One thing we give with every shirt purchase from our online store is a free guitar pick! If you’ve been lucky enough to meet us in person, you probably got one attached to your business card as well. If you’d like to get a custom guitar pick shape to design your own guitar pick, free free to use our template:

Download the Guitar Pick Custom Photoshop Shape

Recently, the geniuses over at Storenvy relaunched their online storefront system with a totally revamped ruby on rails environment that can be completely customized from head to toe.

Not only can you hack the shit out of the CSS, but you can also dive into the actual Shopify code that drives the simple, tag-based template structure of Storenvy. I’ve only had the pleasure of working on one other system similar to this one in my days as a web developer, but Storenvy has pushed the envelope even further by making the online editor be color coded based on the code syntax. I know, nerd babble, but for those of you who have worked in shitty plain text fields like you have to on WordPress and other systems–it can be a real bitch.

As a proof of concept I’ve gone through and hacked together a real slick looking customized store that looks almost identical to our actual online t-shirt store. (and in some ways it’s a bit better) How long did it take me to put Assault‘s official online store together? 6 days of 10 hours+ coding each day. How long did it take me to make my custom Storenvy store? 6 hours. That includes learning the actual Shopify syntax.

Download Assault’s Storenvy theme files to see how we made this possible.

View the Assault Storenvy Customized Store to see what the final store looks like

Read on to go through the process with us step by step as we unset the default Storenvy theme, and create one with custom CSS that looks remarkably like our actual site. (or any site)

Features

There are a number of things the css and files I’ve included will do for you.

Unsets Storenvy Default Theme
Rather than use the soft gradients and arial fonts, my website uses mostly serif fonts for the large blocks of text, and arial black for all the headlines.

Mail Chimp Subscribe Form Styling
If you use Mail Chimp for your newsletter, I’ve included CSS that will style the sign up form that Mail Chimp supplies to you. Be sure to strip out the Javascript cause Storenvy won’t let you have them anyways. (To my knowledge.)

Fully commented CSS
For those of you not very familiar with CSS I’ve added comments where I was changing the CSS and tried to best explain what was going on.

Set Base Font

* {  font: 14px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;}
p {  font: 14px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;}

On our store, we use mostly serif fonts for the body text, rather than the Storenvy default theme which uses Helvetica. This will apply serif to all items, and also to paragraph elements (<p>) If users do not have the Georgia font, it will use Times New Roman. If users do not have times new roman it will attempt to display times, and then a default sans-serif.

Change Background Image

body {
  color: #666666;                   /*: Body Font :*/
  /*  background: #0a0b0b url(PATH/TO/YOUR/BACKGROUND/IMAGE.JPG) top center no-repeat; */
}

This is where I overwrite the background color and background image. The “top center” declaration after the url path to my background image tells it to stay centered, at the top of the page. I use the full url of the image I uploaded to Storenvy as my background. I also set the base font color to #666666 which is a dark gray.

Container + Nav resets

#nav, #container {
  background-color: #F1F1F1 !important;        /*: overwrite darker gray outline with nothing :*/
  border: none !important;       /*: overwrite darker gray outline with nothing :*/
  position: relative;
}

This piece of code removes the outline around the nav and container, as well as sets the background color to a light gray. It also sets the positioning to relative, which will help me position items with precision that are within it.

Edits to header

#header {
  text-align:center;	/*: Header Alignment :*/
  height: 110px;
}        

#header h1 a {            /*hide the giant store name link text*/
  color: #666666;	/*: Store Name :*/
  display: none;
}
#storeName { /*create a hidden link that google will still spider for your storename*/
  display: block;
  height: 120px;
  width: 325px;
}

#storeName span { /*hide the link text to everyone but google*/
  display: none;
}

In the layout.html file you’ll see that I added some custom classes to hide the store name to the browser window, but still allowing the text to be read by a Googlebot which has CSS disabled. This code above is what makes this possible.

Unsetting button styles

#buttons {
  position: relative;
  text-align: right;	/* Buttons Alignment */
  padding: 10px 0px 0px 0px;
}

#buttons a {
  display: inline;
  background: none;
  border: none;
  font: normal 20px 'arial black', arial, helvetica, verdana;
  color: #fff;
  text-transform: uppercase;
}

#buttons a:hover {
  color: #7d8f9c;
  text-decoration: none;
}

The main top level buttons on the default Storenvy theme have gradients in the background and borders and all sorts of other fun things that don’t look like what I wanted. The above code resets the button link text to a bold arial that you see at the top of our navigation items. It also makes the letters all caps.

Reset and style headings

h2#title {
  background-color: transparent;	/* reset h2 background color to same color as #nav, #container */
  color: #000000;                   /*: Page Title :*/
  font: normal 32px 'arial black', arial, helvetica, verdana;
  text-transform: uppercase;
  letter-spacing: -1px;
  padding: 0px !important;
  margin: -28px 0px 0px 0px !important;
  border: none !important;
  line-height: .7em;
  width: 500px !important;
  height: 46px !Important;
}

h5 {
  color: #000000;                   /*: Page Title :*/
  font: normal 22px 'arial black', arial, helvetica, verdana;
  display: block;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #000000;
  line-height: .8em !important;
  padding-bottom: 4px !important;
}

The headlines that appear on the homepage within the container, and on the sidebar and product pages need to be restyled to look like our normal headlines which are arial black. We also move them to position them properly above the product listing, without a background color.

Custom Spacing Classes

.blog_link {
padding-right: 10px;
}

.faqs {
margin-right: 55px;
}

.home {
margin-right: 20px;
}

The above 3 classes adjust the spacing on my top level navigation items so that they are properly centered within the black background.

Set Content background color and fonts

#content {
  position: relative;
  background-color: #F1F1F1;        /*: Middle Section Background :*/
  font: 14px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;
}

This is to set the background color to the same as the container and position: relative makes it so I can absolutely position nav items within the content div. It also sets the font to the Georgia font or a subsequent sans-serif font just in case for some reason items were set otherwise. (It never hurts to keep doing this to keep from having a random font face that you didn’t want somewhere–especially when you’re working with a pre-built theme)

Change Product Description Links

div.description a:link, div.description a:visited {
  color: #30AFEA;                   /*: Product Description Links :*/
}

The above code will change your links in your product descriptions on the product pages. Mine are a blue color.

Main Left Column Styles

#main {
  background: transparent;
  margin: 0px !important;
  font: 14px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;
}

The above sets the background color to nothing, and the margin to 0px as well as resets the font sizes. You may notice that I switched my sidebar from being in the left column, to being on the right side more like I did on the Assault Online Store. You can see what code I moved around by referring to the layout.html file in the zip file you downloaded at the top of the page.

Reset Product Description’s CSS

#product_description_container {
  background: none !important;
  border: none !important;
  padding: 6px !important;
  margin: 0px !important;
  font: 14px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;
  color: #000000;
}

#product_description h6 {
  font-weight: bold;
  color: #000000;
  letter-spacing: 0px;
}

#product_description_container p {
  color: #000000 !Important;
  letter-spacing: 0px;
  font: normal 14px georgia, 'times new romain', times, sans-serif !Important;
}

p#price {
  background: none !important;
  border: none !important;
  font: bold 28px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;
  color: #000000 !important;
  text-shadow: none !important;
  line-height: .8em;
  margin: 0px !important;
  padding: 0px 0px 10px 0px !important;
}

I reset and slightly adjusted the spacing on my product descriptions. Primarily, I wanted to get rid fo the background image and border. When you see the !important flag after a CSS property that tells your browser to explicitly overwrite whatever was set previously in CSS. You’ll see this throughout my stylesheet as I want to overwrite any previously set CSS.

Reposition “breadcrumbs”

.breadcrumbs {
  position: relative;
  left: 550px;
  top: 0px;
}

Because I set my positioning on my previous container elements (main, container) I can position the breadcrumbs within those div elements absolutely. The breadcrumbs div will now display 550 pixels from the left, and at the topmost pixel. (0px)

Reset Sidebar and Reposition

#sidebar {
  background: transparent;
  border: none !important;
  margin-top: 0px !important;
  padding-right: 0px !important;
  margin-right: 0px !important;
  padding-top: 0px !important;
  width: 200px !important;
  overflow: hidden;
  margin-left: 60px !Important;
}

#sidebar fieldset {
  background: none !important;
  border: none !important;
  margin: 0px !Important;
  padding: 0px !Important;
}

This resets and restyles the sidebar to be 200 pixels wide, and hides anything that flows outside of those 200px. (hence the overflow: hidden properly) It also sets the margin left to 60 pixels to give it some space to the left where the #main column is.

