Preshrunk

Drop Shadows Not Bombs

I'll beat everyone to the punch and run this shirt before I go and get a couple dozen suggestions for it littering my inbox.

In case you forgot, I sort of read BoingBoing too. And by sort of read, I mean completely obsess over. And by completely obsess over, I mean that it sort of makes my junk a bit rigid while I'm reading it¹. But that's neither here nor there, right?

So, uh, yeah... This one goes out to all the vaguely political graphic design geeks in the house. By cleverly using drop shadows and negative space, the crew at Playground of the Stars managed to make both a firm statement and a pretty fashionable design.

What can I say? I like it — and I don't even like word tees normally. So I guess that's says something, doesn't it?

1. Chub only occurs whenever I read Xeni's posts. Although admitting that here will probably make it sort of akward the next time I run into her. I mean, the LA scene is sort of small. *shrug* Oh well. It's out there now, isn't it?

$25.00 | PayPal | URL | M: XS - XL

March 28th, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Funny T-shirts, Occupation T-shirts

DRM Is Killing Music

Ken and the rest of the gang over at Giant Robot Printing are good chaps.

Why's that? Well, after catching Cory's post on Julian Bond's wickedly clever Home Taping Is Killing Music piss take this morning, I picked up my conch shell and sound the alarm. But since that didn't work¹, I decided to send an email to Ken to ask if they'd consider doing a run of tees. You know, for the kids...

Because honestly, how would you rather see this done — as a $20 CafePress, Spreadshirt or Zazzle iron-on hatchet job or an $8 silkscreened shirt in a metric crapton of sizes? I know which one I'd pick, at least. *shrug*

Besides, they did a great job at getting those Creative Commies shirts done pretty quickly. And seeing as how I've always managed to spot at least one or two people wearing them at every almost geek event I've been to over the past year, they've got some staying power.

Anyhow, as far as I could figure, if anyone could pull it off it'd be the dudes at Giant Robot Printing. And you know what? They totally did.

So what are you waiting for, yo? $8.00 shirts are yours for the taking!

Update: Mark from Spreadshirt just schooled me for being a douche and writing them off as just another iron-on t-shirt maker. Sorry about that Mark, et al.

1. That probably has something to do with the fact that I'm not Aquaman.

March 27th, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Womens T-shirts, Political T-shirts, Pop Culture T-shirts

Intramural Zombie Hunter

"You've got red on you."

So what brings forth such polar emotions? Well, while the base design of the shirt makes me go meh¹, the fine folks at Seibei Industries will actually splatter and smear zombie blood² all over your tee if you'd like them to. If you're lucky, they might even include a hand print or two.

What's more, they actually let you choose the level of gore that they apply to your tee before they ship it out. And that my friends, turns the shirt the from just okay to extremely fucking insipired — or at least it does in my book.

Oh yeah. Did I mention that they do all this for $14.00 and offer sizes up to 3XL? Because they do...

Update: For those of you who hate printing on the back of your tees — or loathe the fact that it mentions vampires — the gang over at Seibei will run the shirt off for you without it.

1. Then again, they may have been trying to go for that goofy sort of softball league feel. *shrug*


2. Actually, since zombies don't exist — not yet at least — I'm pretty sure it's fake blood. That makes it vegan friendly, Sean!

March 23rd, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Womens T-shirts, Funny T-shirts, Pop Culture T-shirts

Did You Say Dogs?

I sure as hell didn't say cats!

Yes, I DID say dogs! I'm ALWAYS saying dogs!!

This shirt is very close to being the shirt of my life. It would actually BE the shirt of my life if the dog was hugging a giant squid and they were both wearing oh-so-whimsical Slash top hats....except for then the shirt would have to say, "Did you say dogs and giant squids and GUNS N' FUCKING ROSES!?"

You can't put all that on a shirt. Nobody would buy it. I probably wouldn't even buy it. I would just wait until my birthday rolled around and somebody bought it FOR me. That's the kind of girl I am. Broke? No. Financially conscientious? Yes. Frugal¹, even!

Anyways, even without the giant squid and the top hats this shirt is totally cool. If you buy it and wear it, dogs won't bite you. I promise. They'll totally lick your face.

Editor's Note: In a gesture similar to giving your significant other the key to your apartment, this post was written by my amazingly funny — not to mention sexy — girlfriend Yoko Sarah². She might chime in from time to time in the future — but only when I'll let her³.

1. I don't like the word "frugal". It sounds too fat. I don't know why. Maybe because it sounds a bit too much like "frumpy"...


2. He might mention me all the time, but I'm sort of his muse.


3. Because Jason is sort of a control freak like that.

March 23rd, 2006 Posted by Sarah Sterner | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Womens T-shirts, Animal T-shirts

Odds And Ends

Now that I've been back for close to a week, I've got a few non-tee related updates for y'all...

• I've offloaded all of our feed traffic over to FeedBurner for the time being. This was done to get a better idea of how many subscribers we have and what sort of things you guys dig. The redirects are all in place and everything should be working.
• Unfortunately, since the redirect was thrown down Bloglines is sort of being a bitch to anyone who reads the old atom.xml feed. Because of this, we've got about 700 subscribers who haven't seen an update since Monday. Some of those people probably think I crawled back into my hole — and we can't have that, can we? So if you're one of the affected people, please feel free to give the staff at Bloglines a heads up.
• So, uhm, ads... I hate them just as much as you do, but I'm really trying to cover my expenses now that I'm between jobs. And to be quite honest, just running Google's AdWords isn't going to cut it anymore. I'm going to be casting the net out to a couple ad brokers¹ and signing up for a few affiliate plans², but I don't want to insult any of y'all in the process. Are there any ads that you folks wouldn't like to see here? Don't worry, there won't be too many ads on a given page³ — and I'm thinking about offering an ad blocking script to people who can float a few bucks to my PayPal account.

