Reply To: Report from Scandinavia

[Glenn Millam]

OK… Here are the the long awaited, promised reworkings of the main t-shirt design for black t-shirts.

Why the rework? Because the printing process for black t-shirts is different than for light or white t-shirts. CafePress puts a layer of white down before they print the color. If they didn’t, the t-shirt would look like it had an interestingly-shaped coffee stain on it. Because of this white layer, the original design would look like it printed in an ugly white box. So I had to come up with something else made of hard edges. This is what I came up with. In fact, I came up with two variants.

What I did was to take the original design and kind of go back to the original thumbnail that you see in the first page of posts. I kind of made a logo out of the starburst. In the first variant, the streaks all have solid colors, but they use 4 different tints to create variation. In the second variant, I used 4 different radial blends to create a smoother, yet varying, starburst.

The hardest part (after finally coming up with the starburst structure) was the type and reaction diagrams. As you can tell, the starburst is very busy, and the type on top of it wants to get lost. I stroked and shadowed it heavily. Each version has a different take on how I handled the problem. Please comment on what you feel works best.

And please hurry, as we need to get this design a CafePress pronto, so people can order it for the holidays. 🙂

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