We have just about put in our first full week at the new You Design It administrative offices and we couldn’t be happier! Things are going really well and the new place matches our growth and excitement. We have very aggressive development plans and you can expect a lot of extraordinary things to come in the future. We can’t wait!

Here are two new pics from the office just for fun because nobody likes a blog post without pictures:

*For custom printed hats and embroidered hats visit You Design It.

This week featured quite a few awesome tees with some most excellent blog posts about them. However, since we have to pick, here’s our top favorites:

Everything is Fine by Wondermark (via Hide Your Arms)
This awesome design features the words “Everything is Fine” crafted from a series of definitely ‘unfine’ scenarios. Hats off to HideYourArms for this great find and for the back ground info on Wondermark.

Lost in the World of Fast Joe (from Buy Tees)
This blog consistently features thorough and insightful reviews on interestings designers, shirts, and topics. This most recent review chronicals the work of talented – up and coming artist “Fast Joe”. Check out the blog and Joe’s work.

80s Tees Sale (Thunderfrogs)
How could we not feature a blog that points us in the direction of so many cool shirts (check out made in the eighties). The design featured pays homage to Nintendo’s crown jewel, Mario. Very cool!

Wotto. On A Woll. (via The T-Shirt Review)
This blog entry takes the time to feature and review several great shirts. Among them the excellent new design by Wotto, The Assassin’s Birthday. Another smashing design is the “I’m With This Clown” tee!

UP UP and Away! (from Shirtfind)
This blog post provides the perfect caption for a GREAT new shirt. A sharp, insightful, to the point review AND an awesome title for the shirt? What more could we ask for?

Vargas Visions Captures Your Wildest Imagination For the Shirts (Cottonable)
This Cottonable post features the dino shirt above (hey it’s a great design!) AND a very thought-provoking, creative (though dark) “Baby Inside Grenade”. It’s hard to ignore this post, and why would you want to?

Kids, Kidnaps, Festivals and Teeshirts (TeeJunkie)
This week featured several blog posts that were tough on kids. This one is an amusing take and original design on a common tread. Props to teejunkie for featuring this creative, though controversial shirt.

Graniph’s Gold Standard (Rumplo)
This blog features some beautiful designs that are not only fit for a t-shirt but even fit for a canvas or a mural. Awesome designs! Great job Rumplo!

Turtle Rage (from Shirts on Sale)
Shirts On Sale is dedicated to featuring a batch of marked down shirts on a daily basis. Today’s post highlights a timeless tale of competition with a new twist that resonates in today’s economy. To see what we mean check out the post!

AV by Olly Moss (HideYourArms)
This great blog entry features an excellent review of a really cool shirt called “AV” The front features a simple, understated design while the back is a busy mass of plug ins. This blog does an excellent job describing the shirt and highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.

Foam Monster in Emotional Reunion (Thunderfrogs)
This has got to be my new favorite shirt! It depicts a crowd scene with a man in the lower region of the picture holding up one of those big foam hands. Higher in the crowd we see a very prominent, handless foam monster. Simple, but genius!

New Shirt Monday at Threadless (Compete-Tee-Tion)
This blog is dedicated to bringing readers the news of shirt competitions and highlighting the standout designs. This great entry features a nifty write up of AV and Foam Monster from above (reason enough to highlight them) PLUS a stunning design called “Bunyan’s Blues” and a very good design called “In US All”. Awesome designs and awesome descriptions!

Finally, a T-shirt for Beer Pong (the DailyTee)
The title practically says it all. This is a fantastic shirt, with a great design that’s sure to be all around fun to wear. Great choice Daily Tee and great write up!

Arrr…Here Be A Pirate T-Shirt (Militant Geek)
Militant Geek does an amusing and descriptive write up of this amusing and descriptive shirt. Great combination huh? This is truly a great-looking tee! Check it out!

Going Bananas (via Shirts on Sale)
Another simple, amusing, terrific design! This blog also makes a very good point about the saying that we hadn’t noticed until they pointed it out. Check out the design and then read post to see if you notice.

