As someone that sees hundreds of t-shirts every day it’s quite hard to get me interested in t-shirts that have a story behind them, I tend to just look at the artwork and decide if I like it from that, but Nspired do actually have some pretty cool stories behind their shirts which does make them a bit more interesting and easier to understand.
Chapter 5: Follow the Herd – Governments around the world have been know to pass some “interesting laws”, such as banning small breasts in adult publications in Australia, Emo music in Russia, and time travel and reincarnation in China. Design was done by the one and only Fintan Magee from Australia.
Chapter 6: Nature vs Nurture – This month’s chapter deals with two twins, separated at birth and never having met until the age of 40, lived lives with uncanny coincidences. This month, the t-shirt is more than just interactive. It launches a game in which you will help the two twins reunite by beating the computer at tic tak toe. Illustration was designed by the one and only Nate Williams
The shirts are €19.95 each and are available now.
I
first wrote about this tee a bit over a month ago, so you guys know that I’m already a bit of a fan of the design, and receiving the tee in the mail has not changed my opinion of it one bit. I still think that it looks like some creey dude hanging out in a forest rather than a sasquatch, but as I’ve never seen a sasquatch (and I doubt the
Badd Habit team thave either) I don’t really think that I’m in a position to be judging whether an intentionally mysterious silhouette is a mythical beast or not.
When I check out a clothing company and say “hey, that tee is cool” I only really take a superficial look at the site and just focus on the shirts. I’ll always maintain that the clothes are the most important part of any brand, any of the ‘extras’ are just a bonus, and should never be a replacement for good design. However, I do have a soft spot for clothing companies that attempt to give something back beyond just selling tees, and whilst I was checking them out in greater depth for this review I found out something cool, they give the majority of their profits to a charity called the 4806 Foundation that help young people recover from substance abuse and addiction. Beyond that, some of the people that work for Badd Habit are young men from the Gray Wolf Ranch, which is a place dedicated to getting people sober, and working at Badd Habit is part of that recovery process. It’s very admirable, and it makes me like them more as a brand because it truly means that buying a t-shirt can make a real difference.
The design is a real winner for me. The large print really helps to reinforce the appearance of it being more like art on a t-shirt rather than a design that is just placed onto the shirt. The fact that the tee colour itself looks a lot like canvas probably has something to do with me forming that opinion, but even if that was just an unintentional side-effect of the color palette I think that it works really well. Something I like about this design is that taken on their own, most of these elements don’t look like the things they’re meant to look like (come on, does that
really look like a tree on the left?), but taken as a whole the scene really comes together, even if it does have that slight ambiguity that I mentioned earlier.
In my first post about the tee I said it was a black and white colour palette, but in reality the shirt is actually creme with a brown print, both colourways would work in my opinion, but creme/brown is good for evoking a vintage photo look. The tee itself is from the American Apparel organic range, so I assume that just about everyone reading this will know that fit, the organic shirts fit the same as the regular Earth-hating ones in my experience. Print quality is top notch too, soft and thin so that even though there’s a lot of print area, it isn’t at all heavy.
Costiness=$24.95 Squatch is available from Badd Habit
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This might be the only time I ever say this, but I think that the print on this tee might be a little bit too big. I like the design and its type treatment, and perhaps the text wrapping around your body is part of the concept, but surely you’re meant to be able to read the whole thing when looking at it face-on? Or am I just being silly and this is what a text tee like this should actually look like, and I should stop complaining since I’m always going on about how print sizes are too small. Again though, just to be clear, I do like this tee.
Costiness=$24 For men, for women
So, we blew one up yesterday, and then the
C-Dog (as no one calls him, probably) found a
Macintosh that hadn’t been ripped apart. Back in the early 90s my family actually had a Mac, I forget the model, but I remember it being an exciting day when we upgraded the memory from 4mb to 8mb (or something like that), so I guess that even though I’m a Windows type fellow with the exception of my beloved iPhone and contemplating hackintosh-ing my new PC with Snow Leopard, I was into Macs before they were cool (were they ever not cool?).
The tee shows off Print Liberation’s typically restrained design style, which would probably look boring if it was small, but luckily they’ve made it nice ‘n big so it works.
Costiness=$18 Available from Print Liberation
P.S. Did anyone see Print Liberation’s 9/11 tee? I wouldn’t call myself a fan.
