Shirt Critic

Shirt Review #10 – Lovely Idea, Although I Doubt One Would Wear It

I first off have to say that I appreciate the spirit of this shirt greatly. As my own father used to be a trim runner, his aging and growth of girth have provided a glaring contrast. Back when my father used to chide me for my long hair, I used to accuse him of having Shakespeare hair!

But, on to the design…

The sans serif font and the centered message on the front is quite playful and simplistic; a serifed font would seem a bit too formal, and the thin line of the shirt makes it easier and clearer to read. The dropped g in rockin’ additionally adds a playful tone to it.

The back of the shirt is quite an effective punch line. The large Buddha image, with “almost there!” displayed below is effective. Perhaps the “almost there” should be above the image to facilitate reading? If you use a smooth design application, I would suggest playing around with the placement of the text and see which way suits you better.

I’ve not been much of a proponent of prints on the side of sleeves of shirts, but this one makes sense; the Yin-Yang. To make it smoother, I would ask the shirt designing company if only one Yin-Yang could be printed on the sleeve, instead of two on each face… that just seems like what the designer wanted to do, yet in this 2-D manner of representation and design, it might be difficult to achieve.

Regarding economy, this is a great shirt! Recently I’ve been factoring in the number of colors on shirts I find, and this shirt would work wonderfully as a double-sided screen print! (Screen printing is explained well in this article on ooShirts, a custom t-shirt printing website.) However, I don’t think that this shirt would be warranted in high quantities, unless you were a reseller. I would say the best use of this shirt would be giving it to a father or older male with whom you have good enough rapport to make fun, and not expecting him to wear it, like the Scharffen-Berger “Semi-Sweet” shirt I gave my girlfriend back in the day. It has never been worn… oh well.

Shirt Review #9 – What’s Won in Vegas Stays in Vegas

I really approve of these designs; they’re not only true, but they look great. Let me break down the ideology behind this shirt for all you who didn’t get it.

Gamblers are notoriously poor statisticians; they don’t realize that gambling is governed by the laws of chance, but instead believe in the narrative fallacy of “hot streaks.” Thus, if a gambler wins big at a slot machine, he or she thinks that they’re on a “hot streak” and will win subsequent turns of the arm. However, this is completely false; it’s like saying that when flipping a coin, if you got 3 heads in a row, that there’s a higher chance that one would get tails on the fourth flip. Chances work in isolation!

Anyways, the idea is that the gambler would lose all his or her money while pumping his or her winnings into a gambling device, believing they were more statistically likely to win during this mythical “hot streak.” Ideally, all the winnings earned in gambling is thus fed back into the system, and this is why casinos have the money to construct replica pyramids, Eiffel Towers, and all that jazz. Thanks to compulsive gamblers, this is all possible.

I, therefore, think the spirit of this custom designed t-shirt is lovely. However, the design is noteworthy as well… at least the placement is.

The winning is clearly placed in the dead center of the front of the shirt on the front, and the winnings staying in Vegas are in the dead center of the shirt on the back. The sizing of the text and the images are fine, too. I am concerned, however, that the coloring could be done in a more economical manner, as the number of colors involved in this shirt would demand a digital print. As the link states, digital printing is more expensive per shirt than its cousin screen printing, because it is like using a color printer to create the image. However, screen prints for many different colors are quite expensive themselves, so digital printing is the way to go if one has a plethora of different colors necessary for their design.

However, if the creator of this shirt wanted to make a screen print, (and therefore save a lot of money,) only minor changes would be needed, and the spirit and design of the shirt would be left intact.

First, the “what happens in Vegas” and “stays in Vegas” are slightly different colors of blue. If they were standardized to the the same, this would reduce the color count. Additionally, why is the slot machine’s display and the dollar sign on the cash a different shade of green! Standardize again!

This would reduce the colors used to 4… perhaps change the text color to conform with the outline of the dollar sack, or change the outline of the dollar sack to blue to further reduce the number of colors used to 3. I suppose I would say that it would be smartest to compare prices and see how many shirts you’re ordering, and whether changing colors really matters.

