Between his time as a possible contender for single man of the year, and posing for various Chicago magazines, Shawn Hilgart is doing what a lot of our visitors to Assault.it are doing–listening to music, designing websites for bands and clothing lines, and laying down code for Chicago idea house, We Cant Stop Thinking.

In the past, he’s done work for Friends Or Enemies, Fall Out Boy, Clandestine Industries, Empires, The Academy Is…, Q101, Plain White T’s, Boys Like Girls, Warner Brothers, and Patagonia. We Cant Stop Thinking recently launched The Music Trust, a collective of high profile DJs and artists.

Assault.it: How’d you get started in actionscript and php?

Shawn Hilgart: I got started with actionscript after being a designer at a small shop in the suburbs of Chicago, and being required to use it for projects. I got into php when I got thrown into a fire learning it when I started developing the friendsorenemies.com online community.

What are your major responsibilities at We Cant Stop Thinking?

There are so many – where do I even start? I guess day to day I am programming about 5-6 hours of the day, and the rest of the day is managing clients, making sure everyone gets paid on time, trying to improve our process, project managing. You name the job, I’m probably doing it.

Is WCST ahead of the times a bit when it comes to interactive design? (My last job used to basically just plop PSDs of designs in front of us and say build it with absolutely no specs or functionality documents of any kind – have you ever had that happen?)

I would like to think we have a pretty good process here. I think the scope of the projects you do really affects the process. When we first started it was trial by fire – my partner Nick would design something, I would slice and code it up. Now we have different phases. We research the competition, do information architecture, wireframes, and then design. Once you get a psd, you also get nice IA docs to back up that design. Having IA really helps. It allows you to see all the paths a user can take spelled out in a clear form. Another benefit of this process is the whole team gets all this time to think about how to make the project better for the user through each phase. Of course we’re not perfect, and some projects just need to get done. Then I get a PSD just put into my drop box and the real fun begins.

When it comes to breaking down something you’ve seen to try and recreate it yourself in actionscript, what’s the process?  (I know this is old, but this site is one I always use as a benchmark for design and you replicated it: http://www.iamalwayshungry.com/VERS7/)

First off, that site is amazing, I remember first seeing it and being taken back by how smooth it ran. Over the last 2 years I’ve developed a collection of home grown classes that I have been using to put together my flash sites. So when it comes to breaking down a site I first think about what chunks of code I have laying around that are similar. So in this case I think of different navigations I have done, and if I have any drag-and-drop or image tiling libraries. If I don’t have something around,I will start to craft a specific library for that task. I try and code everything in reusable classes if possible. Once I have all the parts I just start to combine them into a way that works. I think replicating a site is much easier than creating a new one – you can have the perfect block of code, but when clients start to make changes it can get really scrambled. All of a sudden your vision for that code is destroyed. On another note I have never been much one for swf decompilers, just copy and pasting code. That won’t really teach you the lessons of going through the process in your head.

I saw you’ve done some work with Empires, one of my favorite local bands. Can you describe what other kind of work you’ve done as it relates to the music business?

I really started out developing when E-cards were huge – every band wanted an E-card, and every label wanted to pay for one. So that’s kinda where I started getting some flash skills animating and pulling all these external content feeds. My partner Nick played in bands when he was younger,and we both have friends in bands so it just came naturally to be in that industry. We don’t do so much music stuff anymore. Just here and there, normally to help out a friend.

What’s been the most challenging piece of actionscript/php you’ve put together in terms of complexity?

I built this touchscreen wall out of a projector, IR leds, and some cameras, so this was electrical wiring nad coding. It was fun. I haven’t taken it out in a while but it was complex in terms of logic and execution. The code was all in as3 and it could turn any surface into a touch surface which was pretty rad.

What piece of your work are you most proud of that people may not even know you worked on?

I worked on this piece for Patagonia called “the footprint.” It was this complicated flash piece that mapped out all the places your clothing travelled before it got to your door. It got tons of press and won a couple awards. It was a great team to work with and I ended up laying down close to 95% of the code for the original.

