The T-Shirt Blog

I love the mischief and blunt honesty present in these two shirts.  Aren’t we all just horny cheapskates deep down inside?

(Psst!  Want instant email updates of my latest t-shirt findings?  All you have to do is subscribe.)

Not a t-shirt, I know, but a good find while browsing Cafepress’ marketplace.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Spreadshirt, one of the leading t-shirt on-demand companies in the world. I didn’t stop there, and I’d like try out and review many more custom t-shirt and write about them here. Next up is MySoti, a previously unknown, and mysterious printer with and Indian sounding name. One of my readers, Kevin, alerted me to their presense, and I decided to give them a shot.

It turns out that MySoti is in fact a t-shirt printer and allows you to put your designs on sale in a sort of a shop, much like Spreadshirt and Cafepress. Uploading your designs and finalizing your products is pretty easy, especially considering a much smaller range of products, which includes American Apparel products for Men, Women, children and babies! I also like the the large 12.5″ by 17.5″ printable area, but what really interested me about MySoti is the way that it’s organized—more like a community than a t-shirt marketplace. You can vote for designs you like, check out creators’ profiles, and view other shirts offered by a given designer. In my mind, voting is what’s missing from major t-shirt marketplaces. Think YouTube meets Cafepress—now that would really separate the wheat from the chaff!

While MySoti proved to be a fun experience with it’s vibrant collection of available designs, it remains to be seen if their quality is up to snuff and whether their reach is big enough to make them relevant.

A few days ago I signed up with Spreadshirt, in order to play around and see how everything works.  The only on-demand printer that I had worked with previously is Cafepress, and in a way my first impressions were made up of ways in which the two are different.  Here’s what I found.

Vector Designs and Printing Methods

In addition to the traditional WYSWIG method of digital printing Spreadshirt employs something called plot printing.  I’m not any kind of an expert on this, but the way I understand it is that a blade cuts your design out of a colored material, which is then adhered to your shirt.  This allows for a wider range of materials, such as glittery foil and velvety “flock” prints, and Spreadshirt claims the results are a lot more durable.  There are some limitations in terms of the shapes your design can have, and only one swatch is possible.  This also requires the use of vector graphics (think Illustrator not Photoshop).

A Wide Selection of Printable Products

Spreadshirt has a dizzying selectino of printable apparel for men, women, and children.  There is anything from cheap lightweight t-shirts to American Apparel and even track jackets.  Choice is always good, but makes for some difficult choices when designing your products.  The upside is that printing areas are fairly large, average around 12″ wide and up to the whole shirt length.

Sell Your Design at Spreadshirt

Another way that Spreadshirt is diffirent from, say Cafepress, is that in addition to putting your shop’s products into the “marketplace” you can also submit your designs, which in turn can be used by other shopkeepers, in exchange for royaltees.  This works a bit like clip-art.  Design an element that someone might like to use (think shamrock, stylized heart, baseball bat), and you can earn a couple of bucks anytime it’s printed on a shirt.

Aside from all these positives Spreadshirt also has a slick, modern interface, and tons of customization options.  Just take a look at a shop like Amorphia Apparel to see how seamlessly Spreadshirt can integrate with your website.  This high level of customization at a price of a higher learning curve, but the e-mail support so far has been great.

Want to see what’s available in the Spreadshirt Marketplace?  Here are some coupon codes:

BUYMORE8 - 20% off when you buy two products.
BUYMORE9 - 25% off when you buy three products.

Experies Nov 28th.

CYBER48 - 25& an order for $30 or more.

Valid Dec 1st - 5th.

There is no other way to say it. I’ve put a lot of work into these t-shirt designs, and while they are not perfect, I greatly enjoyed making them and I want to share them with the world.

Which of my t-shirts designs do you like best? Chode Island Kiss Me I'm Queer Kiss Me I'm Illegal I Beat Up Ashley Todd Save a Tree, Hug a Person I'd honestly prefer just a plain white tee. View Results  Loading ...