However, I can see many applications to this shirt. If you were part of a statistics department at a university, I could see you wearing this shirt. If you worked with chance at all, I could see you wearing this shirt. Additionally, I could see you wearing this shirt if you were a math-y kid who wanted to shock some people, after seeing the barrage of Vegas commercials on TV. So I would assume that the volume ordered would be large, a screen print would be in order, and my color editing would be warranted.

In closing, though, nice shirt! Not only is the message good, and the design good, but the colors gave me something to talk about.

Who’s this Doctor D guy? Part I

Hi everyone,

I hope it has not come to be traumatic to see someone other than admin writing reviews of tee shirts on this site. Don’t worry about a thing; I may not be editor #1 on this site, but I am indeed a force to be reckoned with.

When it comes to apparel and design, I’m quite the pro. I’ve rocked the black tee shirt and blue jeans for many a day, and also enjoy rocking the Hawaiian shirt every once in a while (okay, maybe more than every once in a while, due to it being summer now.) I’m also an award-winning cartoonist and have taken drawing and composition classes so if you are wondering what sort of license I have to criticize designs, there you go.

When it comes to the sorts of designs I like, well, there is one group that always makes designs that are home runs. That happens to be the now defunct deathcore band Animosity. I mean, look at THIS. There is no band out there that doesn’t have better album artwork, and their t-shirts. Par excellence! I would divert you to their store but it has been picked bare since they’re stopping production of those t-shirts. But sirs and madams, Animosity is the design. I don’t care if I’m going into a fancier restaurant, I will wear my Animosity t-shirt.

Additionally, in the music realm of things, I am known to purchase a t-shirt when I attend a concert. This is a lovely way to get a t-shirt that says what you want it to say, because, well, you pick it, and you generally like the band whose concert you have just seen. A t-shirt from a band, or a t-shirt from an artist, is great to have because they generally hire professional graphics designers and they look great.

However, the idea of shirt-critic.com is not to tell you to go buy bands’ t-shirts. I mean, it’s fair, considering their music is stolen left and right, but band t-shirts are expensive, and sometimes t-shirts don’t have what you want to have on them. That’s where you enter the realm of custom t-shirt design, and this is where we help you out; by showing you designs people like you have made, and how they can be improved.

However, if you want to get thumbs up from me, you need to know my tastes. Perhaps this will help you uncover my biases, or perhaps you’ll agree with me in my reviews. Keep posted to see about what really gets me going about a t-shirt.

Shirt Review #8 – Fellowship Groups

I remember back when my church had a really good youth group… and then they all went off to college and it entered a Soviet Union-style decline, where it is all but absent now. I gotta say, though, that this shirt brings me back to the glory days.

I like the contrast in this shirt, seen on the front and back. I mean, the front seems pretty austere, although I like the sun being the halo behind Jesus’ head, as the retreat was “Fun in the sun.” The front of the shirt also mentions the fact that it was a retreat. It is the back of the shirt that shows a stick figure reveling with a beach ball.

There are many things to note here… I actually like the fact that the religious part of the shirt is on the front; I’ve seen church shirts where the religious bit is on the back, and it’s kind of like a shock when you see, “Oh, that was religious!” If you’re not religiously inclined, it can feel like a pit trap. I remember back in the beginning of my college career we were all seduced into having Korean barbecue, although the Korean barbecue followed a Christian rock show put on by various baptist and other evangelical groups around campus. My floormates and I bailed in the face of this trickery!

So I do LIKE the ordering of the images; the Mission logo on the front, and revelry on the back.

I also think that the all lower-case letters makes the shirt a bit smoother; I’m no e.e. cummings but I do think that lower-case is more reserved than capitalizing things. The color is pretty cool… alabaster, in honor of it being a “mission” retreat. Good design there.

I additionally like the little reveler being small and near the hip area of the back side of the shirt. It’s more of an accent than a main design (sometimes main designs on the back are awkward, and if the major design of the shirt WERE on the back, the power of the tee shirt would be compromised greatly by wearing a jacket.)

So, I admit this review has been a bit rambling, but I think this is a dandy shirt! Nice job!

Shirt Review #7 – Appropriate for Irony, Perhaps?