One of the most popular staples in t-shirt design is the skull. Our fascination with this fleshless bone is enduring and profound according to its popularity on t-shirt designs. Check out these awesome skull designs we have gathered off the interweb:

Tief Fairies

This large print and colorful skull appears to be popping off the shirt with a big grin on its cheerful face.

Skull Garden

This dark rendering of the skull garden is certain to be a crowd pleaser with its floral design.
Gambling Skull

A cool design with a cool concept. This shirt is offered at Lucky Brand retail locations.

Sugar Skull

This beautiful design is enhanced even more with the glow in the dark ink they use for it.

Pollution Effect

This fantastic t-shirt design once again uses the skull as a symbol for the effects of pollution.

Stick Figure in Peril

This is the ever-popular skull and crossbones. This shirt really pops with its bright red background featuring all of the warning signs before death.
I Skull NY

This shirt puts a new spin on the popular “I ‘heart’ NY” t-shirt design. Once again we can see how prolific the skull has become.

Life, Tis Precious

This beautiful, vivid, busy design is truly a work of art on a t-shirt.

Two Candles Skull T-Shirt

This bright, monochromatic skull features candles and other decorative elements. It will provide a little diversity to your skull collection.

Vampire Skull

This design shows the more extreme side of skull depictions. This one is for the hardcore skull enthusiast.

Here at You Design It we appreciate good t-shirt art. That’s why we wanted to take a moment to give a shout out to one of the best designers in the industry – Jimiyo, and help support his t-shirt print effort.
Jimiyo has an extensive and impressive portfolio of work and he is one of the top designers over at Design By Humans. He has a real knack for capturing the beauty and elegance in any rendering he makes. His work usually features dark, mystical, satirical, or just plain off the wall designs, but it is consistently strong. Check out this popular and colorful design he created for Design By Humans:

One of the reasons we wanted to spotlight Jimiyo, apart from his amazing talent and dedication to creative design, is because he currently has a new project in the works. He’s created an excellent design featuring the adage “Eat, Drink, Be Merry” and he’s looking for pre-orders to help fund the printing of the shirt! Check out this great design:

So what can you do to help support this artist and snag one of these awesome shirts for yourself? Simple, you can make a $20 pre-order donation to the fundraising event via paypal. Jimiyo is using tough concept of pre-order donations to help offset the costs of manufacturing the shirts and to generally gauge interest. Here’s how it works. The goal of the t-shirt fundraising event is to raise $881 in free pledges by August 30th. As of this writing he has currently secured $160 in pledges. If he reaches the goal of $881 he will email you to find out your size then ship out the shirts by the tentative target date of September 8th. If he does not reach the goal of $881 then your $20 pledge will not be drafted and you’re not out anything (except for missing the opportunity to own a terrific shirt that is).

Help support this terrific artist and his dedication to great design!

We get testimonials occasionally because we don’t solicit for them like one of our competitors. It always feels good when we do and this one made our weekend. It just shows us that we are doing something right for someone to take time out of their day to let us know they are thankful:

Hi Blake and Lauren,

I wanted to let you know that we received the T-Shirts today and they are
GREAT!!!! Thanks to both of you for all of your help in creating and
expediting our order. We will definitely be using your company in the near
future.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Annie
[Major Vehicle Manufacturer]

It appears that we have some unfinished business on one of the previous t-shirt design tutorials that we did. We are referring to the 3D t-shirt design technique that we blogged about that we feel could go two or three more steps to really polish it off. The trick that we are going to use involves transparency and allowing the different layers of colors to mix in the spots that they overlap. This makes for much more difficult screen printed t-shirts but we think it is well worth it.

Let’s begin with taking a look at the final design we created with the 3D feel:

The first thing we’re going to do is grab all of the blue stars, and simply change the transparency down to 60%.

Here is a closer look at the transparency change:

Then we are going to grab all of the pink stars and drop the transparency down to 70%. Going any lighter will take away the pop of the paint that we need for this technique.

A closer look at the transparency:

And that does it! I know, simple enough to really add the third dimension to the illustration. Here’s a final look at an old design with a new trick: