One of the Mirror Image artists and I stood in the middle of the crowd at Farm Aid. As many of the 20K people in attendance filed past us, we took note of what they were wearing. Simple, simple and simple was the conclusion. What did we see? One color designs for the most part, distressed, tone on tone, and even with “bright” colors of ink like teal and orange but that were screened back and subtle. Our company has 16 color presses and we have done some of the most complicated prints with difficult color separations and all kinds of specialty inks, but what people want right now are simple designs done well.

This re-inforced what we had decided going into the Farm Aid show. We were definitely on the right track as we sold every last shirt we brought to the show to sell. I have been doing the merchandise for over 20 years for Farm Aid (farmaid.org) concerts and this was the only time we sold out. Some things were gone in a matter of a couple hours and we had lines of thirty people or more until we ran out of shirts.

Here’s the line-up, all but the concert logo were designed with the idea that simple is better. All the shirts were printed as softly as possible. “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy” and I have to say that our artists came up with lots of concepts, narrowed to a few, and then worked these over to make subtle changes that improved each and every one of the final prints. In the end  you can think whatever you want, but the proof is that they all sold extremely well.