Mr. High Roller, eh? Well, aesthetically, this shirt has great visual appeal. The front has, placed in a stable manner, liquor, a die referring to gambling, and lots of money! The back has a fat cat smoking a cigarette, which, regardless of whether you approve of the practice, recalls *class.* So, I gotta say, if you wanted to have images that invoked the high life, while only using clip art, this is a very tasteful composition. The brown and gold also works quite well; it’s a good jab at the “standard beauty” of wearing a black shirt and blue jeans. I mean, it’s not very adventurous, but for a cool colored tee shirt, I do think that brown is a good bet.

However, the appropriateness of this custom t-shirt is much more questionable than the design. Let’s illustrate this in a series of parallels:

I actually wasn’t in this math class when it happened, but I remember one moment of reviewing for a test that some friends took part in. The class was divided into teams arbitrarily named after the colors of the rainbow, plus others. My buddy Perry (who is of the Asian persuasion) was on “White team.” Whenever the white team got a question right in math review, he shouted, “Go white team! White is right! White is right!” I remember this as hilarious only because Perry himself is not white! Otherwise, it would have been… less than humorous.

Additionally, there are other moments that people find humorous only because of irony… remember McLovin of Superbad? That, I think we all can agree, is funny because of the irony. If “McLovin” was a sort of douchey guy who was a hugely successful player, I don’t think that McLovin would have been as memorable of a character.

So, what I’m trying to say about this shirt is that if you’re actually a high roller this shirt may garner more resentment than fame. Perhaps, if you were to wear it and you weren’t much of the sort of type depicted on the back, it would hit a home run. I mean, I like this shirt, but only a certain group of people could pull it off. I hope people are with me on this one!

Shirt Review #6 – By Jingo, it’s Patriotism!

I have to say that this shirt has the correct idea. Voting rocks! Whether you’re petitioning for a proposition, working at a polling station, or in any sort of career where you espouse or teach civics, the spirit of this shirt is definitely appropriate.

However, I must question the sizing of the images! The shirt looks pretty empty, and the solution to this issue would either be (a) put in more images or (b) enlarge the existing ones. I think that more images would make it look cluttered, so I would recommend enlarging the existing ones. There’s more than one reason for this. There are things that are worse, but nobody likes having someone stop them in the middle of a conversation, or whatever, and say, “Could you turn to the side a little? I’m trying to make out what’s written on your shirt.” I do bet that people would do that for the slimly written “America” on the top right. And additionally, why have the eagle so small? Blow up that image, too, and have VOTE be displayed more prominently! America is where SIZE rules… Europe is known for its quaint, daintily-sized designs. Leave the tiny alligator to LaCoste… have your t-shirt designs big, loud, and proud.

However, I do like the placement of the images. Having the eagle smack dab in the middle is good and eye-catching, and the “America” bar… it’s top right… just like a name tag. “Hi, my name is AMERICA!” Ha! I wish! There are kids out there named Usa, so keep your eyes out!

I have no problem with this back design. Very slick, and suitably large to avoid the issues of the front side. It will let people know that you are indeed a representative of the red, white, and blue… good job!

Shirt Review #5

Here’s a good example of a shirt with some interesting design ideas that were implemented in a clunky way.

I love poker

I will assume that we are all familiar with the very popular “I <3 NY” Shirts. Well, it’s obvious that the artist behind this design was trying to go off that idea.
The idea itself is fine, but the way it was carried out was not done carefully. Take the heart for example. It looks very elongated and narrow, giving it an awkward appearance when it sits next to the “I”. Both the “I” and the heart picture are arrow, but the heart is considerably longer than the “I”. Perhaps the artist of this design did this to make the heart bigger, but a much better way of achieving that same goal would have to simply have made the heart wider.

Another obvious detail of this design is that the “o” in “Poker” was replaced with a spade symbol. It is cool to replace letters with symbols that resemble the letters, but only if you do so in a way where the final product looks as coherent as if the word had no symbols in it in the first place. In this example, the spade symbol is noticeably bigger than the rest of the words within the design.

As you can see, this is a design that started off with some good ideas, but failed to implement the ideas professionally. While you can still tell that this design tried to replicate the “I <3 NY” layout, the final finish of it looks disappointingly uncoordinated. If you have some free time, try making a custom t-shirt design yourself, and see if you can fix the errors that this design displays.

