Artybuzz are a British company that will print and sell your art as tees and ‘hangable’ prints (obviously you can hang a tee, but I think you all understand the differentiation I’m making here). You could say that they sound an awful lot like MySoti and redbubble, as all three companies offer roughly the same service – POD tees and art prints – and if you look at the Artybuzz and RedBubble homepages you could easily say that they look pretty similar too.
Much like I don’t feel that there is really a problem with new t-shirt design contests opening every few weeks (just because Threadless & DBH are huge doesn’t mean there’s no room for others), I don’t have a problem with there being new POD companies springing up, from a consumer point of view the extra choice can only be a good thing. I haven’t yet had any e-mails or links sent to me from artists asking me to check out their Artybuzz page yet, but they are quite a new company so I think that as artists find out about them they’ll grow because they seem to offer a good service at good prices. It would be nice if they had some examples of physical artwork and tees that they’ve printed out on the site, because that will always be how sites like this will be judged, on the quality of their products, and if you’re proud of what you produce you should be showing it off for every visitor to see.
At the moment I think it is more of an art site than a tee site, there is some lovely art on there, but with them being fairly new it’s hard to tell where they’ll be heading in the future, so whilst they don’t look quite as polished as their POD brethren yet, hopefully they can bring in enough talent to the community to reach that tipping point where they can bust out and really grow.
Infinity Six is a clothing company that was born in August and has a small but growing number of interesting shirts on offer. Yes, all the tees have ‘Inifinity Six’ written on them underneath the main design, so you’d probably expect me to moan about that, but I’m clearly not going to change the clothing industry and stop people writing their names on their shirts so I may as well not bother, especially as IS have actually put some effort in an tailored the text to each design rather than just slapping it on there. The designs run along fairly similar themes (and all look good), so if you’re into character tees you might be pretty happy right now, but if not then Infinity six may not be for you.
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Hizoku is the physical representation of the creative human spirit. Hizoku is a collection of artists from around the world working together to create clothing designs that will change the way you think about apparel rather than just being a garment, they are transformed into wearable pieces of art. Our goal is to open the human mind to the endless possibilities of creative power and positive thinking. Each and every design produced by Hizoku has meaning and substance behind it.
That quote is the e-mail I received from Hizoku, when I read it I must admit that my eyes rolled a bit, how am I meant to react to that kind of PR? I’m all about t-shirts as art, but they might have taken it a little far with the language there (unless ‘hizoku’ is a forgeign word that actually means that, in which case, fair enough). With Hizoku having designers from around the world the themes and styles employed in their range are pretty varied, and I must admit that some of them aren’t to my personal taste, but even the ones which don’t suit my style are clearly well done, so I’m expecting good things from the future.
Costiness=$20 (currently on sale) Available from ShopHizoku.com
