul that this is how the visitors are ticking over so far :-

As You can see there’s very little difference right now, and in fact neither is generating an enormous amount of traffic. The truth is most t-shirt related sites (with the exception of the likes of Threadless, Spreadshirt, Cafepress), blogs and communities have few visitors, however much passion we all may feel for the medium, and yes it is a medium of art rather than an item of clothing, most of the world hasn’t woken up to the splendour of the iconic tee (quite yet).

What’s more I believe I’ve been put in the impossible position of comparing two very different beasts here, let me make a poor analogy here (on 4 hours sleep btw), it’s like comparing a critically acclaimed book with a flashy news stand magazine. One is in the game of making money, the other has higher ideals, of building a long lasting community.

ShirtSeek.com was released to the public when PDM was but an inkling in the collective subconscious of a hotshot team of net entrepreneurs. ShirtSeek is a one man band operation, an admirable but always treacherous past time in the online world, if there’s one thing this difficult, evasive, and generally intolerable reviewer has learned about making one’s way on the net it’s that the old adage ‘talk is cheap’ is actually a good thing, if you’re a loudmouth with a few thousand friends you can do almost anything (as long as at least one of your friends can code interactive application-based sites in their sleep). I’m not all that keen on social networking, I suppose it takes a certain kind of personality to persist with proffering small talk to hoards of strangers everyday. But unfortunately that is exactly how business is done online, and so much so within the field of t-shirts that I’d be hard pressed to find a success story in our industry that didn’t feature a social marketing guru behind the scenes.

The truth is Paul needs to make more friends, and don’t we all? I sometimes wonder if all of us social noobs out there could somehow get it together for once, we might just find we have our own enormous social networking army ready to storm the barricades of Digg, Facebook, Myspace and all the other usual suspects. The truth is we are all of the opinion that quality wins over quantity every time. The trouble is we are for the main part in the minority and probably always will be. The Internet is foremostly a money-making machine, if you have several thousand ‘friends’ you most likely have something to sell, and take every opportunity to do just that, if you don’t you gain the respect of those who’d rather ponder life and its complexities, but those same people rarely fork out on a whim.

The amount of inspiring and creative people I meet who’s ideas, creations and solutions either never make the light of day, or die before the first dusk merely reiterates my own sneaking suspicions of our society today. What’s more the more spontaneous surfer is used to clear cut simplicity of ideas, they jump on every bandwagon out there, and jump off at the first sign of trouble. They are used to the best, and they want everything handed on a plate. For instance most t-shirt review sites would have given ShirtSeek.com a couple of paragraphs and a photo or two and will be done. They as many people these days have little patience with the ideals of organic growth and natural evolution. If they don’t find all the bells and whistles they find on the vast and established networks we all know today, then they’ll hitch a ride to the next site before you have a chance to finish your ‘about page’.

So what can Paul do to improve his chances. This Paul is going to be a little painful, change always is, but here goes.

The domain name – Shirt Seek. No one seeks shirts, they search for them, and they search for t-shirts rather than shirts. With the right skills a name shouldn’t even matter, then again I’ve never been particularly imaginative with domain names, having seen the changes in Google’s SEO policies over the past few years, I’ve got myself stuck in a keyword rut. Americans call t-shirts ‘tees’, and most people online are American (bar the Chinese which is academic seeing as I cannot speak or write the language and that their average wage could hardly cover the cost of a designer t-shirt). So I lumped myself with a dull and hyphenated domain name. Still, my ranking isn’t too bad, I get a lot of positive feedback, I find the experience rewarding for the most part. You could call my blog a ‘slow burner’ in the world of t-shirt review blogs. What’s worse is that PleaseDress.Me is playing with TLDs, the way that say Del.icio.us has, and you know how much social networker types love that, the thing is that Google does too. If you can include a keyword in your TLD Google seems to go crazy for it, don’t ask me why.

Functionality. PleaseDressMe is geared towards the social networks, following the tradition of many successful t-shirt sites, they even offer a widget, if Paul could design a Facebook widget for ShirtSeek.com I think he’d put PDM to shame in a minute flat, it’s a tall order I know but Paul has managed to build ShirtSeek from scratch so I doubt it’s a total impossibility. Beyond the widgets there’s the functionality of the sites themselves, Paul, I have to admit that PDM have far more on offer on their homepage, it’s like a tarts’ boudoir over there, they make it all so easy and lay out their wares before you have a chance to blink. I’d consider ‘appropriating’ all of their search functions, seeing as they’ve near enough ‘appropriated’ your whole strategy!

Community. Where ShirtSeek excels is in its community-based model, rather than PDM who’s sole purpose is to generate cold hard cash, and then some. For instance every link I found at PDM led me to a product page via an affiliate link (Shareasale, Commission Junction, CafePress, TshirtHell). PDM want you to buy, they don’t want your opinions, or rather your views and comments are merely a by-product of their core strategy to rake it in as fast as possible. ShirtSeek’s links lead to a review page, offer details of other t-shirts by the same designer, and offer the visitor a chance to have their say. It’s more constructive, more altruistic, and a rather more inspiring business model, although ultimately less profitable.

I can see that ShirtSeek is in it for the long-term, I understand Paul’s motives, his ambitions to build a t-shirt community are highly admirable, but this does leave him open to attack from many other competitors. For instance there’s T-ShirtForums.com, an enormous t-shirt community that’s been around for quite a while, backed up by a network of other popular t-shirt related sites including a t-shirt rating site and a t-shirt designers directory. Then there’s a whole heap more t-shirt rating sites out there to choose from.