Reset and Style for Places and BulletLists

.bulletList {
  margin: 0px;
  padding: 0px;
}

.bulletList li {
  margin: 0px 0px 0px 5px;
  padding-left: 5px;
}

.bulletList li label {
  margin-left: 10px !important;
  font: normal 11px arial, helvetica, verdana;
  color: #000000;
}

ul#places {
  list-style: disc;
  margin: 10px 0px 0px 0px;
}

ul#places li {
  list-style: disc;
  display: list-item;
  width: 100%;
  margin: 0px 0px 8px 15px !Important;
  padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px !important;
  font: normal 16px georgia, 'times new roman', times, sans-serif;
}

ul#places li a {
  background: none !important;
  border: none !important;
  text-align: left;
  color: #000000;
  margin: 0px !important;
  padding: 0px !important;
}

The places links by default are gradient buttons in the left column, and I decided I wanted them to be plain looking text links like we have on our site and blog. The above code removes the backgrounds and borders and sets the fonts to what I have throughout the site and it also adds some spacing to the list items. (<li>)

Mail Chimp Email Form Stylings

/*************** Mail Chimp Email Signup ********************/
/************************************************************/
/************************************************************/
/************************************************************/
#mc_embed_signup {
  margin-bottom: 20px !important;
}

.indicate-required {
  margin: 4px 0px !important;
  font: normal 10px arial, helvetica, verdana;
  font-style: normal !important;
  padding-right: 40px !Important;
}
.btn { /* newsletter signup button */
	padding:2px 8px;
	-moz-border-radius:7px;
	-webkit-border-radius:7px;
	border-radius:7px;
	background-color:#3b566b;
	color:#e6e6e6 !important;
	font:bold 11px arial, helvetica, verdana;
	text-decoration:none !Important
}

.btn:hover {
	background-color:#000;
	color:#e6e6e6
}

If you aren’t using Mail Chimp for your newsletter you should. It’s completely customizable, and free for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month. I switched to it two months ago and it cut my html email development time in half, and increased my sales, subscriber count, and allowed me to track sales numbers with Google Analytics. The above code will style the default CSS/HTML that is supplied to you from Mail Chimp when you use their form builder with no CSS.

Reusable Classes

/***************      Reusable Classes   ********************/
/************************************************************/
/************************************************************/
/************************************************************/
.alignright {
  float: right;
}

.alignleft {
  float: left;
}

With every website I create I have a section of classes at the bottom of my stylesheet that I constantly reuse. In this instance, only a alignleft and alignright to float images and/or text to the left or right. In the future I’m sure I’ll add more to this, but this was all I needed for now.

Additional Tips

Storenvy is constantly updating their feature set, and they recently made it possible to add your Twitter updates–which is also completely customzeable with CSS. To add your Twitter updates to your store put this in your stores theme:

{% twitter_update_list assault %}

Google Analytics + E-Commerce Tracking

Want to track everything on your store from head to toe? Storenvy now supports Google Analytics plus e-commerce tracking. All you have to do is enter your unique tracking ID into the “Settings” area of your admin.

Show the newest products first on the homepage

{% for product in products.current %}

If you want your newest products to show up at the top of your home page you have to change the above line of code to:

{% for product in products.current  reversed %}

Storenvy’s Customization Guide

Storenvy does have a customization guide, although it is under construction. I still found it quite helpful with a few of the things I describe in this post. Check out the Storenvy Customization Guide here.

With so many different facets of information and steps needed before you can even print your shirts it’s easy to quit before you even get started.

With all the different, well-documented sites out there, I’ve found that there still hasn’t been anyone who managed to get everything just right, and more importantly, just right on a limited budget. The only thing that comes close  is the How to Start a Clothing Line E-Book. If you’d rather not swing the $37 bucks for the e-book we’ve done our best to compress everything you need to know to start your own clothing line here in this blog post. (Disclosure: We get a portion of the sales of the E-Book and recommend it if you need more in depth information.)

Spend only what YOU can afford

We’ve been lucky at Assault to have made all the right moves so far to a point where we have no credit card debt, no binding agreements with any poisonous partners, and no investors to pay back. We’ve started Assault with our own money, and it currently runs itself, independent of outside funding.

One thing to keep in mind during this read is that there are no definite right or wrong ways to forming your own company. In the end, your decisions need to be based on what works best for what you are trying to accomplish. This article is a compilation of what worked (or didn’t) for Assault; as well as some of the complications we ran into.

Before you EVEN start your t-shirt company

1. What makes you different?
2. What makes your t-shirts or clothing buzz-worthy?
3. If you saw your product on a website, would you tell your friends?
4. Would you pay $$$ for your product?
5. What separates you from your competition?
6. Who has been successful with similar products in the past, and what did they do?
7. Who is your ideal customer? Age? Sex? Interests? Where do they hang out? What do they like to eat?

These are all questions that you should have addressed before you drop a penny into your clothing line.

T-Shirt Printing Equipment

Storenvy Printing and Free Online T-Shirt Stores

Don’t buy any. There are plenty of professionals who are GREAT at screen printing and have been doing it for years. (Exhibit A: Nick Roccanti over @ Storenvy) Your product will suffer if you try to learn to print on your own and you’ll be too busy with other day to day activities to learn to print and fill your orders.

Trying to learn to do it on your own will only make your bank account dwindle.

Akumu Ink

An exception to this would be if you only plan on doing one or two color prints. Akumu Ink does just this, and have been extremely successful at it. For Assault, if we were to do this, one color pressing would have been too constricting for the majority of our designs as they’re oversized and multiple colors.

Online Store Systems

For many of you with limited or no web experience, you are going to have to go with some sort of hosted cart solution like Storenvy. One thing I do recommend is going to a service that will suit your needs and only charge you a flat rate per month. (Or no rate per month–as in free beer… like Storenvy.)

You don’t want a cart system taking a cut of your payments no matter what, because your bank is already doing that on your merchant account. (more on that later.)

Domains are CHEAP! Buy one and forward it

One thing I cannot stress enough with a hosted system is to buy a cheap domain name and forward it to your site. It’s just a bit more professional to have a store with yourname.com instead of yourname.etsy.com or yourname.bigcartel.com.

I never understood why people were okay with that–and why they were willing to put a .etsy.com or .bigcartel.com appended to THEIR brand name on a large banner for an event or festival.

Spend the $8.00 bucks or whatever it is and buy a domain name. That should be one of the first things you do after deciding on a company name.

Sole Proprietorship, Partnerships, Incorporation

This gets confusing and again, there are no right or wrong answers. Because we are talking about starting a company, and on a budget no-less, I’m assuming that you’re a small company. With that assumption, I’d suggest not starting out with a corporation. Corporations have their tax benefits and depending on your growth, are definitely something to look into, but they are fairly complicated to setup. The cost to have a professional setup for you runs approximately $500, but considering the complications that could arise if not done properly, is money well spent.

To start, Assault formed as a partnership. (We have more than one founder) What this meant to us was that the Assault company name was personally held by me (Craig) and Tim. This included any liability, gains, losses, etc. So if Assault made money, as far as the Government is concerned, Tim and I made money. Same goes for if we lost money, if there was any litigation, and so on. Obviously, on a larger scale, this could create some major troubles in ones personal life when their company gets sued for say, copyright infringement, and the lawsuit now bleeds over into their personal assets.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can always incorporate later. At that point, you would need to choose which corporate structure fits best for your business. If you would like more information on this, request it in the comments, and I’ll do a separate post on that in-depth topic.

The alternative to a partnership, or incorporating, is a sole-proprietorship, also known as a DBA, or “doing business as” which is the cheapest solution to starting your company if you are the sole driving force behind your brand.

“Doing Business As” or DBA Certificate

The best way to get a “doing business as” certificate is to place an ad in a local publication with the name of your company and where you will be doing business. This ensures that no one else has the same name as you, and that you are officially on record in public as operating your business.

This is only necessary if you (1) are operating as a Sole Proprietorship or Partnership (ie-not incorporated) or (2) if you have formed a corporation and do not plan to operate as your corporation name. In Chicago, we ran an ad at The Chicago Reader for $100 bucks. They’re used to doing running these types of ads, and they mail you a copy of your ad when it’s done running.

Federal Taxes, State Taxes

You need to register your business with the federal, and the state government you intend to do business in so you can start paying money to Uncle Sam just like the rest of us do with our businesses.

Even if you don’t plan on paying any employees or having any payroll, you still must register with federal to get your Federal Employer ID (FEID). What you register on a state level varies by state, but will be for any state employment taxes as well as state sales tax.

Small Business Checking Account

To get this you have to have the proper documentation. The proper documentation consists of your partnership agreement. (Or incorporation documents) your FEID (federal employer ID), and your local (state) business formation paperwork. You can obtain the FEID from the IRS, and your local state tax registration can be done at your respective state’s government website. (Googling County Clerk +IL is how we found out where to do this cause we’re in IL, duh)

Accepting Credit Cards

This is going to be your one of the essential costs associated with your store. We were lucky enough to get this right the first time.

