It’s that time again…you know the time when we give a shout out to the top blogs of the week. Check out these gems!

TeeFury Has a Cool One from Taddict
Really cool design, as Taddict says it’s pretty amazing that TeeFury is able to come up with a new shirt each day. This is definitely one of their best.

Hannari Tofu, your Funny Japanese Friend from Cottonable
Cottonable certainly dug up an interesting t-shirt line with this one! Who can resist shirts featuring Japanese food?

Blue Sky from Buythistshirt.org
It’s hard not to appreciate such a beautiful, realistic rendering. Fantastic shirt.

Iron Maiden Number of the Best World Tour 1982 from Defunkd
In keeping with their objective of bringing us the best Iron Maiden T-Shirts defunkd brings us a couple of more very cool ones. Gotta love the camo sleeves.

Threadless Sale from Compete-tee-tion
Threadless is having another sale and Compete-tee-tion has found us some of the very best shirts on sale. My two favorites are “Boynado” and “Musical Chairs.”

Markertees from Pop Culture Tees
I think the best way to sum up this blog and T-Shirt company is to quote Liz, “It’s a concept that has made appearances off and and on in the last few years, but I think these guys are the first to make a go at having their whole brand built around writable tees.”

The Big Boys on Sale from Funky Duds
In the past we’ve often pointed out how the t-shirt world enjoys depicting rabbits as evil and violent. This latest design, complete with a bloody axe, is certainly in keeping with that vein.

Threadless now has a kids store from Hide Your Arms
Threadless has opened its first kids’ store and that’s certainly big enough news to be acknowledged in our weekly top blogs.

Celebri-Tee: The It Crowd from Militant Geek Custom
This design certainly qualifies as a terrific geek shirt. It’s taken from the BBC sitcom “The IT Crowd” but it doesn’t take a fan of the show to enjoy the shirt.

$9 TeeFury: The Wave is Forever from Shirts on Sale
Yep, that’s right, this week we’re featuring two blogs about TeeFury shirts. They’re hard to ignore when they’re low price and high quality. This one depicts a surfing samurai.

Artists Series T-Shirts at Resist Today from T-Shirts Around the Internet
This may actually be my favorite design of the week. It features a plant growing from the green veins of a human brain/face. Check it out.

New 90’s Style T-Shirts from Kill The Label from Tcritic
The 90’s are hard to ignore and these shirts certainly epitomize that influential decade. Whether you hate them or love them you’ll have trouble ignoring them.

Don’t Trust Bunnies from The Daily Tee
We’re just a shocked as you are. Imagine TWO bunny designs in one week! Anyway if you haven’t gotten the message yet, DON’T TRUST BUNNIES!

Dale Edwin Murray from Thunderfrogs
Dale Edwin Murray is an incredibly talented, original designer and this Thunderfrogs feature is very informative and fun to read.

Buy 1 get 1 free at The T-Shirt Gang from Troundup
Unfortunately the sale is now over, but that doesn’t mean these great tees aren’t worth the standard price.

Many of the most popular designs today feature dark, subdued colors on shirts with a soft tone.  Flashy doesn’t seem to be ‘the 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 know how busy fall is around school campuses.  It’s not just the guys who are busy training and gearing up for the big season.  The cheerleaders are spending hours practicing and training as well so that they can be in top form to show their school spirit at the big games.  We also know that cheerleading is a twenty-four hour job.  That’s why we wanted to create something concrete that the girls could wear to show their school spirit even when they weren’t in their uniforms or actively practicing.  The solution: custom design cheerleading t-shirts.  We’ve spent the last few days busily adding even more templates to our cheerleading t-shirt designs gallery.  Here’s a great example that we’re proud of:

We can also easily alter these t-shirts to reflect your school information or crests.  These personalized t-shirts are the perfect answer of what to wear to school events when you aren’t actively cheering!

We are proud to announce that the custom t-shirt design gallery for You Design It has finally launched.  It has taken a lot of hard work and long hours, but it has been well worth it.  It’s going to continue to be a work in progress, but we can promise that we will continue to add great t-shirt artwork for your use.  These t-shirt templates can be remixed and altered any way that you want to your next t-shirt printing project.

Please take your time and browse our tee shirt designs and let us know how we can be your t-shirt printing company.

One of the benefits of working at a t-shirt printing company, is the ability to create t-shirts on a whim as funny gifts for your friends. I am at that age level right now where quite a bit of my friends are giving big announcements about their newfound pregnancy. Some of those announcements have been delivered in a funny way such as wearing printed t-shirts that say you’re pregnant, so you don’t have to.

I created a funny pregnant t-shirt for a friend of ours as a joke that is a word-play on a popular song. Now I am not the greatest graphic designer and I have never been accused of being so. So I had to stick to a stick figure on this design, but here goes:

I made sure I put it on an extra soft t-shirt, because being comfortable is key. The mom-to-be loved it and we had a great time producing it. As with anything else, you’re welcome to use it if you’d like to.

When it comes to t-shirt printing, the best artwork is vectored spot colors. What are vectored spot colors you ask? Before we break that down for you, it is important to point out what the opposite of vectored spot colors is. This would typically be a photograph or jpeg that has hundreds or possibly thousands of colors in them. The whole premise for this post is because we get a lot of requests to print photographs or jpeg’s onto t-shirts or hats.

Now back to vector graphics. They are defined Wikipedia as:

“the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based upon mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.”

In more simple terms, vector graphics are simply creating artwork from scratch in programs such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The best feature about vector graphics is that you can scale them up or down in size, and they never lose their quality. This is very important as it pertains to screen printed t-shirts, because there is a lot of resizing involved with getting the artwork ready for print. If you magnify a vector graphic, you will always see the sharp edges and a very clear image. As you begin to magnify a photograph or jpeg, the quality starts to deteriorate, and everything begins to blur. Wikipedia has a really cool image of what I’m describing here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

With that description and illustration of what vector graphics are, coupled with the fact that screen printing T-shirts revolves around single ink colors… everything should begin to come full circle. The “screen” in screen printing actually represents one screen per color in the artwork printed. So you can imagine that a photograph with thousands of colors should be impossible to print on t-shirts. Right? Wrong.

Printing photographs and jpeg’s on t-shirts is possible with four color process. What is four color process? we are going to leave that explanation for another blog post, but for now understand that it is a very inexact science and considered lower quality most of the time. Not to mention, four color process can get quite expensive as well.

On the flip side, printing four color process on paper can look amazing. So when we are presented with a request to print something on t-shirts that has already been printed on paper, we usually have reservations. This was the case recently, when we were quoting on a t-shirt printing job and the artwork supplied was from a poster for an event coming up. The print on the poster was from a painting that was relevant to the event. Here is what that artwork looked like:

We were faced with a few dilemmas when we viewed the artwork. The first being what we prefaced earlier, that the artwork would need to be accomplished with four color process. The second being that the customer was on a budget. The final being that the customer wanted dark t-shirts and four color process is even harder when printed on dark t-shirts. As we spoke with our client, we explain the situation and suggested converting the artwork to a single vectored spot color. This would require a lot of time in artwork, but would guarantee a great print at a low price. Here is what we were able to do when converting a jpeg to vector:

Our client was very pleased with the vectored t-shirt design and loved the price. Here is a picture of what the final print looked like:

If you learned one thing from this post, please understand that there are many options for printing t-shirts and those options are worth exploring when it comes to complex jobs. Please feel free to contact us at any time you have a t-shirt printing job no matter how big or small, hard or easy.