There was a time when I thought flash was the glue between the web and television becoming a completely interactive experience when it came to UI and architecture of websites and mobile devices in general. It seems, though, that since JQuery became so popular, this may never happen. Do you see interactive and motion graphics ultimately overtaking the static html/js/jquery-based world anytime in the future?

I will be careful with my words here as to not start a flash vs. html5 fanboy riot. I don’t think html5 will inch out the demand for flash. I think html5 is coming to do the same tasks that flash pioneered 4 years ago when video on the web really started exploding. We could always play video without flash in html – you may recall the object tag that let you play quicktimes, right? So while the html 5 spec is getting ironed out, the problem I see is, it’s not a browser plugin, but rather part of the browser. So if html 5 can do what flash can do currently, what will flash be up to in 5-10 years before we see html 6? I think Adobe’s ability to push a new plugin version to users lets them move quickly on new tech, and html will once again be stuck catching up.

I’ve heard Steve Jobs called Adobe lazy–is it Adobe or Apple that’s the real culprit behind why we can’t get really any sort of flash on our iPhones? Do you think Flash will ever make it’s way onto the iPhone?

I don’t think flash will make it on to the iPhone or iPad. I think that Adobe and Apple each have their own agendas right now, and I believe that will hurt designer/developer loyalties to Apple. Adobe certainly has its work cut out for them but with cs5 being able to compile to iPhone apps, I think the concern over flash being on the actual device doesn’t concern me as much.

I’ve always said that Macromedia Flash was like Skynet–as soon as someone finds a way to exploit it, we’re all fucked because it seems to be installed on everything. Is there any validity to that?

I am sure there is some validity to those claims, but slightly exaggerated. There are so many variables that go into making a piece of software and one that runs in multiple browsers across multiple operating systems with very little system requirements. Also your plugin can only be as secure as the OS it runs on.

Vampires or zombies?

Zombies. Giving blood doesn’t sound as bad as having my brains eaten.

What’s one place you go for inspiration besides the internet?

I listen to music all the time and walk everywhere. It gives me tons of time to think and come up with ideas.

Are there any websites you visit on a regular basis within the design/development community?

I keep up with my flash news on theflashblog.com. I also read this blog called yewknee.com, it’s great for Friday videos and design/html/ajax stuff. Also a whole mess of gadget and tech blogs.

Are you working on anything major right now that you’d like to share?

I can tell you I have been working on the same project for months now, so it’s big one. It will be one of the most complex builds I have got the chance to lead and is using just about every scripting language out there. But that’s all I can really say!

The Action Blast played their first show at The House of Blues in Chicago, and I was there to take a few photos after some happy hour boozing this past Friday. My steady hand prevailed thanks to my bullet-proof Irish drinking genes, and The House of Blues spacious photo pit. Hot mess beloooow!

Another solid show by The Action Blast–hopefully next time they’ll be able to join me in my pre-HOB-show routine of drinking nonstop at Chilis.

A shape we used for our Peaceful Revolution T-Shirt that may be of use to some of you out there. It’s a saw-blade, or a razor blade that we traced in Photoshop. It’s kinda awesome.

Download the Razor Blade Custom Photoshop Shape

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

Before I launch into my whole schpiel here and start foaming at the mouth, let me say one thing: I don’t hate zombies. As a younger man, I hated many things, but now that I’ve grown up and mellowed out, I try to save emotions of that intensity for truly deserving targets (like Sarah Palin). But I do have a zombie problem: I don’t “get” the appeal. Zombies are slow, dim-witted creatures whose only reason for continued existence is their hunger for brains. I decided to address this topic at length here for two reasons: 1) People love zombies; over the past decade, more books, movies, and songs have been devoted to zombies than any other monster. Their popularity has already gone through the proverbial roof, exited the Earth’s stratosphere, and lifted God’s skirt in Heaven. Zombies are huge. 2) I’m a world famous internet blogger, and people want to know what I think about absolutely everything.