Paypal has one of the best, and easiest to implement online payment systems. It integrates with plenty of stores already including Storenvy, Magento and Big Cartel–plus it’s very competitive with anything that Authorize.net or Checkout2Payment could offer you.

(Opens in iTunes)

It varies per amount, but for $30.00 per month and a small percentage of every transaction–Paypal’s Website Payments Pro is the way to go. It’s the payment system we started with and it’s worked. If you need to have a terminal on site for street-fairs etc, we recommend using iSwipe Pro on the iPhone. (opens in iTunes) It’s only $.99 cents and easy to setup. Thanks to Judd from Shirt Fight for helping us out with that at our first street festival.

SSL certificate for secure online transactions

If you’re hosting your own store like we are at Assault you’re going to need an SSL Certificate to ensure that your server is encrypted when making credit card transactions.

Back in the day there was only one place to do this: Verisign, and it cost a whopping $300 bucks a year! Thankfully, the great people at GoDaddy started selling their own version of the SSL certificates which works the same way and costs a fraction of the amount. I believe we ended up paying only $17 bucks per year after all was said and done.

Launching your store

You’ve got your shirts designed, bank account setup, and your website is successfully processing credit cards legally and safely. Here’s the most important part about launching your store: making sure you get people there, and the only way to do that is with links!

I Am The Trend - Your Guide For All Things Independent

When we got started, we compiled a list of places that you can post links about your store launch, and have actual people come to the store to buy your products. I Am The Trend will review your shirts live via a ustream video podcast if you send them one. They’ll even pimp your stuff all over their website.

We’ve also recently added a User News section to our website which displays prominently on our homepage and sidebar where you can submit links to us for approval. If you’re launching a store–let us know and we’ll pimp you double hard.

Launching and marketing your new store could be a post of it’s own, and is on it’s way, but in the meantime you can refer to these two posts for some additional SEO and Google tips that will help bring in some organic traffic to your online store:

• How to Float to the Top of Google Search Results Pages Without Paying
• SEO – Tips & Strategies you aren’t hearing from high priced consultants

Assault's SS Amnesia put on one of these mockups

While browsing through Emptees a few days ago I came across a talk post about some new mockups. To my surprise, they were quite good–and free!

They were done with American Apparel shirts, in size XS by Tom Neal of Ctrl Alt Defeat Clothing. They’re a great set of mock ups and come with prepared backgrounds. If you need some mock ups to make your store look a bit more professional, these are the ones you want.

Download Tom Neal’s T-Shirt Mock Up Kit V2

I got an email this week from Shy asking for a tutorial on how we apply our t-shirt designs onto photo real mock ups. I must say as much as I’d like to act like we could do photo shoots every day with pretty girls like the people do over at Design By Humans, we can’t. So I enlist my resourceful mockup PSDs from Emptees, and Photoshop layer modes and by the time I’m done I’ve got something worthy of the Assault Shirts homepage.

There are already plenty of people who have built ready made templates to place shirts on and to adjust colors so I’m not going to go into detail on that process. Instead, I’m going to refer you to the post I did last week about a few quick tips, as well as point you to the Emptees resources page where I got my templates from:

• Tips for prepping t-shirt designs for print
• Emptees Resources & Downloads

I chose to use this prepared blank shirt photoshop mockup by Falseone.org and if you chose the same one I did, your design should look something like this when you are done:

For demonstration’s sake, I’ll be using the most recent design we released, SS Amnesia, because it fits very well on many different colors.

Is your design flattened and not on a transparent background? See Below:

You have several choices if your design is on a flat background:

1. Trace your design in Illustrator:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0yNFH99cWg

2. Use the magic eraser tool and delete your background (This will look like shit)

3. USE LAYER MODES

Depending on the color of design you can easily set the design layer’s mode to either “Screen“, or “Multiply” and it will delete the background (or blend it) so that you see the design placed nicely on the shirt mockup.

This will take some experimentation. Generally, if you have a darker background on your design you want to use “Screen” as your layer mode. Think of it like a screen door in a way. All the black and darker tones becomes see through. If you have dark colors in your design that now look brighter or darker, you may want to use Image>adjustment>levels (or cntrl+L) to adjust your colors to get them as close as you can to your actual design.

If you have a lighter background on your design set your layer mode to either “Multiply” or possibly “Darken”. @angbowen from Fuel Your Creativity has a great article explaining the various layer modes and how they work. I highly recommend reading her article, Photoshop Blend Modes Explained. It will help clear up any confusion about what each layer blend mode does.

Is your design is on a transparent background. Read below:

If you’ve prepped your design with a vector fill layer as your background layer, you should easily be able to hide that layer, and copy the other merged layers by hitting cntrl+shift+c or by flattening your image and hitting cntrl+c.

Change over to the blank mockup t-shirt file, and hit cntrl+v or paste your design on top of it. Scale it down as you see fit and place it on the design. If you had a transparent background on your design you should be good to go for the most part. The only other step is to change the color of the t-shirt to the actual color you want it.

To do this double click on the Gradient Map Layer which will bring up the gradient editor.

Double click on the red colored tab to the right which will bring up your color picker window.

What I do next is head over to the American Apparel Colors resource and grab all the CMYK values for the shirt color I want. The highlighted field in the screen shot above is where you enter the first value, the second value goes in the next field, and so on and so fourth. Here’s the color picker window with the proper CMYK values for the American Apparel red color:

The red code listed on the American Apparel page is 0,100,80,2. See where I entered them above? Nice work.

You can use any color you’d like for the gradient map color, but you probably want to stick to the exact color your shirt supplier gives you. Just sayin’

Feel free to scale/distort the shirt if you feel it needs to be warped a little to fit into the shirt, but I generally leave it as is. Here’s what the design should look like:

Click to see a larger version of this image to see the detail

Need more help still?

Post in the comments, and I’ll gladly answer any questions you have on using free mock ups or getting realistic t-shirt templates. GoMediaZine has also covered this in great detail and even sells templates. I wish I had an entire design team like they do, but unfortunately it’s just me, and Mr. 51% so you’ll have to take what you get!

In the past year I’ve learned quite a few things that I didn’t know about t-shirts, and t-shirt printing that I thought I would share with anyone who’s either already designing their own shirts, or just getting started.

If you’re printing your shirts using a direct to garment type of solution you need not worry about many of these tips such as reducing the colors, but for those of you using screen printing, like we are at Assault Shirts, I think you’ll find most of these tips and resources very helpful.

Reducing image colors in preparation for a screen printing in Photoshop

Throughout many of our t-shirt designs we’ve had to reduce the amount of colors in an image in order to make it fit into the color scheme of our design.

Reducing the amount of colors also makes it cheaper to print, and it gives you a better idea of what your design is going to look like once it’s been screen printed. We used this technique in our 1984 T-Shirt design as well as our One Year As A Lion T-Shirt.  The key to reducing an image’s amount of colors for screen printing is the Posterize image adjustment. To demonstrate, I’ll use this image of Johnny Depp as the iconic Chicago gangster, John Dillinger.

Image > Adjustments > Posterize…

Posterize reduces the amount of colors in your image to the number of levels you specify. Depending on what kind of a look you are going for you can reduce the amount of colors once, or sometimes twice to get the desired look for your image. I’m sure you can even reduce it further, but I generally use 3 or 4 levels.

To posterize your image, first make sure you are on the selected layer you want to posterize. Then, go to Image> Adjustments> Posterize…

After posterizing your image, you can either desaturate it or try varying the amount of levels within the Posterize settings to get the desired effect. Here’s a few other options I managed to come up with:

You can also bring your image into Illustrator, and start to trace the image so it doesn’t look so crispy which you’ll find  may have a better effect than what I’ve outlined above. I personally am all-Photoshop guy so I prefer to keep everything in Photoshop, but Live Trace in Illustrator is another popular method for vectorizing an image.

New Document Presets for Screen Printing T-Shirts

The two document presets for the two sizes of screens that we use are:

18x23 canvas with 300 dpi resolution in CMYK color mode

With the large image sizes it may make sense to start at a resolution of 150dpi if the computer you are working on is a bit older. You can also use a Fill Layer for a background rather than a raster background layer to reduce your document file size. I do this with all my designs so my working file isn’t a 2gb fail whale waiting to happen.

Getting Pantone color codes for exact color matches with your printer

In order to guarantee your designs colors are matching and actually printable you need to send your pantone colors for every color in your design to your printer. Rather than let them do the color work for you, you should send the colors pantone codes.

To do this,  use the eye-dropper tool by selecting it in the tool palette or by hitting the “i” key and then clicking on the color in the design.

After you have the color selected, in your tool palette double click the color, and your color picker will open with the color you just eye dropped. Generally, this color will still be an RGB or CMYK color and isn’t the pantone color code we want. To get the approximate pantone color code, click on the “color libraries” button.

