This is another guest post from Germany by Markus, the guy who runs Shirtspotting[to see Markus' last guest post for Fantastic Blognanza, click here]. Yes, it’s been a while, but I’d like to present you another nice tee shop from Germany I found that you might like. Actually, I didn’t find them, they contacted me, which is always a good idea if you have a little shop that deserves attention.
Bloodgold Clothing is one such case. They started their shop in 2006 and have already gotten a little coverage on the blog scene. One thing that makes them different is their experimentation with print positions. Their small neat designs are draped around the neck or on the shoulders … who says the print always has to be on the chest?
I particularly like Swing: a cassette (you can’t go wrong with tapes anyway!) out of which the tape hangs, goes up to the collar and on the back of the neck there’s a little girl using it as a swing. Neat. So when Benny from Bloodgold kindly offered to send me a shirt, I went for this one. Here’s some photos of it. I totally suck at taking photos and so does my cam. Please excuse this.
Anyway, what I found:
Feel: this shirt is one of the softest and best-feeling I ever wore. It’s silky smooth and it has a great cut, too. I can’t tell exactly what brand of blanks they use, it can’t be American Apparel.
Print: Different from most labels, the designs are not screenprinted but flex printed, which means that they are cut from flex foil and heat pressed to the shirt. On mine you can see this by a bit of foil slightly sticking out at the collar (seen here) … but don’t worry, you can’t peel it off and it’s not disturbing.
Number of people telling me they liked it when wearing it the first day: Three, which is quite a good ratio.
They have some other nice shirts, too, like Alter Ego, a face that watches your back for you. In sum, Bloodgold is really worth checking out.
That’s it for today, I hope the next guest post won’t take so long.
Hey everyone! As John mentioned back on Friday, Joe and I spent this weekend at ROFLCon, a.k.a. The Great Meeting of the Internet. It was a blast!
First, a word of explanation. From ROFLCon’s “About Us” sidebar:
Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon. [...] It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.
So what was Fantastic Bonanza doing there? Well, we designed the t-shirts!
In addition, the ROFLCon organizers (being the awesome folks they are) kindly offered us the opportunity to set up a booth at the convention. Of course, we jumped at the chance. Things happened, deals were made, and soon enough Joe was flying across the country to meet me in Cambridge, MA.
Here’s the breakdown:
Day 1:
The crowd at ROFLCon, as seen from the Fantastic Bonanza table
We arrived a little late on the first day, but the super-awesome Christina was there to cheerfully greet us and hand us our schwag bags—among the goodies included were a Firefox-branded apple and a 16-ounce can of Brawndo1. In an extremely well-conceived plot, I downed the Brawndo in the span of 10 minutes, thereby dumping a cool 100mg of caffeine into my normally stimulant-free circulatory system. Between the resulting jitters and my poor vantage point, I didn’t really catch most of what the opening keynote speaker was saying. I believe it had something to do with the internet.
After the talk was over, Joe and I went to Building 34 to set up shop. After a fair amount of hustle and/or bustle, we were ready to go.
Look, Joe is saying “hi!” Hi, Joe! [The table on Saturday looked way better than the haphazard spread of Friday! -Joe]
Our table was situated right next to Leslie Hall’s booth, which was kind of neat. Leslie herself was out and about for the most part, posing for pictures and whatnot (you know how it must be for Internet-Famous People); her mom had the duty of managing the booth. So we talked with Leslie’s mom for a bit, and she was extremely friendly. She even bought a shirt from us!
Before long, Joe Mathlete came on by and set up shop right next to us. He was selling off the last handful of MARMADUKE IS AN ASSHOLE shirts in the world. Yes—the whole entire world. This was extremely lucky for us, as it meant that we got to hang out with Joe Mathlete on-and-off for the next couple of hours. From this experience, I can say without equivocation that Joe Mathlete is all three kinds of awesome. Yes, all of them.
I stole this picture from the ROFLCon site because I am incredibly bad at taking pictures of my own. But see that arm on the left side of the picture? See it? That’s my arm!
Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 1
Day 2:
On the second day, we had our table a bit more standardized than the first…
A view of our table… from the side!
At the bottom edge of the table, you can see our super-neat Conezor buttons (courtesy of the amazing Purebuttons3) and our last-minute DIY cannibalized stickers. We were situated between the ROFLCon info/schwag desk on our left, and the Weekly Dig (whose special ROFLCon issue is hilarious) crew on our right.
We spent a pretty decent chunk of Saturday chilling with Larry ‘Liontamer’ Oji and David ‘djpretzel’ Lloyd (from Overclocked Remix). I was going through Greg’s iTunes library, and he has basically a million video game music remixes from OC Remix. So if you see some sort of OC Remix/Fantastic Bonanza collab, don’t be surprised!
A camera dude from Fox 25 Boston came by and talked with me, and they posted the brief interview on their website for some reason. So that’s pretty cool! I obviously wasn’t ready to give a spiel about Fantastic Bonanza, and they cut the part where I mentioned our name:
Before his appearance on the Internet Cult Leader panel, Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics) stopped by and got a t-shirt. We heard it straight from his mouth: he doesn’t consider himself to have either a) a cult or b) a leadership position. But, in our opinion, he still has a pretty sweet webcomic! After this final panel, Jeph Jacques (of Questionable Content) swung by for his very own Fantastic Bonanza tee. He seemed pretty discombobulated… Christi described him as like ‘leading a herd of cats’. At the very end of the day, shortly before we packed everything up, Andy Ochiltree (head writer at JibJab) came by to get Octotree because his last name, Ochiltree, is so eerily similar!