Threadless hasn’t always had slogan tees, as their main focus has been, and still is on illustration. In fact, every month a new theme is declared for their design contest, challenging artists to create a suitable illustration in the form of a t-shirt design. Currently the theme is horror.

When Threadless launched TypeTees the premise was a little different.  Instead of designs, users submit slogans, which are voted for by other users.  Winning slogans are then designed by professional artists.  This great news on both fronts if you are a fan of slogan tees. You can earn $500 by submitting a winning slogan, or you can peruse their collection of existing slogan tees.  Here are my favorites:

• Allow me to explain through interpretive dance
• Stop detroying our planet. It’s where I keep all my stuff.
• Haikus are easy
  But sometimes they don’t make sense
  Refrigerator
• Being vague is almost as fun as this other thing.
• So far, this is the oldest I’ve ever been.
• In case of emergency, break dance.

A part of me believes that anyone who triviliazes the sacred institution of democracy by making a political t-shirt that satirizes, idolizes or takes advantage of a presidential candidacy is going straight to hell. So if I’m going to make one now, it might as well be the douchiest most offensive thing possible, right?

In case you aren’t aware, Ashley Todd filed a false police report claiming to have been a victim of a racially and politically motivated attack.

One of the favorite images on my computer is this outdated campaign t-shirt, referencing the 1988 presidential election. I grabbed it from an eBay auction years ago, and now I wish I had grabbed the shirt. It’s something I like to call a political anachronism, taking a shirt with long lost political meaning, and re-purposing it for it’s inherent irony and quaint nostalgia.

One t-shirt site that seems to share my affinity for the past is Retro Campaigns.  You won’t find any Obama or Palin there just yet, but can you really go wrong with someone like J.F.K.?  Heck, they might even let you wear it to the polls.

First off, I’d like to apologize to anyone who might find the title offensive. What really interests me about this topic is how t-shirts designs can be different, or stay the same as you look at different countries. For every This Is How I Roll, there is Play Back That and Swimming To You. Clearly, there’s a lot of attention and creativity applied to these shirts, as Wikipedia explains:

For the same reasons that a Chinese character or a Japanese Kanji tattoo seems “exotic” to many in the West, Asians may appreciate English words or gibberish for its aesthetic appeal alone; straight lines, frequent symmetry, and the unembellished curves of Latinate letters may all appeal to Asian senses of aesthetics and balance.

With this in mind, I’m wondering where some of you are from. I’ve checked last month’s logs, and I’m seeing a bunch of visitors from Sweden, Australia, and Ukraine (which is where I was born). Of course the majority of my visitors I believe are from the Unisted States, which is where this blog is based.

Poll: Which continent are you from? Feel free to leave your actual location in the comments. North America South America Europe Asia Australia & Pacific [Please don't say that you're from] Antarctica Africa View Results  Loading ...

Hoaxicillin is a 100% all natural product that effectively addresses the symptoms of of anxiety, stress, depression, panic attacks and restless Sleep caused by boring, unoriginal, and underdesigned t-shirts. Unlike prescription drugs, Hoaxicillin is formulated to naturally and safely treat you without the unwanted side effects you may find with prescription habit forming medications.

Poll: If you were a doctor, which would you recommend? Mikoc Fukitol Neither View Results  Loading ...

And the greatest present I could possibly give myself is a new and revamped T-Shirt Blog! Not everything is complete, but during the last couple of weeks I’ve put in a lot of time into tweaking the layout.  I started by upgrading the blog’s software, and I made the content area wider while also increasing the font size of most of the elements.  I believe this will make the blog easier to read, and will allow me to post bigger, higher-res images of t-shirts, which is, after all, what the blog is really about.  I also made a few minor tweaks to make sure everything is neat and aligned, removed a few elements which I deemed less than useful, and added a few things, like the email subscription widget on the upper portion of the sidebar.

More things to come:

• Completely new background images.  If you have any high res photo images or vector art that I can use, please let me know!  I’d like to use some high res t-shirt close-ups, but bandwidth may be an issue.
• Ads.
• More t-shirts!