This will open up your color libraries window and the eye dropped color should be selected. The P542 C is what you want to send to the printer along with every other color code associated with your design.

2 minute color separation in Photoshop

Our printers have always done the color separation for us after we send them the high resolution images, but in case you need to do color separation on your own here’s the easiest and quickest way to accomplish that:

• Select the Magic Wand Tool in the tool palette (or hit the “w” key”)
• Uncheck “Contiguous” in the tool options area

• Click a color on your design
  

• Create a new layer and fill it by hitting cntrl + backspace or alt + backspace (depending on what color you want to fill it with the foreground or background)
• Repeat this for each color in your design and you should have each color separated on it’s own layer! (Here’s my design with new colors all separated on their own layers below)

I also found several detailed step by step Youtube videos which outline the above process using similar techniques:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmspWZqbc2Q

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uydc2VmfvQ

T-Shirt placement templates and mock ups

To ensure your printer gets your shirt printed with the correct shirt placement you should place your design on an actual shirt. This should be included with your high resolution shirt files that you send to your printer.

In the past we’ve used a combination of the below sources for t-shirt templates and mockups:

• Photoshop T-Shirt Custom Shape -- Download Use this custom shape as a background and place your shirt design atop it and mask out the outside area.
• Go Media’s Arsenal T-Shirt Templates are a the best way to get a photo realistic idea of what your designs will look like. They’re worth every penny.
• Color Overload’s Men’s T-Shirt Templates Another PSD with an assortment of color t-shirt templates to use for creating mockups from Color Overload
• Assault Shirts Product Page Photoshop Mockups This is our T-Shirt mock-up that we use on our product pages at Assault Shirts. It’s my personal favorite and can be used for shirts of all colors in the American Apparel style.

Related Links & Resources

• T-Shirt Forums Graphics & Design Help
• Designer’s Guide to Apparel Printing from Go Media
• Emptees T-Shirt Resources -- Great assortment of downloads and resources

Unlike a good portion of the design related blogs on the internet, we at AssaultBLOG try to write as much of our own content as we can rather than just link to other peoples’ hard work. It’s also been awhile since we’ve written an extensive tutorial so I’ve decided to make our own list of best posts from Assault that you may have missed if you just recently started subscribing to our RSS feed.

5 Tips to make your unsigned band stand out from the rest

List of tips to spend your hard earned day job money to make your band stand out from the rest.

HTML emails – A quick rules and primer tutorial

Thinking of writing an html newsletter? Consider these few things first.

When Every Sale Counts

When you launch your first online store, it takes forever to get sales. This article will give you a few insights as to how you can get those first few sales even when your traffic is relatively low.

SEO Tips and strategies the high priced consultants aren’t telling you

Don’t feel like paying $2,000 for an SEO audit of your site? Read this list of tips and it will greatly help you fare better in the SEO world. This is my most comprehensive and one of my best SEO articles to date.

How to float to the top of Google search pages

Interested in what gets you in the top ten search results for Google searches? I list out my secrets for free! (This list is a great list especially if you have no money to spend like I don’t.)

E-Commerce tips explained with some interesting human behavior psychology

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

How to reset your Myspace page using CSS

A brief tutorial with working code to make your Myspace look a bit more respectable. If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can just copy/paste/edit the source code that is supplied.

Tips & tools to improve your conceptual web design

A list of tools that will help bring your web designs one step closer to print designs including non-standard web fonts, custom line breaks, and transparency across all browsers.

Assault Photoshop Brush Set 1

The first set of brushes released from some of our t-shirt designs that were never used.

5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground

During my time at the university of hard knocks in the t-shirt business I learned a few things that I share here with anyone else who may be starting a t-shirt company so they don’t have to go through the same growing pains that I did.

How to create your own Photoshop Brushes

A step by step tutorial outlining how to create your own Photoshop brushes so you don’t have to spend hours scouring the net for the perfect brush.

How to use Photoshop Brush Dynamics

Part two of my brush tutorials where I show you how to use brush dynamics to get some cooler effects with your brushes that you’ve created in the Photoshop brush tutorial.

How to make those trendy lasers and light bursts in Photoshop

I’ve seen tons of ads with cool looking light bursts and light rays, and decided to write a step by step tutorial on how it was done. Originally, I believe I saw them in wired from designer, Tom Muller, so I even got in touch with him and interviewed him to find out more about his design process.

Alternative ways to find design inspiraiton

My personal best ways to find design inspiration when watching tv or going to the park just doesn’t cut it.

Turn a WordPress blog into your own personal FFFFound

A wordpress theme tutorial with included plugins that will allow you to make your own FFFFound blog like I have done on VNovember.com.

Like what you see here?

I write one quality post like this at least every week, and time permitting I make additional posts about the music industry, apparel industry, and design. Subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s worth every penny.

Seems like too many websites and brands start up from scratch, and get absolutely NO WHERE. Without the blitzkrieg of press releases and public relations broo-haha, it can be damn hard to get relevant traffic to your site, especially with no money. Here’s my comprehensive guide for getting traffic to your site when you have no fan base, no tribe, no cult following, no page rank, no domain age, no public relations, and most importantly, no money.

Before you even write, follow SEO best practices

We’ve done several posts on SEO here at AssaultBLOG. Our most popular one being, “Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You.”

There’s no point in trying to get Google to spider you if you aren’t following best practices.

A quick recap of SEO best practices from this article

• Minimize HTML and use table-less layouts
• Utilize alt tags, title tags, meta title and description tags, and anchor tags with keywords every
• 3% keyword density is more than enough on every page
• Utilize strong, em, h1, h2, h3 for headings and elements that carry more importance
• Think like a human, what would I search for in a post about [your blog post here]
• Register your business with local search, you appear at the top of the pages in the maps section
• Use an XML Sitemap
• Don’t waste too much time on META keywords
• Keep up with the latest Google trends and follow search engine resource websites

Provide something useful, unique

Content is king. It took me a long time to realize that no matter how much I wrote, unless it was something useful, and interesting to the masses, no one was going to take the time to read it, if they could even find it in the first place.

Writing for the web is a different kind of beast. People use the internet as a tool, to find information. How to do something, how to fix something, What’s the best way to skin a cat? Who did Michael Jordan punch in the face at the Bulls practice one day? What’s the name of Shawn Kemp’s 12 kids–you get the point.

Ulysses is a great novel, but no one on the internet is going to read an epic saga, we’re here to get answers, fast.

Hit the ground running, get links back cause you’re awesome

Congrats, you have something interesting to say, and you’ve followed SEO best practices when coding your website, but you’re still not showing up for any major searches in the top 20 results. It’s not secret, you must have links from other popular, relevant websites pointing back to your site, using the keywords you want to show up for in searches. A good way to start, is to mention other articles, and websites in your posts, and contact the original writers telling them you enjoyed their article, and you wrote about it. Some of my closest network of online friends are people I emailed (or Twittered) telling them I liked their articles.

Use Google docs, and make yourself a list of places you can send out freebie links to. There’s hundreds of websites you can submit links to in a user link feed to a helpful blog post about design, programming, and just about anything else. Our current list has over 100 places we submit our stories to, and we submit every quality blog to every one of the pertaining websites. Most importantly, when you find a new site, take the five seconds to add it to your list, and be sure to update your list if changes are made to the website.

Here’s our list of websites we submit our posts to

The most important thing to remember when getting links back to your site is the popularity of the site linking to you, as well as the relevance of it’s content. Second most important thing when getting linked to is that your targeted search keywords must be used inbetween the anchor tags and title tag.

In our case, getting linked on websites like Shirt.Woot.com, Hide Your Arms, Emptees, has helped us because they’re popular, the send lots of traffic, and in the future their links to us help us float up to the top of popular searches with the word t-shirt in it. This works the same as getting your pages on Digg, Designfloat, and many of the other sites in our list of links above.

Recently, Digg released the Diggbar, and they did a ton of research into it’s SEO-ability, and it appears as though they have done their homework. Don’t be afraid to utilize it, more people will digg your stories, and you can only benefit from it. One general rule I try to use when utilizing Digg is to not submit your own stories. If you do have a specific story you think is worthy of the Digg homepage, go for it and push it-but hell hath no fury like angry Diggers. So submitters beware.

Beware the rel=”nofollow”

When you type your name and website into a comment area on a blog, you get a link back to your website. While I do encourage participating at other blogs and websites, beware the rel=”nofollow”. That tag inside of an anchor tag tells the search engine not to go spider your link, so in other words you are getting no “link juice”. I see comments showing up from normal users and spammers all the time saying things like, “art community” trying to get link juice. I have bad news people, no one spiders your link text in comments–at least everywhere I know of doesn’t.

Delicious bookmarks is one place where the rel=”nofollow” tag is setup, as well in all Flickr image descriptions and comments.

