Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Spreadshirt were kind enough to send over a copy of the book they put together along with Zeixs for the posts that I wrote about the recent International T-Shirt Day activities (peep some pics of the Berlin festivities here). Since I’ve got a fairly decent collection of t-shirt related books now I thought it might be cool for me to give them reviews just like I do with the tees.

When I first heard about this book I thought that it was going to be a how-to guide about t-shirt design, teaching people who were new to the industry about what makes a design ‘good’. As I discovered, this wasn’t the case at all, so I guess you could say that the title is a little bit misleading, but if you spend just a few seconds reading the description its pretty clear that this book isn’t about helping new designers, its about showcasing the best designs that have been submitted to Spreadshirt.

It’s a fairly weighty slab of dead tree, it’s diminutive page sizes being more than made up by the fact that there are 670 pages for your perusal. In terms of content, things are kept simple, the opening few pages are what you’d expect from a book about t-shirts, a bit of text about how tees are so prevalent in society now, and now that came to be that way. Once you’ve got the text out of the way we get down to the real meat of the book, the tees. Each page is dedicated to a t-shirt design, sometimes placed onto a t-shirt, sometimes just the artwork, and there’s also the name, location and website of the artist to make sure that you can get hold of the design if you really want it. The book is split into categories (logos, typographic, characters, illustrative, political & pattern) which I guess would be useful if you’re a designer trying to get some inspiration for a project, as long as you keep it at just inspiration, of course!

There’s some really great designs in the book, I’d love to rip out all the pages and stick them on my wall as a massive collage, but there just seems to be something wrong about ripping the pages out of a book that you actually like.

Costiness=€19.95 Buy It Here

{ 9 comments }