The Focus Fusion Society Forums Story, Art, Song, Self Expression T-shirt designers unite and take over

Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 94 total)
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  • #1943
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    The Green design.

    Attached files

    #1944
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    The green Peace design.

    Attached files

    #1945
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    The golden yellow Peace design.

    Attached files

    #1946
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    The Waste design.

    Attached files

    #1947
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    I am considering one more design.

    Unlimited Energy Without Greenhouse Gases

    (Image of an acacia tree on a hill, with the sun shining through it, using the starburst glow)

    It’s Closer Than You Think

    Any thoughts on it?

    #1948
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Here is a concept for the Peace t-shirt on black cloth, ala Jolly Roger.

    Attached files

    #1949
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Concept for a black Waste t-shirt. This design is very busy and there isn’t enough contrast between the reaction and the loud Radiation Warning symbol. Is there a better icon we can use for nuclear waste? I thought about two drums with rad warnings on them, but that seemed just asa bad. Any physicists in the audience that would have a cleaner, but less loud substitute? What to spent fuel rods look like?

    #1950
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Grr.

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    #1951
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Here is one more Waste on Black. I have muted the Rad Warning, returned the reaction to its original blue, and made the reaction’s drop shadow soft-edged. Looks a bit better, but still busy. What do you think?

    Attached files

    #1952
    Jolly Roger
    Participant

    Glenn Millam wrote: Here is a concept for the Peace t-shirt on black cloth, ala Jolly Roger.

    Glenn,

    Great designs! I suggested the light green because green is the color of environmental friendliness. However, my wife would like to see it with a pastel blue Peace symbol, and I wonder how pastel yellow and goldenrod would look.

    As for the radwaste one, I prefer the muted version.

    As for another symbol representing radwaste, how about the “Jolly Roger”, the “skull and crossbones” which is a well-known symbol for poison?

    We don’t have to mention that the decaborane fuel is toxic. That is an industrial issue, not a radiological one.

    P.S. I’d like to mention that I used to prepare manifests for radioactive waste shipments from a nuclear power plant.

    #1953
    Rezwan
    Participant

    Glenn Millam wrote:
    As most print processes use CMYK, this may be the result if we use the original design. I believe they use an inkjet based process that may have a wider color gamut (HP uses a 6-color process, Epson uses an 8-color process), so itt may not be as bad as shown here. The only way to know is to make a shirt, order one, and see how it looks.

    By “they” use an inkjet based process are you referring to Cafepress? Are you sure you can’t have the starburst over transparency (not white) and it will print out OK on black? Like fireworks against a night sky?

    Regarding the back design, perhaps you can have that in different colors so that it matches the front. If a person gets the yellow peace symbol T-shirt, the back will have a yellow oval with writing in it, etc.

    Great work by the way!

    #1957
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Rezwan wrote: By “they” use an inkjet based process are you referring to Cafepress? Are you sure you can’t have the starburst over transparency (not white) and it will print out OK on black? Like fireworks against a night sky?

    Regarding the back design, perhaps you can have that in different colors so that it matches the front. If a person gets the yellow peace symbol T-shirt, the back will have a yellow oval with writing in it, etc.

    If you read their instructions on how to prepare art for Black T-shirts, you’ll see how they describe how to delete transparent pixels out of Photoshop artwork. Transparent art will be flattened, and will print as if its opaque, sort of like a GIF file that doesn’t have a “clear” pixel color defined, which shows up on a web page as if it had a white box around it.

    What this suggests to me is that they do not use their normal “direct” printing process for black T-shirts. They must use a more conventional one like silkscreening, which must be more expensive. Another thing that suggests it is that, to sell black t-shirts, you must now become a “premium” member. This suggests they want some money before they invest in creating screens and making t-shirts with a multi-pass process like silkscreening. By becoming a “premium” member, you will be driven to sell the kind of volume that lets them recoup their prepress costs.

    About the backs, your idea of multiple colors to match the fronts sounds pretty cool. Colors should be darker on light shirts and vice-versa for black shirts. I’ll make some variants and post them here.

    #1958
    Glenn Millam
    Participant

    Also, here is how to think about printing transparent art on a black t-shirt. Get a black piece of construction paper that is Letter-sized (8.5 x11) and put it in your ink-jet printer. Open up a web page with a big image on it, like a picture of a person in daytime. Print the picture. The results you get is what you’ll have when you set up transparent art on black cloth. It is their process, which is inkjet based I am sure, that causes the problem, because inkjet “inks” are actually thin, translucent dyes.

    Silkscreening uses thick, opaque inks that are more like a paint. It is this opacity that doesn’t allow the art to gradate with the cloth to create an effect, or at least you can’t without a lot of hand-holding from the printer. I don’t know if we can submit art to them for review as to how we can make it work. I would assume that “premium” members would get better service, so maybe we can go that route.

    #1988
    Rezwan
    Participant

    OK folks, I’ve set up our preliminary cafepress store: http://www.cafepress.com/focusfusion

    I plan to upgrade to premium so that we can have every kind of product with each of our designs (e.g., I haven’t set it up for all the products yet, this is an initial sampling with a variety of images on a variety of things. If we go premium I think we can have it all).

    Before announcing the store on the website proper, I’d like it if you T-shirt designing and comentating folks can chip in with some final suggestions and improvements. The store is online, of course, so you could rush out and buy a T-shirt right now.

    Some concerns I have:

    1) The default product description. It’s limited to a certain number of characters. Right now I have there:

    Fusion: It’s closer than you think! The T-shirts and other products are already here! Each item depicts a proton (hydrogen) and a boron molecule, stripped of electrons (in a plasma state) fusing an

    It cut off in the middle of “and”. We could just stop at “fusing.” Or say something different entirely. Keep it short. They don’t give us much space to explain the design. Perhaps I can include a hyperlink.

    2) The back: Seems a little strong compared to the front. I experimented with the Jr. Baby Doll T – I assumed the red is supposed to match with the pink front, but it’s much too strong. Also, for that shirt I put the image on top in the back instead of center, which makes the image get very small. In any case, I think just plain text on the back for some of the shirts might be just fine. In fact, the thing we have for the back of some T-shirts could be a front design.

    3) The buttons and clock. Clock is nice for “it’s closer than you think” motif. The only thing here is we need to get the http://www.focusfusion.org line to also curve so it can fit on the button and clock. Need a separate design for the round objects.

    4) Mug image placement. This has always bugged me w/ cafepress. You can’t have a front and a back on the mug. So, is it better for the person drinking to see the image, or the people the person is hanging out with to see it? Left handed or right, center…

    Looking forward to your feedback.

    #1989
    Rezwan
    Participant

    And we also need keywords to help the search engine. When people come onto cafe press looking for shirts about energy, what key words would they enter that will cause them to stumble upon us and serendipitously discover fusion? This is a good way to get people to discover us, as these sites are searched by many people.

    Keywords/Key Phrases

    Be descriptive! Think about what keywords you would enter to search for your products from Google or other external search engines. Brainstorm by listing all the possible keywords/phrases your target customer would enter to search for your products.

    So far, I’m drawing a blank. I have:

    Focus Fusion, Fusion, aneutronic, clean energy, it’s closer than you think, global warming…

    PS, the store is now premium, so we can have a gazillion products. Have yet to customize it, though.

Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 94 total)
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