That’s not to say you get no benefit from those User Link feeds on some of the websites in my list of websites we submit our posts to, alot of the time we end up getting featured in other popular design blogs as a direct result of those links. Keep this in mind when submitting your website, but don’t waste your time. We also pull in RSS Subscribers through these posts, so even though there is no actual “link juice” benefit, there is still the benefit of repeat visitors, and possibilities that you may be linked later.

rel=”nofollow” tags do have their benefit though. The more links you have on your page, the more Google divides their importance. For example, if you have 50 links on a page, there is obviously a less amount of importance on each one instead of having ten links. You can carve out which links not follow just by putting rel=”nofollow” in the <a href=”link here” rel=”nofollow”>Link not getting followed</a> I believe this has some fancy title called “link carving”, but that’s just how it was explained to me. If you do have lots of links on one page, sprinkle the rel=”nofollow” tag on ones you don’t want spidered. Like when you’re trashing a competitor.

Freebie “link juice”

I know some people like to keep their secrets to themselves, but I like to tell everyone in hopes that a few of you subscribe to my RSS feed. (As well as hopefully buy the occasional t-shirt, or hire us to design something for you.)

Believe it or not there are ways to get good quality link text back from very popular websites. Here’s a few websites that, upon approval of your content, will link back to your website without the rel=”nofollow” tag (This is subject to change) A couple of places that provide link juice are:

• Ebay blogs – We repost our relevant articles over at our ebay blog and link back to our site. You get quality html link text and there is no rel=”nofollow” tag on the links
• Flickr – While you used to be able to get link juice from flickr.com, that is no longer the case
• I Snare – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• Ezine Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• Go Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• QBN – Design resource website
• Noupe – Design resource
• Squidoo – Make your own pages

We’ve only done a handful of these things, but find a site that fits your demographic and run a contest there, or see if they feature “cool stuff”. Through a mutual friend I was able to show our products to Slash Film, and they wrote a very nice piece about our Chainsaw Bunny Shirt which sent us about as much traffic and sales as getting featured on Woot.com as a side deal.

Surgically Precise Keywords™… No not meta keywords

As I said earlier, pick the keywords you want to show up for in searches and use them inbetween anchor tags, in your title=”" tag, as well as in your head title tag. Don’t forget to use the keywords on your actual site content as well inbetween H1, H2, H3, and <strong> and <em> tags as well. They put extra emphasis on terms. 3% keyword density is MORE than enough per page. Don’t be evil.

Know what you want to show up for in search results and fight for them. Put those words in your H1 and H2 tags. Put them in your title. Put them in your product names. Have blogs link to you with that link text.

I touched on this in the, Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You, but it really is the do or die for your company.

You’re not going to show up in the top 10 results for “design blog”. At least not right away, you have to attack search results from the outside. Get ranked in the top result for other more specific searches that aren’t highly sought after like, “custom photoshop brush downloads” or, “repeating seamless background image” and you will eventually climb to the top for other searches organically.

Assault is never going to show up for the Google search, “t-shirts”. That search term is dominated, but we did feel we could show up on top for “zombie t shirts”. If you’re small you have to carve out your keyword niche with surgical precision. Pick keywords that are less competitive, but still have high search volume. (Use the Google keyword analysis tool for that)

Give it time, 3-6 months to see results

If you’re doing everything correctly, it still takes a few weeks and/or months to see quality results. Unless you’re a huge brand name, like Oprah, or have your name in the news constantly, your site isn’t going to get spidered and benefit as quickly.

If you’re starting from zero, every link, and every keyword counts. Give your link exchange partners the code and keywords to link you with. Don’t go overboard (title=”t-shirts t shirts art on our fancy designer graphic bloody t-shirts officially zombie awesome cool neato”) You’ll look like a fuck-stick.

A few additional thoughts

Google changes there algorithm several hundred times per year, so your site may fluctuate up and down in the rankings, and a lot of what goes into the Google algorithm is a mystery. What I’ve outlined above works for me. Don’t get discouraged. I should also note that in my other article, I provide a link to the PDF Google has written where I have gotten a lot of this information. I highly recommend reading it, and memorizing it. As I always say:

There are about 50 techniques, and everyone’s doing em, don’t let anyone sell you their Google first page results in 30 days snake oil bullshit, it’s not happening.

Have a tip? Did I miss something? Disagree?

Post it in the comments and share it with the world. I read every comment that hits this blog. (And sometimes when I’m bored I read spam for a laugh, or to order my viagara at discount prices.)

I don’t want to add to the already long list of great iPhone application round ups, so I’ve decided to add some applications that I use on a regular basis that seem to have snuck-in under the radar. Some of them are games, one keeps me from driving drunk, and another helps me post images to my photo blog. All the apps have at least one thing in common, they’re free.

Last Call aka, “How drunk am I iPhone?”

This handy little app has prevented me from driving under the influence more times than I can count. In the last 3 days alone it has helped me keep track of my drunkeness at least 3 times. The way this app works is, you put in your sex and weight, and throughout your night of drinking you enter in all your drinks and it will provide you with an estimated BAC as well as a timeline for how long it will take you to get drunk, as well as to come back down below the .08% thus allowing you to operate a motor vehicle again.

The best part, you can compete against your friends in an accurately weighted BAC competition rather than purely based on the amount of drinks you have had!

Zombieville USA

This is by far one of my most favorite games to kill some time with on the iPhone. Simply put, you walk around the levels and go house to house getting money and supplies, while being attacked by zombies on the outside! For someone who sucks at most video games like I do, this is a great game. It’s fun, easy, and totally addicting.

One more great thing to note is that the game is most fun with the sound on. Plus, Zombies are so in right now, more in than bacon.

WordPress

If you take alot of pictures and want them on your FFFFound WordPress photo blog like I do, then you may want to install the WordPress application. It allows you to blog on the go, as well as take pictures, preview, and post blogs to your live website.

It has support for multiple blogs, blog preview, drafts, publishing blogs, tags, categories, and just about anything you can do with your normal WordPress Administration area. It’s one of my favorite applications along with Tweetie to do my social networking and photo uploading on the go.  (I’m sure you’ve heard of it so I excluded it from the list, plus it is not free.)

Easy Wi-Fi

Logging in everytime you get to a free AT&T wireles access point is a major pain in the ass. Enter Easy Wi-Fi. Easy Wi-Fi takes care of all the heavy lifting making it easy to connect to free wifi spots without the signup and text message process that can be a major pain in the ass to do.

You can also make Skype calls on the iPhone now as long as you’re behind a Wifi connection making this application even more useful.

Bump

Rather than type in all the contact information of someone you want to add to your phone, why not just bump them? It’s the easiest and fastest way to exchange contact information. Check out the video below to get an idea of how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZudLSKaBgM

Lex and Terry Morning Radio

My favorite morning radio show, the Lex and Terry Show is now available 24 hours a day 7 days a week on a freebie iPhone application! The application is simple, click the icon, listen to the show, pause, and resume playback. Playback streams live from the Lex and Terry Live stream during the show, and then plays repeats the remainder of the day.

If you haven’t heard of Lex and Terry I highly recommend installing this application and listening to it on your morning commute. I personally can’t stand morning radio, but this show is always entertaining and interesting.

Skype

I know Skype is vastly popular, but it’s new and it kind of came in under the radar for me. (At least when it came out I was only twittering 10 times per day so I may have just missed it.)

Currently, there’s no video, but I have heard rumors on such notable podcasts as TWIT with Leo Laporte that with iPhone 3.0 Skype will work with video too! Unfortunately, it only works when you’re near a Wifi connection. (Good news if you’ve installed the Easy Wifi application mentioned above as it will do all the hard work for you!)

Know any other applications that I missed? Feel free to post them in the comments.

Free Photoshop brushes available for download including several famous Guantanamo pictures that I meticulously traced, stars, grunge borders, anarchy logos, and the declaration of independence in several different sizes. Feel free to redistribute these as I have created them and would rather have them downloaded in as many places as possible from as many people as possible.

Download Photoshop Brush Set Assault 2.0

I don’t ask anything in return except that you link back to my site, or you can support Assault BLOG by buying one of our exclusive designer graphic t-shirts in our online store.

Also don’t forget about our first photoshop grunge brush set which is still available for download. If you’d like to know how to make your own Photoshop brushes, I’ve written several tutorials including, “How to make your own photoshop brushes,” and “Adobe Photoshop brush dynamics“. Check em out, they’re in depth with screen captures of just about everything you need to get started making your own brushes in Photoshop.

MySpace Background Template

One of the items I struggled to get right with my brand more than the blog, more than the shirt designs, more than the online store, more than the SEO and link exchanging was the god damn Myspace. I don’t know why, but for some reason a staple of your brand besides a decent Twitter and blog presence is to have a Myspace page. Add us as a friend on Myspace, or at the very least checkout what your Myspace will look like if you start using this theme.

