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

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Tags » book • books • collaboration • Germany • review • Reviews • spreadshirt • zeixs

Rejoice, American t-shirt designers, because the mighty Strawberry have ordained that you can now submit your designs to their competitions and hopefully win, which is nice, since their prizes are in Euros rather than dollars, and Euros do look ever so pretty (so much colour!).

Unfortunately, they still haven’t given the North American t-shirt buying public a kiss on each cheek, and those of you on the other side of the Atlantic still have to make your laFraise purchases through a special Spreadshirt US store front which lags behind the European version by quite a long way, although it has been restocked recently with a few ‘new’ designs.

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Tags » design competitions • lafraise • spreadshirt • US

Irregular Times, who don’t appear to spend all that much time talking about tees normally, have taken a look at print on demand companies and judged them based upon where the stock tees come from, and how ‘ethical’ those suppliers are (American Apparel = good, Gildan = bad, for example) . I don’t know if its the best metric for judging where you set up your virtual shop, but it is certainly something that you should think about when using a POD website.

Irregular Time: Review of Eleven Websites To Design and Sell Your Own T-Shirts, Considering Shirt Source [via that other t-shirt blog]

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Tags » American Apparel • cafepress • gildan • POD • print on demand • resource • spreadshirt • T-shirts

I know I’m being a big tease to the American portion of my audience when I post about LaFraise since they still don’t sell directly to you from their main site, but I have good news for you on that front. The official Spreadshirt US store that LaFraise are using to sell their tees in the US has been updated with some fresher designs, though none of them are brand-spanking new. I guess now you can stop drooling over the previously featured ‘Lost in the City’ (pictured), and actually buy it.LaFraise/Spreadshirt US store

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Tags » lafraise • shipping • spreadshirt

Things are starting to become a bit clearer thanks to a major overhaul on the T-shirt day website, it’s gone from a plain outline of a tee last week to the fully blown site that you can see in the screenshot. From the looks of things, Spreadshirt will be holding events in Berlin and Boston, giving away about 500 t-shirts both online and off, and they’re also holding a special competition in conjunction with laFraise. It’s shaping up to be more of an event than I rather cynically first expected, so I’ll keep you updated on developments.International T-Shirt Day

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Tags » Competitions • free t-shirts • lafraise • News • spreadshirt • t-shirt day • tshirtday08

When I heard that there was such a thing as ‘International T-shirt Day’, I thought two things “what the hell is this?” and “it must be a publicity stunt.” Spreadshirt own the domain (hurrah for whois!), so it could be some kind of publicity stunt, and probably not a ‘real’ international day, like Christmas or Talk Like a Pirate Day (just 126 days to go!), but I know Spreadshirt love their tees, so I’m interested to see how this will go, and what will happen in June 21st, which also just happens to be the first official day of summer.
Part of it, presumably, is linked to this blog post, in which they ask you to send a picture of you wearing your favourite tee and a short story explaining why it’s your favourite tee. And the prizes that are on offer? Well, 5 people are going to win one of those massive tees in the picture above, which have lots of little printed tees on them in all the colours that Spreadshirt offer. Not exactly that wearable for most people, but still pretty cool and very limited (just 5).T-Shirtday.com
Spreadshirt’s related blog post

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Tags » Competitions • contest • day • publicity • spreadshirt • t-shirt day • tshirtday08 • wtf

I wouldn’t usually post a coupon from Spreadshirt since they seem to have a new one coming out every couple of days for various promotions, but I was a bit keen to keep up this run of posting coupons that give you 15% off, so here it is!

Here’s the Spreadshirt blog post about the coupon code [note: I think it might be US/Canada only, but probably worth a go for Europeans too]

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Tags » Coupon Codes • eco • environment • POD • spreadshirt

I’m kinda worried about wearing this tee outside my house because I’m unsure over whether it counts as a ‘religious’ tee (though I will tag it as that). It isn’t necessary pro or anti Christianity, but I’m not sure that Christians would be particularly happy seeing Jesus puffing on a death stick. I’ll have to ask my designated Christian friend about it, even though we never discuss religion, presumably for fear of ruining our friendship. Can you see the risks that I take for you people!

Blasphemy aside, I think it’s interesting that Individualitee went with an image of Jesus that isn’t that cartoony, obviously it is a cartoon, but it doesn’t seem to be an image that is directly meant to make us laugh, which makes the tee slightly less whacky, and as I’m not a fan of wackiness, that is something that I’m happy about. One issue that I have with this image is that I always thought the phrase was “holy smokes,” but a quick trip to google suggests that both forms are acceptable, so that issue is probably all in my head.

I was excited to receive this tee because Individualitee’s website is powered by the Spreadshirt print-on-demand service. I know that there are some people will not buy tees from services like this, but when the quality is as good as this then I don’t really understand why. Though having said that I do think that Spreadshirt offer a rather more superior quality when compared to other POD services (though more research is needed on that subject). The main image is printed with flock, but thin and flexible flock, which I was impressed to see since the last flock item I got from Spreadshirt about 4 years ago was much thicker (hurrah for progress!). There is also a little logo on the left sleeve which is printed with regular ink (probably plastisol). The tee is from a stock that I haven’t experienced before called B&C European Style, the cut is of the regular style, similar to Fruit of the Loom, and I’d call it similar in terms of quality, possibly even a little bit softer.

Costiness=$23 Link

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Tags » ash • flock • grey • individualitee • jesus • religious • review • Reviews • spreadshirt • t-shirt

Spreadshirt, my favourite print-on-demand company, have carried out a test of American Apparel tees to what happens when you wash them 20 times. It turns out that they shrink, and that some shrink more than others.

It would be great if they carried out the same test with some of their other brands so that we’d be able to find a more scientific way of deciding which tee brands were the most consistent beyond “but this one feels better, I think.”

Check out the test on the Spreadshirt [EU] blog

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Tags » American Apparel • spreadshirt • test

Oh Spreadshirt, you hopeless bunch of romantics. I don’t know if me making a tee professing my love to a girl would really do the trick, but I’m sure there are some people willing to give it a go, and I’m sure that getting 14% off orders over $18 should help. The coupon code is LOVE308 in the US and CADLOVE308 in Canada. It will work from now until February 21st, which I guess means you can make up those “I can’t believe that bitch dumped me on Valentines Day” tees if your V-Day didn’t work out as planned.

As far as I can tell there’s no love for us Europeans, Spreadshirt must think that we’re already romantic enough as it is!

Spreadshirt Blog Post with all the coupon details

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Tags » coupon • coupon code • discount • spreadshirt • valentines