What do all of you think? I'd love to get some feedback from everyone on everything I talked about here, so feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line, yo.

1. Federated Media and IndieClick, actually.
2. SuicideGirls, Defunker and Busted Tees seem pretty easy to get started with...
3. No more than a couple graphical ads per page, plus AdWords.

March 23rd, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Admin

Spacewalkers

Mark from Invicid just dropped me a line to tip me off to their new line of hand screened shirts, and I'm really glad that he did. They've got a bunch of fresh designs — Left Wing, Loveless and Clean Air Act come to mind — but the one that stood out the most to me was Spacewalkers.

I mean, dude, astronauts and skulls coming together in a simple, clean design. What's not to love?

Well, I'm sure there's plenty of things for a few of you not to love. Like the fact that this shirt doesn't go any bigger than a large. Or that it's printed on the American Apparel stock — which means they're probably those irritating fitted tees. And what about the fact that the design isn't even available for the ladies.

Have you ever considered that maybe there's no satisfying you? It's nothing personal, really. I'm just saying, that's all...

FYI: For those of you who have too many black shirts, you can also get this design on a blue tee.

$22.00 | PayPal | URL | M: S - L

March 22nd, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Funny T-shirts, vintage / Retro T-shirts

Two Birds

So, it would seem that I've sort of been on a tangent where I've been subconsciously revisiting some of my favorite t-shirt designers to see what they've been up to... In the past week we've run shirts from Diesel Sweeties, Enclothe and Red Labor — and now we're raiding the vaults over at Crowded Teeth.

But unlike the other shirts we've been running since my recent resurfacing, I decided to go with something a little more lighthearted for this post. And what's more lighthearted than two well drawn, adorable birds? Absolutley nothing, chief.

Honestly, it doesn't matter if you're a dude or a chick... I guarantee that members of the opposite sex will find you aesthetically pleasing while you are rocking this shirt. It's just that good, yo.

Update: Seems like we ran this one a little prematurely. Apparently, Michelle sent all of her stock off to get retagged and any orders that happen between now and April 1st won't actually be shipped out until April 3rd. As far as we're concerned, they're worth the wait. Hopefully you feel the same way...

$20.00 | Credit | URL | M: S - XL , F: L

March 21st, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Womens T-shirts, Funny T-shirts

TV Attack

🧦This picture didn't survive the wash.I can't quite quantify exactly why I dig it, but there's something about a faceless soldier wielding a bazooka and popping out of a TV that I rather enjoy.

Maybe it's just so aesthetically pleasing that I feel the need to sing its praises. Or maybe I have some sort of predisposition towards this design from years of playing with GI Joe figurines. Whatever the case may be, I like it — and that alone covers my sole prerequisite for running a design here.

Then again, it is from Preshrunk favorite Red Labor — AKA Josh Bertrand and Dave Rau — and they've consistently turned out some pretty sweet designs in the past. It'd only make sense that I'd come back to them eventally...

Anyhow, Dave and Josh's recently launched¹ shop at Iron-On Resistance is full of extremely nice, well designed goodies if the color palette or military design on this shirt isn't really your cup of tea. You will check them out, won't you?

1. At least I assume it's recently launched. It looks like the paint is still a little fresh and there are some unfinished things laying about. But I have been gone for a little while, so who knows... *shrug*

March 21st, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Military T-shirts

Ideal

🧦This picture didn't survive the wash.I might feel a tad bit artsy-fartsy and pretentious for loving this Basquiat designed shirt from Gingham/2k, but to be honest I'm not going to get too caught up in it. I know what I like and I'm not going to apologize for it. And if you've read this site long enough, you should really know that by now.

Still, there's just something about Basquiat's take on the Ideal logo that gives me a warm and kind of sticky feeling in my pants. Maybe it's because I have fond memories of playing Mouse Trap for hours on end — I tried so hard to make my setup look just like the one on the box that perhaps the logo managed to burn itself into my subconscious. *shrug* Who's to say, really?

Whatever my reasons, it's only seems fair for me to I balance out the lovely bargain that I posted earlier today with a much more indulgent — not to mention expensive — shirt. I actually didn't plan it this way, honest. It's just sort of how things happened.

P.S. So now that I have a bit more free time, I'm going to try to go back to running at least one shirt a day, Monday thru Friday. Maybe even two a day — like today — if you're really, really lucky...

$32.00 | Credit | URL | M: S - XL

March 20th, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | Mens T-shirts, T-Shirts, Funny T-shirts

War Swine

🧦This picture didn't survive the wash.Derek,

Sorry it's taken me a couple months to write about your newest shirt. I've kind of been preoccupied with work and women, but it looks like things are finally leveling out — I'm in the process of finding a new job¹ and I went and fell in love with a girl².

Enough about me though... War Swine is fucking spectacular. As always, I'm totally enamored with the wonderful level of detail you put into your work as well as your sparing use of red in an otherwise greyscale shirt. But seeing as how I get so many comments on Ghost Ship whenever I wear it in public, I'm really not that surprised that you're continuing to turn out quality gear.

Keep up the good work, chief!

Love,
Jason

Update: Several of our astute readers have pointed out that Derek has gone and dropped the price of most of his shirts to $10 until March 22nd. So go on and snatch a few up while the prices are nice and low...

1. "I'm in the process of finding a new job" is just a really nice way of saying "I'm sort of unemployed".


2. The aforementioned — not to mention very beautiful — Sarah.

March 20th, 2006 Posted by Jason Cosper | T-Shirts, Animal T-shirts