In all my years of web design and development I’ve never had anything be quite as big of a pain in the ass as a Myspace layout and getting it to look the way I wanted. After three different Myspace “resets” I think I’ve finally found one that helps get you back to a mildly respectable looking page.

Download Assault’s Myspace Reset

A few things you should note when editing this file for your Myspace:

• Colors need to be changed in several places
• No # signs are used in the color hex codes
• No Javascript allowed
• No CSS shorthand, you have to type it all out

Before Copying/Pasting the Myspace Reset CSS into your profile about me area, make sure to copy the URLs to your Add to Friends, Send Message, and any of the other links contained within your Contact box because it will be hidden by the CSS. I suggest making an image and using some sort of online image map tool, to apply your add to friends and contact links as appropriate as I have done.

Elements we will be hiding

1. Contact Information
2. MySpace URL
3. Blog Listing
4. Extended Network Box

Change Images

You can download the image I have used here for my layout to get an idea of where to position your background image. You will also need to upload your background to some remote third party website such as your own web host or your Flickr account. Make sure to change the background-image: url() to the url of your background image or else it will show my background and I’m sure you don’t want that. The first code block in the reset CSS contains the background-image URL you see below:

   body {
  font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; font-family: georgia, times, 'times new roman', sans-serif;
  background-color:000000;
   background-image:url(http://www.assaultshirts.com/images/myspace_bg.jpg);
  background-attachment: none;
  background-position:center center;
  background-repeat:no-repeat;     }

Change Colors

I recommend going through and changing the colors in one batch find/replace because the colors show up in several places and it can be hard to keep track of the sheer number of CSS colors because of the strange organisation of the Myspace Layout.

About this theme

That’s it! Change the images, colors, add your own background, and contact information image map and you’re good to go! Best part about this freebie I’m giving away is that it still abides by the Myspace terms of use and shows the advertisements, and it doesn’t have any of the stupid  spam links you find on most themes. (Though it would be nice for you to at least add us as a friend)

Assault's most recent HTML Email blast

If you’re a designer and developer there’s no doubt that you have at some time had to design or code an HTML email. If you haven’t already, sign up for our newsletter at the top of our homepage to receive the Assault Newsletter once a month.

HTML emails have become a great way to solidify your brand with internal and external emails. Along with their popularity, there seems to be some common misconceptions about how they work, and how long they take to build. Along with the basic process for which I have outlined below, there are a few general rules that you should always follow with HTML emails as well as with any other web based project for which you are not experienced with or completely cognizant of:

1. If the client needs it the next day, they are not getting an HTML email.

Email clients are even pickier than web browsers, and there are 50 more email clients than browsers. HTML emails need to be tested after they are built. Testing can take anywhere from 1-4 hours. They also need to be cut up from an image and turned to plain text so that if users have certain features disabled in their email client (Such as HTML) they can still see the content of the message.

2. HTML Emails are commonly rejected and/or flagged as spam (Should you even use it?)

HTML email adds points to your emails’ overall spam score, and runs the risk of being marked as spam. For this reason, it is important to send a text only version of your email, and/or a link at the top of the email that allows users to click to view their newsletter in a browser window. Another thing to note, is that because you have an inherit spam score from the embedded HTML, that you should not forward HTML emails. They should be sent directly with no FWD in the subject because that too will add to your overall spam score.

We should also be sure to have permission to send emails to the people we are contacting whether it be via an opted-in online subscription form, or they should have exchanged business cards, and understood that they would be getting contacted.

3. Images are disabled for security reasons

It is important to have the text of the email be in system text because 99% of email clients have images disabled for security reasons. This causes them to show up blank until the user right click and allows them. With plain html and system text users can still see most of the email.

4. “Pixel Perfect” – Not possible with HTML Emails

There are too many email clients, and too many different rules for how html emails are displayed. They are never going to look exactly the same in all email clients. Your 16 hour build time can easily turn into 100 hours of time if you spend time trying to make it look correct in Eudora as well as in Outlook Express, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail.

5. Fast, Good, Cheap – Pick two

If you want a fast and cheap email, it’s not going to be complex and it has to be very simple. If you want a good, fast email, it’s not going to be cheap.

The Correct Process (16-24 hours After Design Approval)

• Design Approved for build
• Design built into inline styles, HTML/CSS and tables
• Images uploaded to remote host
• Design is sent around to different email clients to test for images disabled etc.
• Email is built into workable template for either Campaign Monitor or Thunderbird (see below)

The Incorrect Process

• Design Approved
• Design Sent to Client
• As an attachment
• As a PDF
• As a single image in an html document

Two Ways to send your HTML Email

1. One email at a time, personalized for each individual
This process requires using either an Outlook template, or a Thunderbird template. We recommend doing this process in Thunderbird because it provides a way to send an html email, as well as a text only email in case users do not allow HTML in their emails.

It should be noted that there is no tracking with this approach. The only way you will know who clicked on what is by looking at your site statistics, or from actual responses from users.

2. More than one email at a time, mass email to large lists
For this solution we recommend using Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor‘s templates take longer to make because they have to integrate with the Campaign Monitor template scheme, but can be saved and reused.

Campaign Monitor makes it easy to import lists of emails, personalize names and subjects of emails, make groups of users based on certain rules, and makes it easier to track and maintain your campaigns to see how successful they are. It’s also a relatively cheap service at $5.00 per campaign and .01 cents per email. Some of my most favorite t-shirt related websites use Campaign Monitor: Linty Fresh, and Threadless.

Other email services:

• Mail Chimp
• MyEmma

With Assault in it’s infancy, we’ve decided that the time has come to execute the old punk rock motto, “Support your local scene.” We’re in the t-shirt business in Chicago, and there plenty of other local companies that are in one way or another associated with the apparel industry–here are some of our favorites.

Akira Chicago

1837 W. North Avenue Chicago 60622 | 866.477.2299
If you’re familiar with the indie clothing scene in Chicago then you’ve surely heard of Akira. One of the fastest growing boutiques in the area, and they’ve got something for everyone! Currently, they’re running a sale for 30% off everything that ends in 4 days!

Cameesa

Cameesa’s paving the way just like Threadless did with a new business model known as crowdfunding that we’ve talked about here on the blog before. You pledge your money to a shirt design submission that you like and if a total of $500 bucks is pledged by other members your shirts get printed! Artists get commission, you get a shirt for every $20 bucks you pledge, and you get a percentage for each shirt sold! New and innovative–I think so. Check it out and start submitting your shirts!

Ware You Fit In

Unique T-Shirt designs by the graphic designers John and Shane. They’ve been featured in several newsletters in the area as well as at the Renegade Craft Fair. Check em out!

Screwball Press

4045 N. Rockwell, Chicago 60618
Steve Walters has been running Screwball Press since 1991, and has since opened up his own screen printing academy. They offer 8 hour screen printing poster sessions at a very affordable price. If you’re interested in learning how to screen print, and need access to screen printing equipment, this is the go to place in Chicago.

Boutiqueville

770 North Halsted, Suite 303 Chicago 60642 | 312.243.8786
Comprehensive local boutique listing here in Chicago. Boutiqueville also runs as a print publication in tandem with New City. Hopefully they’ll come around and list us as an online only shop!

Solemates Chicago

2708 N Halsted St Chicago 60614 | 773.327.7782
Shoes, apparel, and handbags store for both men and women. A favorite amongst Assault friends and family.

Leaders1354

1400 N. Milwaukee Chicago 60622 | 773.489.1900
Freshness. Leaders1354 has hats, t-shirts, and shoes for rappers, scenesters, geeks, hipsters, skaters, and I’ll go ahead and say ROCKERS. (That’s more our department though) Leaders started in the south side in historic Hyde Park, and now have multiple shops around the area closest to Assault being Wicker Park. They’ve got great taste and a great assortment of stuff. Highly recommended.

St. Alfred

1531 N. Milwaukee Avenue Chicago 60622 | 773.486.7159
St. Alfred has the finest footwear and streetwear apparel brands from around the world, and one of the cleanest stores I’ve seen since those communist Apple folks.

Propaganda T-Shirts

3327 N. Lincoln Avenue Chicago | 773.549.6736
Propaganda is a full service printing company and I highly recommend them for any printing needs whether it be t-shirts for your local bar, soccer team, or if you’re starting an apparel brand like we did. They’re friendly and very helpful.

I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few of you, and if I have post it in the comments or email us and we’ll add to our list!