It gets worse, there are some absolutely enormous contenders to deal with, if you want to see a t-shirt community in action check out Threadless.com, which apart from selling a few t-shirts ($18 million profit was the last figure I’ve heard), they also encourage an enormous amount of interaction, what am I saying ‘encourage’, they positively demand it. Without audience participation Threadless would never have got off the ground, and seeing as they started as a thread in a t-shirt forum, it’s no surprise they’ve taken this route, and in some ways revolutionised it. I don’t personally enjoy Threadless, many competitors use fake or friends’ accounts to slate their rivals, firing out zeros and ones like there’s no tomorrow. There is no such thing as perfection when it comes to a business models, evolve or die is the best advice I can offer. My blog will most likely die on day, it doesn’t evolve, I don’t evolve, I firmly dug my heels in years ago, then again that could be old age or senility kicking in.

I will never be a success in business, perhaps I’ll find my place in the world one day, the Arts, visual, literature, who knows I might even manage to make a living, but that’s because I like to stick to my principles. If it’s worth saying at all, it’s worth saying well. I don’t skimp as you’ll obviously gathered by now, I know what it means to put quality ahead of perfunctory streamlined efficiency and productivity. I’d rather make a name for myself than make money, I’ll doubt I’ll get either, but if I do I will have both and that’s because I am in some way or other unique, I’m not truly unique, I can’t fly or move objects with my mind, but unique in the way that some old hobos sit in a gutter and drink away their lives, whilst others write about it.

Paul needs to take another look at ShirtSeek, I’m not keen on the design myself, yes PDM has a rather obvious format, a clone of everything from Stumbleupon to Threadless, but it’s a proven format. If you want to make your mark take it to the edge and then some, or not at all. I like the scribbled effect, but if you want to make it stand out scribble over everything, and leave the edges of the site tattered and frayed, or go the whole hog and create a site that looks like a t-shirt, with a tag and the top and hems around the edges. Sure it’s all just personal tastes but making yourself stand out these days is a near impossibility. Most successful sites rely on two things, a very strange name and an incredibly simple layout. The fine line between bland and brand is almost imperceptible, but it’s there.

I’d love to see ShirtSeek.com survive and prosper, excel and triumph, who knows Paul may even have a job for me there one day if he does make it big, but before any of that happens let’s recount what needs to change.

Friends. Make friends. Buy Friends. Pay someone with friends to trounce the networks and splurge your branding everywhere.

Functionality. Chuck far more function on the homepage. Tell them what you offer and why you’re the best. You have more listings than PDM, you offer more interactivity, tell the people as soon as they arrive. Create a Facebook widget and find someone to plug it to death, PDM have hardly made headway there yet.

Branding. Create a stronger branding, imprint that name in the subconscious of every passer-by, how can ShirtSeek become a household name? It’s difficult but only experimentation will find the answers you need.

Offers. Try some tie-ins with the major sites, you’re not clawing in the affiliate links like PDM so go to the top and offer them far more exposure, free ads for free contests for instance.

These are all merely opinions, ideas, if you have any yourself, or think you might be able to help propel ShirtSeek.com into the major league contact Paul Grzymkowski and tell him what you can do, who knows he might give you a job too (if things truly take off).

In the meantime show your support for all of Paul’s efforts, sign up (for free), submit your t-shirts for some free and unfettered promotion to the market, vote and comment on the current listings and generally shout about ShirtSeek.com from the rooftops, be it via the social networks, your favourite forums or blogs, or even an email to a friend or two. Competition is ultimately a good thing, it increases the quality of service and eventually sorts out the wheat from the chaff. Let’s hope that Paul has a bumper harvest of wheat this year.

Apart from the cool logo the first thing to hit me was the high standard of design at BAHC, Charles obviously feels the same as he’s picked six winners for his first month’s trading and every one of them is a real cracker. The top prize is a generous $600 ($500 cash and $100 vouchers), plus residuals that can amount to $1000 if they sell 550 or more of your design, or $1 per t-shirt if they sell 150. So well worth submitting your latest tees if you’re after some cash and kudos.

By the way check out the crazy logo, Charles can certainly practice what he preaches as BAHC so be sure you submit your very best works to get a crack at the top prize! Anyway on with the current winners at Bad As Hell…

As you can tell by now they’re are some gorgeous designs on sale there already, which means a full-on vector brush attack if you want a chance of winning. I’d avoid puns here and go as far down the arts route as you possibly can, meaning more illustrative flair and less conceptual idealism. They aren’t after messages, they’re after high quality line art. BAHC use a top-notch four-screen printer press with a Wilflex‚Ñ¢ ink mixing system which allows them to match any possible colour to the tee, but as I’ve mentioned this currently limits each design to four colours (soon to be eight), so your brains maybe taxed just that little more than usual.

Hurry up and send in your latest design to beat the rush, they’re holding the current contest until August 8th 2008, so the earlier you do the more votes you should receive. Find some divine inspiration and send it to hell ;)

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 Condi√ß√µes’, 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 ‚Ǩ350 per batch of 200 t-shirts printed, essentially you’ll continue to receive an income of ‚Ǩ1.75 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!