Fantastic Blognanza!

I know I’ve written before about innerTee, but that was before I’d even seen any of their goods! Now that I have, I can say that I’m pretty impressed. The concept, if you’re not familiar with it already, is mixing user-submitted pieces of wearable art (called “elements”) in whatever way you please; they then screenprint every customized shirt individually. Even though each shirt is unique, they don’t sacrifice the quality of their prints, which have a soft hand. They feel like they’re probably plastisol inks with softener added.

This is one of the shirts that I myself mixed and ordered from innerTee:

If you’re curious about what this shirt looked like when I designed it on their site (and you should be!), take a peak:

The second shirt that I mixed is this one:

The little guy is supposed to be dragging the banana over to the other guy who has a big mouth. Can you tell? Well, even if you can’t, you should be able to spot the differences between the mixed design and the shirt that I actually received:

That’s right, there’s a gap between his claw hands and that banana! And that gap shouldn’t be there. As they work out the kinks in their system, I’m sure such inconsistencies will disappear. I’ve been talking to them, and their screenprinting process currently severely limits what they can do in terms of overlapping and layering elements. They also currently cannot scale elements. The easiest way for them to be able to overlap and allow for scalable elements would probably be for them to use a direct-to-garment printer. I don’t have much experience with them, but I know that I like the look and feel of innerTee’s screenprinted garments already, so I think I’d like to see them continue what they’re doing already.

I think that at least part of the problem with how my shirt turned out was due to some funky things that their system currently does when switching between different shirt sizes and styles. Fortunately, they’re working on fixing these issues! They’re also currently working on improving a messaging system that will alert you when your mix is unprintable.

I know you can’t tell from the pictures, but lighter colors (like white) are not completely opaque, so medium-dark and darker colors (like red) will show throw the ink a little bit. It isn’t very noticeable, but if you don’t want your shirt to be like that, either make sure your design is on a light shirt (the yellow is suitably opaque on my light blue shirt, for example) or only use elements with darker inks, which will be more opaque.

Link: [innerTee]
Expensiveness: their sale is still running, so $10+art

P.S. If most of the links to innerTee don’t work, it’s probably because you’re not signed up! If you’re not, you really should be. An added bonus of signing up is being able to see my mixes and elements (which should be up soon)!

P.P.S. In the last couple week, they added some new elements and new features, so be sure to check those out if you haven’t been to their site in a while! They have a lot more to add, too, so from now on there should be fairly regular element additions!