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

The Truth About Relativity

• When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a “deluxe” version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain
• When contemplating the purchase of a $25 pen, the majority of subjects would drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7
• When contemplating the purchase of a $455 suit, the majority of subjects would not drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7

The Fallacy of Supply and Demand

A good portion of what you may have learned in your high school economics class may not necessarily be true. By piggy backing on other brands and setting a unique price point and targeting a higher class of consumer you may find that you can put yourself in the same class as the greats:

Savador Assael, the Pearl King, single-handedly created the market for black pearls, which were unknown in the industry before 1973. His first attempt to market the pearls was an utter failure; he didn’t sell a single pearl. So he went to his friend Harry Winston, and had Winston put them in the window of his 5th Avenue store with an outrageous price tag attached. Then he ran full page ads in glossy magazines with black pearls next to diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Soon, black pearls were considered precious.

Supply and demand doesn’t necessarily pertain to products either, we’ve all seen that club that’s got a line out the door every Friday Night. (that’s probably devoid of any chicks on the inside.) The illusion of demand creates demand.

The Cost of Zero Cost

When we first started Assault, we charged for shipping. After realizing that that was a huge part of what kept people from buying our product we decided it would be good to try giving our visitors free shipping to simplify the process. We were amazed to see that getting hit with a shipping cost was a huge stopping point for most consumers and we’ve never looked back. Ariely noticed similar things with some of the tests that he tried on students:

• Ariely, Shampanier, and Mazar conducted an experiment using Lindt truffles and Hershey’s Kisses.
  • When a truffle was $0.15 and a Kiss was $0.01, 73% of subjects chose the truffle and 27% the Kiss
  • When a truffle was $0.14 and a Kiss was free, 69% chose the kiss and 31% the truffle
  • According to standard economic theory, the price reduction shouldn’t lead to any behavior change (relative price and expected pleasure should be equal between the two experiments)
• The same experiments were conducted with Kisses going for $0.02, $0.01, and free…and free again made a huge difference.
• Ariely’s theory is that for normal transactions, we consider both upside and downside. But when something is free, we forget about the downside.
  • “Free” makes us perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is
    • Humans are loss-averse; when considering a normal purchase, loss-aversion comes into play
    • But when an item is free, there is no visible possibility of loss
• Ariely conducted a variation, where people were offered a choice between items.
  • He gave kids (and students) 3 Kisses and offered to trade 1 Kiss for a small Snickers, and 2 Kisses for a large Snickers.
  • The subjects overwhelmingly chose the large Snickers (which is rational, given the weights of the candies)
  • When he instead offered to trade 1 Kiss for a large Snickers, or let the person take a small Snickers for free, the subjects overwhelming went for the free offer.
  • The zero price effect applies even when money is not involved.
• In the real world, this effect was demonstrated by Amazon’s free shipping.
  • After Super Saver shipping was introduced, Amazon saw sales increases everywhere except for France
  • It turned out that the French division offered 1 franc ($0.20) pricing instead of free pricing.
  • When this was changed to free, France saw the same sales increases as elsewhere

The Influence of Arousal

Another astonishing piece of information was the interviews of people when they were “sober” and after in which they had “aroused” themselves. People’s minds  function entirely differently when under the influence of… well ya know. (We didn’t have to tell you that sex sells. That’s why our site is absent of pictures of Craig and myself on product pages…)

Ariely and Loewenstein conducted an experiment on Berkeley undergrads (Ariely tried to do this at MIT, but couldn’t get the necessary permissions).  They asked them a series of questions.  Then they had the undergraduates stimulate themselves to a state of sexual arousal, and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

• Some of the results from their experiment:
  • Can you imagine having sex with a 60-year-old woman
    • Sober: 7%
    • Aroused: 23%
  • Could you enjoy having sex with someone you hated?
    • Sober: 53%
    • Aroused: 77%
  • Is just kissing frustrating?
    • Sober: 41%
    • Aroused: 69%
  • Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance she’d have sex with you?
    • Sober: 5%
    • Aroused: 26%
  • Would you use a condom even if you were afraid that a woman might change her mind while you went to get it?
    • Sober: 86%
    • Aroused: 60%

A few other interesting pieces of information

In 210 BC, Xiang Yu led an army against the Ch’in Dynasty.  While his troops slept, he burned his ships and smashed all the cooking pots.  He explained to his troops that they had to either fight their way to victory or die.  His troops won 9 consecutive battles.  Eliminating options improved the focus of his troops. We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Companies that try to market based on social norms (“like a good neighbor…”) but fail to follow through (e.g. imposing nuisance fees) end up in a worse position. Consumers take personal offense when a relationship framed as a social exchange turns out to be a market one.

If you think you need to play rough, don’t waste money making your company the fuzzy feel-good choice. State what you give and what you expect in return–it’s just business.

A salary alone will not motivate people to risk their lives. Police officers, firefighters, soldiers–they don’t die for their weekly pay. It’s the social norms–pride in their profession and a sense of duty–that will motivate them to give up their lives and health.

Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.

Some of this information is invaluable to you when you’re planning the little things on your site or company that you may have never thought of. Free shipping, pictures of pretty girls wearing your product, offering coupons everywhere you can, picking your price point–all of these irrational behaviors have alot to do with the way humans have been wired weather it’s social pressure, or some sort of marketing pressure. I highly recommend reading the book outline of Dan Ariely’s book, checking out his official website, or go look at the Predictably Irrational website.

Feel free to arouse yourselves and go buy some of our shirts.

Don’t just scan this if you want to benefit from it. Trust me the juice is below the headlines.

Awhile back I posted a blog about a few helpful tips that would help get your t-shirt company off the ground, and I briefly touched upon a subject that I decided would make for a great post–when every sale counts. I can’t quite remember where I was reading it, but I read something that astonished me about opening your first e-commerce store.

It will take on average 6 months to a year to get your first online sale

I still can’t believe that anyone could ever think this was true. I have news for you, it’s not.

Don’t send robot PR emails… be human

No matter what you’re selling, before you open your doors you should reach out to similar websites, and personalities associated with your target demographic. This doesn’t mean that you send out robotic press-release style spam emails, but rather personalized emails that show you give a shit about the people you are actually contacting.

We get PR emails at least a few times a week about various products and companies, and I can tell you there is no faster way to get your email deleted from my inbox. The products I do end up pimping on our site, are from people who sent personalized, friendly emails to me and actually proved to me that they’ve been to my site and know what Assault is about.

Keep a look out for forum posts in your stats

After your grand opening of your site, sales probably slowed down quite a bit, as well as traffic. We went through our slow periods right after our initial launch simply because our site hadn’t even been spidered by Google yet. To help during the lull periods, we feverishly tracked our statistics. We were only getting about 50 visits a day so we could see EVERY SINGLE person and how they got to our sites.

We visited the forums referring visitors to us and commented on the posts and subsequently got sales from these posts.

Friends with mutual benefits

While you can run around all the social networks and grab profiles and make a half assed effort to stay active in all of them–you’d be better off picking one or two and pouring all your weight into that.

Even better, when you’re making friends in these networks, make sure you make friends with people that have something to offer you in return. Channel the inner high school cheerleader in you and find friends that can make you look cooler, or more popular.

If you choose Myspace: make friends with people who run large groups. (aka heavy metal groups, Twilight Fan groups, People who live in Chicago groups, Barack Obama groups, etc.)

If you choose Twitter, find someone who’s active and steal their friends! Start @replying to questions they pose or things they say. (like I said, channel the inner high school cheerleader in all of you)

Friends page on your store website

We befriended other similar companies that our customers may like and added them to our friends page. It’s an easy way to email other stores that have similar demographics and ask them if they’d like to exchange links.

Mother**cking blog

Kendra wearing one of our shirts. Does it help with sales-Absolutely.

Blog Blog Blog. I hate using the word blog and I hate that it’s now become a thing that mainstream loves to throw out the word blog, but the truth is if you’re not blogging on a weekly basis, you’re going to fade into the background.

I’m a big advocate of never losing steam with our small business. If I’m not doing or thinking about what I should be doing to grow my company every day, I start to feel guilty. Doing a simple blog once a week takes a few hours, and gives you a medium to push visitors to your online store. On top of that, it’s a little subliminal way of keeping you organized and making sure you’re reaching your goals.

By having a blog you’re always adding content and increasing the chances that you’ll be able to push more people to your store.

My store’s biggest referral is my blog. Hands down. (it beats out even woot.com!)

Never underestimate good customer service

Every store is different, but we built our brand/store around the idea that we’d have a cult following so that the “merchants of cool” who found us would tell their friends, who would then tell their friends, who would then tell their friends. We’re online only as of now so we’re restricted ourselves to who can find us, but just think about the millions out there who never shop online–especially for things like clothing.

Make your customers happy and they will spread your seed–Even the assholes. I know you should even make the assholes happy because I’ve been that asshole. I’ve bought shoes online once, from Zappos. They screwed up my order by sending it to the wrong place, and I was pissed. (For some obscure reason) After dealing with some incredibly helpful customer support they’ve won me over as a self pimping customer for life. I can think of at least three people who have bought shoes from Zappos as a direct result of me telling them about how great they are.

