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Trends. New Orleans, Nashville and Beyond. A Trip to Simple.

I just spent some time in New Orleans at the Jazz and Heritage Festival with 460,000 other music lovers, most of them wearing t-shirts. Then I was in Nashville at the ISS show with shirt vendors and fellow garment decorators. Add in a few forays into gift shops and airport stores and I have a…

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2015

The annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is not only a celebration of the many many types of music that mix here in the Crescent City, it also celebrates Louisiana culture from photography to blacksmiths to of course, the t-shirt. They always sell a wide range of styles and designs and it is interesting to…

Big Projects

“Digitizing” the presses has been on my projects list for years now.  It’s quite the undertaking but once completed will allow us to digitally display the full and accurate range of on-press screen and platen movement in relation to each other and in relation to screen profile and artboard (these components we have already digitized).  This is a big deal for us…

Great Design! but actually the print has issues….

I’ve been looking closely at shirts for 43 years (I just posted about that.) Someone may say a design is cute, interesting, funny, awesome or any positive attribute and the first thing I see instead is that it is printed (in order of how often it occurs) out of registration, too low, with too much…

Mis-Print Monday: Don’t Knock ‘Em (Well, Only if Necessary)

I recently met with a perspective customer.  He was questioning the quality he was receiving from his current print provider and brought a couple of samples to get my take.  His issue was with the heavy “hand” on the white discharge ink in his printed designs.  “It looks great but it feels like shit, until you…

Finally, a Good T-Shirt Contest

Alternative Apparel recently conducted a t-shirt contest to highlight their printed fabric products.  “Prints on prints”, it’s a good concept.  But, when you consider what you typically see in the established t-shirt competitions (mostly bad designs and mostly mediocre printing), the concept of showcasing clever and tasteful design, decent printing, and great blanks for a t-shirt contest is actually brilliant.…

Web Wednesday – Crookedbrook.com

In my travels on the web, I ran into crookedbrook.com  I love the work that they do and I absolutely flipped for this great line on their site: “If your only concern is “how much per thousand stitches?” let’s not waste each others time. Search engine results pages are full of companies that offer “Discount Custom…

Misprint Monday – GOAL!!! World Cup Mis-steps

I’m not sure who will win the world cup, though in my pool I’m doing pretty well so far with the Netherlands and Chile. Brazil may have a great team, but I’m disgusted by the horrible police brutality going on in Brazil around the World Cup. However, thoughts today are on neither of those things, I…