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“Crows and People Like Shiny Things…”

When we first started in business in Cambridge, MA in the late 80’s, we were near MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There I meet Andy Hong of the MIT Media Lab, the first customer who brought a case of beer to us to thank us for a job well done. I digress… Being near…

Foaming Web Wednesday: Beer and Screenprinting

A Polish designer, Kamil Piatkowski, has created a bottle design called Regular Beer that uses screen printing to elegantly save on the mental and physical energy used to print bottle labels. The post on psfk combines what is of interest to many readers of this blog, printing and beer, not necessarily in that order…

Human Rights Shirts

I am in Brooklyn in New York (look it up, there is a Brooklyn in CT as well) at the Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International. Volunteers from all over the country get together to work on human rights issues. They also wear all kinds of t-shirts. T-shirts are clearly a way that many people…

Celebrating Celebrity Sightings: Your Shirts on Famous Folks

Last year saw the unfortunate death of Robin Williams. A friend sent this photo of him to me. In the photo Robin Williams is wearing a shirt that we printed from a line we sold at the time, Ken Brown Designs. Below are a couple more celebrity sightings, both of shirts we print for my pal…

Where Does the Image Go on the Shirt?

Q: Where does the image go on the shirt? A: Where it looks good to the customer. I know some shops have elaborate ways to decide where an image gets printed on a shirt. I know some customers try and give very specific measurements as to where they want their images. My advice is to…

Creative Time

My daughter Ivy Neff is at the end of her undergraduate studies at a cool art school north of Boston called Monserrat. It was written for her art school cohorts, but I think her Facebook post might also resonate with many folks I know in this industry. “To any Montserrat seniors who think that documenting…

Tag You’re It

The Samuel Adams Boston Brewery gift shop was looking to have some shirts done with a vintage football feel. We were to use a very simple distressed “84” as that is the year they were founded. They loved the garment as well as the distressed numbers and wanted to brand the shirt in a way…

Heavy Metal Quilting, What a Use for Old T-shirts

Incredible quilts from old metal t-shirts. I’ve seen quilts done before but nothing even close to this creative. The Huff Post mentions the quilter’s “ability to turn “your grandmother’s sewing circle” into a celebration of vintage tattoos, the occult and motorcycle gangs. Blending, as he puts it, B-movie horror film style with the delicate intricacy…

Finally, a Good T-Shirt Contest

Alternative Apparel recently conducted a t-shirt contest to highlight their printed fabric products.  “Prints on prints”, it’s a good concept.  But, when you consider what you typically see in the established t-shirt competitions (mostly bad designs and mostly mediocre printing), the concept of showcasing clever and tasteful design, decent printing, and great blanks for a t-shirt contest is actually brilliant.…

Illusion vs. Reality in Design

The original design of this Octoberfest Lederhosen shirts was to go from the top seam of the shirt down to the bottom of the  shirt, bleeding off the top and bottom and if possible going up over the shoulders of the shirt. There are ways to get that done, but at a considerable cost and with…

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