You’ll benefit 100 times more from a blog post about how your customers service went above and beyond. It may cost you a dollar here and a dollar there, but the best thing a customer can do is send you a referral. A happy customer is going to do that.

Conclusion

The first year of running your own e-commerce can be grueling. You’re spread thin over a lot of different areas and you carry a lot of responsibility. I design, develop, and maintain all of our websites and blog all by myself. It’s a lot of work, and if you want it to pay off and grow you have to get sales any way you can.

Have I missed something or do you know of another great tip? Post it in the comments.

Just the other day I did a blog post entitled, “5 Resources & Tips to help get your T-Shirt company off the ground.” In it I gave a few tips on how we got our store’s traffic flowing after getting our site online and getting our shirts printed. What I did not go over, however, was all the steps in between deciding to start a company, and actually opening our doors to the public. (Our virtual doors, albeit)

As some of you know, at Assault we rarely push other peoples’ products because we want you buying our stuff–that is unless we fully endorse what we are pimping. For instance, the Heelys that I’m wearing on my feet right now.

With that I’m happy to point you in the direction of an e-book from Fuel For Design called How to Start a Clothing Line. If you’re someone who’s been wanting to break free from the man, and start your own clothing line this is a great resource to get you started.

You’ve identified your niche, registered your business, designed your shirts, and launched your online t-shirt store. Now what? If you’re like we were, you need some sales, you weren’t blessed with $20,000 of marketing money to buy pay per click ads from Google. These few tips should help save you a few headaches as well as give you a few ideas on how to market your product for free.

Don’t give away your shirts for free

Don’t give your shirts away for free to people unless you are guaranteed at least a write up in a blog or a link back to your site or some sort of return on investment. I can’t count the number of times we’ve sent free shirts to websites and companies who said they were doing t-shirt roundups and then never posted anything of the sort after we sent them free product.

If you have limited inventory like we do–reserve your inventory for sales. This may sound like we are slightly bitter, and that’s because we are. I designed most of the shirts on our site and I even pay for them. When you’re just getting started, you can only afford so many shirts. This means every sale counts. Unless you are going to get some sort of ROI on your give away, there’s no reason to do this. GoMedia has a great article about doing design work for the apparel industry that touches upon a similar subject.

GoMediaZine

I know I’ve mentioned them before on this site and in this post, but Go Media is a great resource for tutorials and design insight. If there’s one thing you can take away from this post it’s to subscribe to Go Media’s RSS  feed. They’re the best at what they do. One article that I know can help for you people starting up an on demand t-shirt store is the tutorial that shows you how to make realistic t-shirt mockups.

Here at Assault, we were lucky enough to know a few photographers who would take awesome photos for our site, but if you don’t happen to know any photographers and don’t want your photos to look amateurish this is a great tutorial to get your design renderings onto realistic t-shirts.

Put yourself out there – Network in your industry and local area

Don’t be shy. Send emails to local magazines and websites that are similar to yours. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They don’t respond or they say not interested. It’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. The people of QBN and Digg LOVE to slam our designs and site. It’s not big deal. Most of the time, they give good insight and can be quite humorous. Your friends and family are going to say your stuff is cool, but people who don’t care about you will be blatantly honest behind the protection of anonymity on the internet.

The first thing we did after launching our store was to send friendly emails to t-shirt blogs and design websites with links to our store and our blog and tutorials. The best way to find sites similar to yours in your industry is to do Google searches. We did searches like “t-shirt blogs”, “t-shirt resources” and “apparel design resources” and sent emails to sites that appeared to be open to reviewing our products.

Forget Myspace. It’s fine to have a myspace page to get in contact with bands for instance, but it’s useless for the most part as far as getting sales. Make friends with fellow designers on twitter. Download Twitteriffic or a similar twitter application and join in the conversation. Share links you find and comment on other t-shirt blogs’ posts. Thank everyone who comments on your products. Send personal emails back to your customers who comment on their orders.

Monitor your site traffic for forum post links

When you’re not getting much traffic it’s pretty easy to monitor your traffic and referrals. I recommend  using something like Sitemeter since it gives you real time stats. (We also use Google Analytics) There’s been plenty of times that a user in some obscure forum posts a poll asking which shirt they should buy (with links to one of our shirts as well as other shirts they like)

Create an account and add a comment to the forum post with a discount or a coupon code to help persuade the users to buy your product. When every sale counts, this is a good way to get a sale.

Give coupon codes to sites that review shirts

Some of our top sales referrals are from sites that we gave non-expiring coupon codes to like Shirts On Sale and Hide Your Arms. They show up for many t-shirt related searches and users are often at their site to do exactly what you’d think–get coupons for t-shirts. It’s the best way to get exposure to your shirts directly to customers who are ready to buy stuff.

Why would you spend $1,000 dollars for Google Ad Words when you can get the same target visitors to  your site for free? We’ve ran a few pay per click ad campaigns, and let me tell you that we’ve never even come close to breaking even. On the other hand, some of our top sales referrers are from a coupon code on a t-shirt blog that we didn’t pay a cent for.

Know of any good tips that I missed?

I know there are countless tips and tricks that I haven’t told as of yet (Maybe a part two?) I’m sure there’s also people who disagree with me on Ad Words, and giving away our product for free. If you have anything you’d like to add, or if you have your own site, post it in the comments!

We’re proud to announce a new designer has been added to the family, Assault, Fernando Rodriguez. Fernando, formerly of Ecko, is currently in the preliminary stages of launching his own design agency called EyeKandy. He currently resides in New York, but will be moving back to Puerto Rico to dedicate his time to developing his new company EyeKandy.

The shirt he has designed for Assault comes in black and white and is called Fatal Justice. It features the classic underlying political message that Assault has become known for, as well as some of our favorite design motifs–skulls!!!

Fernando had the idea from his experience living under the Puerto Rican government. There’s alot of corruption, like in most governments, but especially in the Latin American governments. His other inspiration for the design comes from the current situation in Darfur. Some common themes in this design as well as in many other Assault designs are about how greed for power leads to killing and mass poverty among the working class.

The design’s major theme being about how there really is no more equal justice for the rich and the poor. Justice has just become a beautiful icon, and is no longer what it used to be. Fernando hand draws all of his designs, and then inks them and scans them into Illustrator. He uses live trace and later brings them into Photoshop to clean them up. The color palette is neutral based to further emphasize the grunge look to go along with his original idea for the concept.

Fernando is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. If you’d like Fernando to do some apparel design work for you, or… if you’d like to contact him because you are a pretty lady who likes artists, you can go to his personal website and email him–especially if you live in Puerto Rico, or NYC.

Relavant Links

• EyeKandy
• Fernando’s Personal Website
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in Black
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in White

The Justice Rave Girls T-Shirt design is among one of the best designs we have done to date exclusively for the ladies. This design was created entirely in photoshop using custom photoshop brushes and shapes that I either created myself or found on the net. I’ve made the orb style brush available for download here if you want to see how I setup the brush dynamics to get various sizes of orbs in the design. I’ve even written a tutorial on this very subject here at the blog in case you want to use brush dynamics in your own t-shirt designs.

This shirt–for now– is available to girls only and it is printed by the wonderful people at Merchspin on the 6321 Sheer Jersey Cap T-Shirt from American Apparel. If you’re a guy and you’d like to wear this shirt you’re just going to have to learn to squeeze into the ladies sizes for now. (Why do you want a pink and purple shirt anyways? With butterflies on it even?)

I highly recommend clicking on the image to see the high resolution version of this shirt as it does (like most of our other shirts) have an underlying social message and it’s also very detailed. The detail doesn’t come through int he thumbnail. We also encourage you to submit pictures of yourselves wearing our shirts and we’ll send you discounts and free stuff!

To purchase the Justice Rave Girls T-Shirt click here.

To download the orb custom photoshop brush shape click here.

The Skull Propaganda T-Shirt was done using a combination of my normal photoshop techniques completely in Photoshop. The skull that provides the main focal point for the shirt was done by tracing a skull I found on the internet with the pen tool. I then converted the path to a custom shape so I could use the shape again if I wanted, and I deleted the jawbone because for some reason it makes it look a bit more rugged.

As always feel free to comment on the shirt as well as the underlying message on the shirt. The image links to a high resolution version of the design in case you want to see all the intricate details.

We’ve decided to make this shirt available to both men as well as women. The Men’s shirts print on the American Apparel 2001 Fine Jersey T-Shirt and the Women’s shirts print on the 6321 Sheer Jersey Cap T-Shirt. As always we encourage you to submit pictures of yourselves wearing our shirts and we’ll send you discounts and free stuff!

To purchase the Skull Propaganda T-Shirt click here.

Download the skull custom photoshop shapes