Back To Basics – Print Liberation

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Print Liberation, cool shirts, political t-shirts, printliberation.com, text t-shirts, type tees, typography tees

Print Liberation break all the rules when it comes to t-shirt design, yet their range of tees deliver such a powerful punch, offering a deceptively basic typographic home-made style, which personally forces the likes of people like me to reassess exactly what makes a great tee. The truth is their simple and straightforward designs offer an alternative to the slick graphics and ideas of most of the indie market. Sure, putting it bluntly, they’re as basic as can be, which in most circumstances is a risky position to take in fashion, yet their philosophy works. In fact it shines.

When you buy a t-shirt from Print Liberation you’re buying a message, you’re opting in to an ethos that hasn’t reared it’s head in decades. Big bold upper case fonts declare their ideology like a heavyweight knock out blow to the head. Don’t expect ‘pretty’ or exuberant illustration – that just isn’t what Print Liberation are about. Don’t expect glib and throwaway sentiments either, this brand doesn’t mince their words, this brand is about as close to an ‘anti-label’ as anyone has managed to create in decades. Their home grown basic design ethic is born out of experience and need, not ambition or fashionable attitude. You get what you see, and what you see is the truth.

They offer a range betwixt the big bold and rather glib typography tees that flooded Britain in the 80’s and the highly politicised tees of the 60’s and 70’s psychedelic era. Avoiding the petty thoughts of famous bands of the time like Wham’s “Choose Life” and Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Frankie Says“, and taking on a deeper and more politicised line more suited to the revolutionary downturn of the hippie movement. Yet there’s nothing sentimental or amateur about Print Liberation’s presentation, with a total lack of pretension, their designs get to the point straight away. There’s no room for art when it comes to this label’s idea of fashion, their hard-edged design ethic tells you why and how it is the way it is. They never cushion the blow, they never ‘decorate’ the truth with illustration and a spectrum of colour. They think the way many of us think, and in turn, their customers help to spread their message.

Founded in 1999, a moment when much of the media touted the world as we knew it would end, well if the Millennium Bug had had its way, a bedraggled collective of burnt-out advertising executives decided to turn the tables on big government and big business. Using the same talents prostituted to the corporations in the name of profit, they began to brainstorm their way through to a new beginning, an new era of indie urban fashion and art. The message would always be the truth, the mechanism for delivery would be popular culture, and the ideology revolution. You’re either with them or against them, that’s just how they roll, live with it. 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