Shirt Review #4- Swimming in Style

Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more people wearing sports shirts that say something along the lines of “I think I’m really good at “(insert sport name here) ” and am going to be totally cocky about it. I am turned off by these shirts as I think they lack both style and charm. Today, I’ll give you a good example of what I consider a “stylish shirt” that tells the world a little about you, without sounding or looking annoyingly cocky.

The shirt is very charming, is it not?

This shirt is a sports t-shirt, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the back design alone.
The front of the shirt has very minimal design on it, placing only a small piece of text in the pocket position of the shirt. This works really well because you never want to have too complex of a design on the front of your shirt. It’s awkward to stare at the front of someone’s shirt- if you get caught staring for too long you may end up looking like a creepy pervert and get in big trouble. Thus, if you have a complex design on the front of your shirt, no one will be able to take it all in without looking creepy, and as a result very few people will appreciate your shirt design to its fullest.

The back of the shirt is where all the charm comes in. Instead of saying something like “I’m an awesome swimmer“, it uses a subtle reference to swimming by throwing out words like “water” and “friend” without ever explicitly mentioning swimming. The picture on the back is very novel as well: instead of showing a actual swimmer or symbol of swimming, it displays a person drinking water out of a water fountain.
This creates a very cool effect when someone is behind you and has only seen the back of your shirt. If they see the back of your shirt first, and then the front of it the person will instantly understand the meaning of the shirt. Having subtle references to things is an excellent way to be clever with your custom t-shirt designs, and will add extra charm and class to shirts.

Shirt Review #3- Simple Baseball

There’s nothing like a transparent cartoon catcher’s mitt over a green background.

People like baseball

This shirt is pretty awesome for a couple of reasons.

1) It’s uses a very simple but effective shirt layout. It is simply a picture and a small excerpt of text below the picture. However, notice how nice it’s overall appearance is. It aims to send a message and does exactly that- you won’t need to worry about people not understanding the meaning of your shirt.
Another thing that was executed well by the shirt’s simple design was the choice of text font, and its size. When you look at the shirt, the overall finish looks very coherent and uniform. The text matches well with the picture, and they serve as compliments to one another rather than two clunky, disjointed parts. Perhaps to be a bit overly picky, you could say the text thickness could be a bit a less, but that’s really a very minor detail.

2) The other reason this shirt is awesome is because of the it’s smart choice of colors. This also ties in pretty heavily with the whole “simplistic” theme I just talked about. The shirt design itself only uses 1 color, that being black. The absolute darkness of the black design contrasts very nicely with the green shirt. If the design were to use, say, a unique color for the picture of the mitt and a unique color for the text, the design would end up looking awkward.
Using a single solid color not only makes this shirt design look good, but also helps it be very cheap when it is printed. If you were to design this shirt as a custom t-shirt, it would be cheap to print since it only requires 1 color for the entire design.

I hope this review has helped you see the beauty in simplicity.

Shirt Review #2- An Arrogant Violinist

Violinist Extraordinaire

This is a interesting shirt because only a very small handful of people in the world would be able to wear it without looking like a jackass. In case you didn’t know, a concert master is basically the best violinist in an orchestra who acts as the leading musician. In professional orchestras, the concert master usually works very closely with the conductor to make each music piece sound as good as the orchestra can possibly play it.

Sadly, being a concert master takes an enormous amount of skill and there are not very many in the world. A shirt like this would probably be a custom t-shirt, since it makes no sense for a big clothing apparel company these shirts in large quantities when so few people can order them.

Also, this shirt has a huge negative effect to whomever wears it. Regardless of whether you are actually a concert master or not, wearing a shirt that just flat out says “Concert Master” is going to attract a lot of hate from everyone who sees you wearing the shirt. Walking around publicly flaunting that you are a concert master is an extremely arrogant thing to do. While the shirt design may look smooth and eye-catchy, the content itself provokes other people to be pissed off at your pompous attire.

If I were you, I would be very hesitant to wear this anywhere in public. Even if you are an incredible concert master of a prestigious orchestra, wearing this during practice or rehearsal would probably cause many of your colleagues the think of you as a high and mighty jackass. So while this shirt looks clean and has a nice, standard design, it unfortunately does not have much viable use in the real world. A good note to hold onto is that if you want to make friends, wear shirts that are a lot more modest than this one.