Welcome to another installment of T-Shirt Tuesday. This time, I’d like to offer a shout-out to a couple of t-shirt blogs I frequently read for news and sales information:
- First is tcritic, written by a great guy named Karl. Tcritic gets about 8 posts a week, considerably less than other t-shirt blogs, but each is full quality information. Karl regularly rewards his readers for involvement in his blog, either through tipping him off to t-shirt news, participating in the comments, or playing his contests with gift certificates to Threadless and other sites. Also, Karl recently crossed over from t-blogger to t-maker when he introduced the funny and timely Prez Dispenser shirt and began his dabbling into t-shirt production.
- Another favorite of mine is Hide Your Arms. HYA is written by Andy and his blog offers some great insight into international t-shirt sources as well as domestic, since he currently resides overseas–though he is moving to Philadelphia for an internship shortly. He posts regularly and sometimes writes a lot about the same vendors, but the high load of posts doesn’t mean he lacks quality. His blog name is actually related to his first love, hoodies, but he takes a break during the summer to write about tees.
- Finally, Shirts on Sale is an excellent source for saving money. I should note that they mostly collect headlines from other blogs with the similar news [sources], but as a simple source for cheap designer tees, I love it.
Update: Note that this list is in no way exhaustive, there are hundreds of t-shirt blogs out there, but these three are my favorites for the various reasons listed.
In other news, Design by Humans announced the winners of the DBH $10k contest. To my surprise my choice, Black Hole Sun, won, but when the graphic was finally translated onto a t-shirt, it is nothing like what I thought. Compare for yourself:
- Black Hole Sun concept, as seen when a finalist in the DBH $10,000 Contest
- Black Hole Sun, as printed
Where did the blue go? Where did the fuschia and purple go? Why bother having us vote on these designs if Design by Humans will then go and drastically alter the design? I won’t be buying this shirt, which is sad, because I was greatly looking forward to it being printed.
This week’s featured t-shirt is “Most Deadly” by Busted Tees.
- Most Deadly by Busted Tees
Like I said way back in the first installment of T-Shirt Tuesday, I avoid buying joke t-shirts. I prefer to wear though-provoking clothes, or at the very least, clothes that don’t characterize me as something I am not. While depending on your personality, the VILF shirt can be pretty funny, I won’t wear it because I see it as only slightly humorous and mostly unintelligent, divisive, and crude, all of which I am not. But occasionally, I’ll make an exception, and this shirt is one.
- Most Deadly T-Shirt by Busted Tees
For those of you not from my generation, this shirt likely makes no sense to you. It is based on the life-status bars for the player from the 007 Goldeneye video game of the late 1990’s. This game was “the game” during my early teenage years when I played lots of video games. I was 12 when I got the game in 1998, and I played it with regularity on solo missions or multiplayer deathmatches with friends until I formed my businesses in 2001. One of the greatest accomplishments of my life prior to the success of my business and my earning the eagle scout rank was the day my brother and I beat the hardest side mission in the game and won the most elusive special achievement: invincibility. While Halo now rules the world of first-person multiplayer shooter games, 007 was the trendsetter, changing the way people played multiplayer video games. I feel 007 made social video game play possible.
BustedTees, the maker of numerous stupid joke shirts, produced this one. I find the quality to be exceptional, and the shirt soft and comfortable. I have washed the shirt twice and noticed no major fading of ink, something I am always concerned about when buying for the first time from a vendor. The design, for essentially copying a graphic from a video game, is very nicely done, and I am especially a fan of the dithered colors in the health meters. For those who don’t know, dithering is a way to blend pixels of two different colors together to create the look of another color. In the game it was used to simulate a gradient, since 64-bit technology was limited in color choices. With today’s t-shirt production technology, a gradient would have come out looking really nice, but by using a dithered color pattern it made the design accurate to the original source and also gave it nice detail in an otherwise simple design.
Overall, for breaking my no-joke-shirt rule, I love my choice. This shirt is a must-buy for all the kids of my generation who grew up shooting their friends to bits with digital bullets on 007 Goldeneye.
- “Most Deadly” detail
First off — thank you so much, Jeremy, for including us in this very abbreviated list of t-shirt blogs. We appreciate your willingness to share valuable resources with your readers.
I would just like to clarify that we don’t “mostly collect headlines from other blogs” — we carefully track five main websites for their daily deals (Uneetee, Shirt.Woot, The Ryde, Shirt a Day and TeeFury), maintain active memberships in t-shirt forums and groups where printers often announce sales, and pore over RSS feeds and newsletters from a huge honking list of t-shirt retailers.
Like you, we make a point of giving credit to the original source of our information, as long as that source isn’t “the source.” If you check out our archive of “other sales” (that is, sales at retailers not listed above) you can see that we almost never refer to another blog as the source of our information.
On a completely unrelated note – I really like your assessment of the DBH $10k winner. Although I’m surprised that it was your pick from early on, I also note that there is a big difference in the artists’ mockup and the final version. Hey, if DBH wants to throw away $10,000 on a t-shirt that wasn’t even voted in as the “cream of the crop” than I suppose that’s their prerogative.
Thanks, again, for the endorsement,
Eden
Shirts on Sale
Thanks Eden for the correction. I guess I should have been more careful in defining how you collect your news! At any rate, you blog is super helpful and super useful and I love reading it every day. Now if only the economy was good enough for me to keep buying shirts…
Thanks for the description Jeremy, I don’t get many people reviewing my site without having a vested interest (running a tee site that they’d want me to write about), so I really appreciate your review. I guess I do write quite a lot about the same companies, but those tend to be my favourite ones, and they’re more like news updates. Also, the hoodies are coming back! I’m aiming for at least one hoodie post a day now that people are starting to release new designs on hoodies for the winter season.
Thanks for updating the post — and for the kind words. Keep on keepin’ on!
I wish the economy were better too — but more importantly, I wish had more dresser space to keep my tees.