Tag Archive for 'mccain'

Welcome back to T-Shirt Tuesday, now one month old.

The Threadless $12 sale continues this week and got even better, with select styles further marked down to $9.  While the selection of $9 shirts pales to the everything else selection at $12 each, there are still a few gems in the $9 sale (especially if you’re a girl or a size small guy) worth looking at.  Threadless released, like it does every week, a couple of new shirts and a couple reprints yesterday which are all only $12, including this one I am sure to pick up eventually (like, wow, UV color changing inks?  Crazy!).  I also discovered some great typography tees at Ugmonk… including a must-have called lowercase.

Finnish National Railway by Ambiguous

This week’s feature shirt explores another design trend in tee shirts, typography.  Typography is basically the study of and practice of design with typography, known in layman’s terms as the font face.  Great typography makes or breaks a design, case in point (Barack Obama’s bold yet comfortable feeling website design to John McCain’s rather bland and sterile website design).  Regardless of who I prefer, the design and use of creative typography on Obama’s website is superior to McCain’s. T-shirts also benefit from good type.  A beautiful design can suffer if the text used sucks.  On the other hand, some shirts can be simply words in different colors and fonts and be an awesome design.  This weeks featured shirt, which I call “Finnish National Railroad” is such an example.

Finnish National Railway closeup

This shirt was designed and wholesaled by Ambiguous Clothing, a skate and snowboard type company.  Ambiguous does not deal directly, but can be found in most “west coast style” stores.  These guys make some awesome typographic tees, including this one from their Summer 08 line and of course this week’s featured shirt.  What is cool about typographic design is that shirts like “Finnish” have simple artwork compared to something like “Refraction” but they still look great.  All it took was some layered fonts, a few lines, and a few colors, and the result was a stunning design that works well and looks great. I picked up this shirt two weeks ago at Pacific Sun Company (or PacSun) on half off sale for $15.  I had been eyeing it for weeks waiting for a sale.  I got the last in my size.  If you have one of those stores around you, check it out and see if you can pick up this gem for as good or better a price than I.

Until next T-Shirt Tuesday, I offer this advice: you may be a great friend who’d do anything for those you care about, but they can get their own t-shirts.