One of our favorite things to do is check out other t-shirt blogs and bring you the highlights of the week. So here they are, some of the top, most innovative blogs of the week featuring some of the coolest and most creative t-shirts related posts:

This Election Season, Choose Star Wars! (from Militant Geek)
This routinely good blog does an excellent job of highlighting Lucasfilm’s excellent line of Star Wars election t-shirts. Every Stars Wars fan/contemporary voter will want to check these out.

The Classic Bar Fight T-Shirt (from The Daily Tee)
This t-shirt blog features a terrific all-over design of an old fashioned bar fight. Great scene with excellent detail.

Mediocore Sale (from Thunderfrogs)
This blog highlights several great shirts from Mediocore and also offers lots of info about their sale.

NUMBER(N)INE Disney Skull Collection (from The Fat Seagull)
This entry features the new designs from Number(N)ine which depicts Disney characters with skulls. Not everyone’s taste but definitely creative.

Baby Bat Mobile (from The Daily Tee)
This post depicts a youthful batman and Penguin. I guess some rivalries have no beginning or end.

Batgirl T-Shirt (from the T-Shirt Review)
Another great batman themed t-shirt, this one depicting Batgirl. These tees are going to be hot with all the bat-hysteria flying around.

A Better Yesterday (from iloveyourtshirt)
This blog does a great job featuring creative and original designs. In this entry they feature a great retro t-shirt.

Paperclips away! (from The Daily Tee)
This entry depicts paper airplanes launching a paperclip assault. Another fine entry from The Daily Tee.

50 BustedTees Shirts for $9.99 Each (from T-Shirts Around the Internet)
This entry gives details on the sale over at BustedTees. It also features a really great design with an amusing take on one of our common sayings.

Tom Burns is on Fire! (from Buy Tees)
This is a really excellent, detailed blog entry about the work of Tom Burns. This entry really goes the extra mile in giving information.

RobotMummy and Catman (from T-Shirts Around the Internet)
This entry features the really creative concept of the “RobotMummy” and the Catman. Awesome t-shirt, great idea.

Uneetee: Camouflage (from Shirts on Sale)
This post features a great Uneetee design of a zebra and a bar code. The truly awesome thing about this shirt is the way it was ‘staged’ in the photo. Check it out to see what we mean.

$10 Shirt.Woot: Midnight Rider (from Shirts on Sale)
This entry depicts a ‘Midnight Rider’ with a cool twist. Amazing detail and a beautiful design. Check it out.

Objectified T-Shirt (from Shirtlog)
This post shows a wonderful, creative t-shirt spelling the word ‘objectified’ with various objects.

Tee Comic: Celebri-tee (from Militant Geek)
This entry is one of their comic strip editions. This very amusing strip pokes fun at the trend toward celebrity endorsements.

We mentioned last week that our main administrative offices moved and we are still getting settled in. The most exciting thing for me is that I live on the same exact street that the new offices are located on. In fact, saying that I live on the same street just doesn’t do it justice, because I live on the same block. In our attempt to go more green, we have been getting pretty creative with the commute to save on gas and to decrease energy consumption.

Just like with anything else we do, we have to create a t-shirt design and print t-shirts for the occasion. We also felt this would be a great chance to give a short t-shirt design tutorial on how to trace something in Adobe Illustrator. We chose an illustration of a bicycle, because it is pretty simple geometric shapes that are easy to re-create using the preset shape tools and pen tool in Illustrator.

Here’s the final design we are going to create:

The image that we are going to trace comes from a standard bike route sign that you see on many streets today. We first open up that image in Adobe Illustrator.

The first tool we will be using is the preset circle tool. We are going to create the two wheels on the bike by sizing up the circle tool and giving it a 9 pt stroke. The color we are going to use to make it easy to see what we are doing is pink.

For this next step, we are still going to use the circle tool, but we are going to create two circles with the fill color of pink instead of an outline.

Next we are going to use the pen tool to trace all of the straight-line pieces of the frame of the bicycle.

Now we are going to increase the stroke on the line we just created with the pen tool to match the bike.

The last part of the process for the tracing is to take the square tool and create the two pedals and use the pen tool to trace the seat.

Since we used a lot of strokes in this illustration, it is always good practice to expand the strokes so everything is a fill color.

Another suggested step that isn’t required, but helps polish off the design, is to merge all of the pieces.

