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