So all in all, ROFLCon was good times. Pretty much a lot of the internet was there. I got live Rick Rolled… twice. Hundreds of people did a barrel roll. And Tron Guy was there. It was great.
Internet Famous People with Fantastic Bonanza T-Shirts after Day 2
1It’s got electrolyes!™ 2 Why am I mentioning these two dudes specifically? Because of foreshadowing, my friend. 3 Use coupon code HPB for 10% off at Purebuttons.
Here be another guest post by the famous (infamous?) Sven Palmowski (aka a.mar.illo), a member of the Fantastic Blognanza Coalition of Good People.
It’s been a while since our first DBH review appeared here at Fantastic Blognanza last fall. Since then, we’ve received a bunch (and I mean a bunch) of new shirts from California, so it’s about time to continue with a second part. These are only a few of our new favourite shirts, listed in chronological order:
One of the designs from Design by Human’s very first collection, even before they started holding contests, was Addition. It’s been sold out for a while, and I grabbed it immediately when they reprinted it. I really love that tee colour—it’s called “Cardinal Francisco”.
Click the pictures for a closer look!
Then, in September, Seed by danr was named Shirt of the Day. It features a simple design with suede leaves (they really feel nice):
A few days after that came Dead Pony, Shirt of the Day winner for October 26th. A very cool design.
The Control Room is a very special shirt. The print goes from the front to the back! Amazing!
Let’s continue with flower, a design I made myself, which comes in a different colour for guys than it does for girls. I like the girls’ version so much better!
Another one of my own designs is Metropolis, a drawing inspired by the German art in the twenties.
Just yesterday we received a new package from Orange County (near Los Angeles), the home of Design by Humans. Despite the disclaimer that comes with Blackbird’s Attackin’ in the Dead ‘O’ Night, believe me, it’s still a great shirt! By the way, it just replaced Robot Attack as DBH’s best selling design.
Also with that last bunch came Made of Steel, another one of my own designs. They really did a fantastic printing job—I’m totally impressed!
Finally, here’s one of my and Carmen’s absolute favourites: All Is Vanity, by mathiole.
Thanks for the update, Sven! And until next time, everybody: putting antifreeze in your hot chocolate is not a wise way to preserve its warmth. See you later!
This is a guest post by Sven Palmowski (aka a.mar.illo), one of Fantastic Blognanza’s favorite tee designers!
This is the second of two recent intercontinental cooperations I had with US indie labels (I live in Europe, in Barcelona, that´s why I call it “intercontinental”, the first being Athena’s Temple for Enclothe) Nightmare City Apparel is a clothing line based in Iowa. It was started 3 years ago as a product development and marketing project in a college graphic design course, became a full-fledged company and has been growing ever since.
Nightmare Cite by Sven Palmoski
First I was contacted by Jon, the founder of Nightmare City Apparel. He saw my designs on deviantART (You may think of tons of “teenager manga drawings” first, but you can get lots of serious contacts there!) and decided the style would fit to their line. So I made one for them and they seemed to be quite happy with it
Click thumbnails for larger versions!
Though there’s been a delay, tees with this design should be available in their shop very soon, so stay tuned.
Now that dream can come true, thanks to the artistic talents of Ryan Berkley, because the above t-shirt is part of Monsieur T.’s brand new Fall/Winter 2007 line (the second part of which will be released shortly)! The dramatic shadows work perfectly to evoke the kill-or-be-killed ethic of a world gone mad for oil.
Well, sharing their passion for t-shirts and octopus trees I feel very nicely honoured to have been asked by the fantastic guys from the Blognanza to write a guest post about how some of the t-shirts from Design By Hümans made their way to Europe. So first let me briefly introduce myself: My name is Sven Palmowski (aka a.mar.illo) and I was born and raised in Germany. I have worked as a freelance illustrator for more than a decade, which allows me to make a living from my passion for drawing. In 2004, I made a new home in Barcelona, Spain.
The shipping of our shirts only took 7 days from California to Spain, which is a very short time for a package like that, and fortunately I did not have any problems with extra customs expenses. The package arrived in good condition and had even some trinkets in it like pencils and stickers.
These are the shirts my girlfriend, Carmen, and I ordered:
I Did by skaffa might be the cutest girl’s t-shirt at Design By Hümans, and it’s Carmen´s favourite too; the very first day wearing it she was asked about it by shop assistants in one of the countless little indie/alternative fashion boutiques in the gothic quarter of Barcelona. Simply cute with its pocket appliqué:)
underwaterdeer by fawnfruit was my favourite illustration in the Kick Off Contest. When I first saw it, I was convinced I had the winning design before me. It did not win, but it made Shirt of the Day and it’s an absolutely fantastic shirt. It’s also printed on a thicker and softer fabric than the others.
Chaos came from the Ocean by Steven is my personal favourite of the men’s shirts we ordered. The shiny silver highlights makes it just perfect.
Rescue by ckoelle is an impressive print. We only have it in the women’s version, but Carmen is very happy with this one too.
The Adventure by dwgagner is a design I love very much, but it’s the only one of the shirts that disappointed me a little bit at first sight. The ‘Large’ shirt is larger then the other ‘Large’ shirts (all the others fit me perfectly), and I´m not totally convinced about the reverse seams (which is a good idea but in this case it means just being printed on an inside-out t-shirt).
But after wearing it a while, I liked it too.
I don´t want to comment on the last of the designs, treepeople by a_mar_illo, because it’s my own I will say this much: the soft prints and the shirts are just perfect… love!!!
I will say this much: the soft prints and the shirts are just perfect… love!!!
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