The last thing we’re going to do is delete the bike sign that we used for tracing and change the color of the bike. We added a little text just to get our point across and provide a little smile. Here’s another look at the final tee shirt design:

*For custom t-shirt printing, please visit You Design It.

Many of the most popular designs today feature dark, subdued colors on shirts with a soft tone.  Flashy doesn’t seem to be too hot right now. One of the main reasons for that is the difficulty of doing bright colors right without looking gaudy. One thing is certain, there have always been, and always will be, very vibrant, colorful t-shirts with great designs. With that in mind we scoured the internet (and by internet, we mean Design By Humans) to find some of the most colorful, coolest designs that are sure to please any bright shirt enthusiast.

Concentric Downpour:

This shirt features colorful, vivid circles falling down onto a man cast in a black, shadowy design who is using an umbrella to repel the color spheres. They symbolism seems to indicate that the gentleman does not want more color in his life or maybe he just doesn’t want to be pelted with colorful, concentric circles. Either way, this is a pretty cool design and a great way to add color into your own life.

C-Theory:

C-Theory has a very colorful, busy design. It features deep, bright tones depicting an array of different situations. The many bright colors seem to add well to the confusion of the shirt. However, they also seem to add to the overall harmony that the shirt is somehow able to convey through the synergy of the different designs. Well done!

Emo:

Emo is an extremely bright, flashy hippie style shirt that seems to directly implore people to make love (and music) not war. This timeless message and colors and style are clearly a throwback to the sixties. This is a great shirt for anyone who lived through the pivotal decade or merely for anyone who identifies with its message.

Bow Master:

Bow Master is an extremely surreal, abstract sort of design. All we really know about the creature who seems doglike is that it has its heads in the clouds and is practically getting tied up by its heartstrings. With so many colors and so much implied movement this shirt is sure to make the wearer standout.

Animal Story:

Animal Story features impressionistic renderings of animals sitting around a campfire, presumably telling stories. This dark shirt is done in vibrant pastels and it’s difficult to ignore.

We are pretty excited about it because we are growing up! We will be posting pictures soon and giving more information because right now….we are in the middle of the move. We are still printing custom t-shirts and will not experience any downtime. Stay tuned!

The other day, we were window-shopping at a local t-shirt boutique in the morning as we got our coffee from Starbucks. It was well before the T-shirt shop had opened, and I could see a t-shirt book for sale through the window. It’s not every day that you happen to see T-shirt books, while window-shopping so I knew I was going to have to come back once they’re open to make that purchase.

The name of the book was Vintage Rock T-shirts and it couldn’t be more interesting for the niche it is covering. You can find the book here at Amazon and here is a screenshot of their order page:

The T-shirt book essentially covers the 60s, 70s, and 80s rock bands and the T-shirts they sold at concerts. And it really isn’t a “reading” book as much as it is a “looking” book. This suits us just fine, because the images are top-notch and the layout is beautiful. We definitely recommend it as a must-have on the shelf of your office or home library. That is with the assumption that you are as much of a t-shirt geek as we are.

One thing that we thought was really cool was the image that was used on the front of the book. They borrowed the image to show the author’s name from the bass drum in an image for the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here is the album cover:

Why is that so interesting? Because we just printed a large amount of shirts for a big customer of ours that was creating a new club for their employees. Here’s the artwork for those shirts:

Now that was a long story, and we’ve got to get back to t-shirt printing…

As we have noted previously in this t-shirt blog, we just entered the Design By Humans t-shirt design contest with artwork that we named Shooting Stars. We promised that we would show you just how easy it is to accomplish that custom t-shirts design effect.

First, we are going to begin with the shooting stars artwork.

As you have seen us do before, we need to group the artwork so we can make everything easier to move and manipulate.

One of the most important parts of making this t-shirt design effect really pop and happen, is to choose the right colors. Now the colors don’t have to be that particular, they just need to be bright and with a lot of contrast.

Next we are going to make a copy of the artwork, move it a little bit down and to the left, and then color it a bright pink.

We’re going to repeat this step, one more time by copying the artwork, moving it up and to the right, and coloring it bright yellow.

We always suggest you play with the artwork a little bit and change the depth until you get it right where you want it. It shouldn’t take a lot for you to be able to get this technique and make it better than we can.