Now: in the interest of fairness, I’ve invited our friends at two separate zombie t-shirt companies to represent a pro-zombie stance. I suckered them into doing this by asking if they would answer “a few general questions about zombie culture” and then springing hyper-specific zombie vs. vampire hypotheticals on them. This is called “getting a scoop.” The fine fellows in question are Django from ShopZombie and Jason from Zombie Liquorice, and I strongly urge you to check out their sites and spend some cash – we may not see eye-to-eye about the undead, but they both have some very fine merchandise that will make your wiener tingle in a most pleasant fashion. But before we hear from them, I’mma let myself finish explaining why I don’t like zombies.

First, there’s the “slow and stupid” factor. Zombies are dumb, lumbering beasts; the average zombie moves slower than Jason Vorhees on ‘Ludes. I’ve been a dedicated pack-a-day smoker for just under a decade; when we ran the mile in high school, I never finished in less than fifteen minutes. But even I, Oswald Fucking Hobbes, could out-run a zombie. I could probably also overpower one in a fight, despite whatever enhanced strength he might possess, because I’m a nimble ninja where it counts: in my mind. I would confuse the shit out of a zombie. Also: zombies are undead. That means they’ve already been killed once, most likely by a zombie. So: if you’re dumb enough to be killed by a zombie (which we’ve already established would make you pretty fucking dumb), and you then become a zombie (which kills another couple thousand brain cells), are you really gonna argue that you stand a chance against a super-genius such as myself? I don’t think so, cabron. But my biggest problem with zombies is their utter lack of personality. If I find myself in a fight to the death, I want to face a combatant with some spark, somebody that can trade witty one-liners with me and get personally invested in the outcome of the battle. We’ve already established I can out-run and out-think a zombie; the only thing that might convince me to stay and fight would be a compelling, charismatic persona, which is something that zombies simply cannot offer.

Those are the reasons I don’t fear zombies. Take those reasons and multiply them by a thousand and you’ll understand why I won’t spend two hours watching a movie about zombies. I don’t need entertainment to try and make boring things interesting;  I want entertainment featuring subject matter that’s already entertaining. I’m too busy being world-famous to watch movies about boring crap that wouldn’t scare me in real life. This may seem like a stupid argument to you, but your face seems stupid to me. So let’s call it a draw and hear from some real zombie experts, who will provide us with information that is interesting but, unfortunately, factually incorrect. I’ll point out the inconsistencies in italics when need be.

What is it about zombies that people find so appealing?

"I Love Brains" tee from Shop Zombie

Django: Pirates, zombies, bacon, Pet Rocks… All of these things have tugged the collective coattail of consumers at some point. It’s always a mystery to me how these things rise in popularity. I think that a pile of good, exciting zombie movies (28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead remake, etc) catapulted zombies into the modern public’s eye.

Jason: I cannot speak for everyone, but what makes zombies so appealing to me is they are very anti-hero.  They will never be featured in a shitty teenage love drama and will never be romanticized.  They are incorruptible and never disappoint.  If you love horror or gore, you must love zombies. (Well, that’s not true, and I can disprove it easily: I love horror AND gore, and zombies do absolutely nothing for me.)

Zombies seem incredibly easy to defeat. Am I wrong about this? If so, why?

Django: Somehow, it seems that only the stupidest people survive the initial zombie attacks. The hardest part about defeating zombies is that they have sheer numbers, and if they can get close to you, you’re suddenly in a VERY dangerous situation. (I believe I already refuted this pretty satisfactorily above. But, in regards to numbers, so what? The zombies aren’t able to organize themselves in any way, so they’d just be stumbling around like a bunch of drunken hobos.)

Jason: Zombies can seem incredibly easy to defeat.  This is their strength.  What they lack in defensive awareness they more than make up for in aggressive numbers.  Not to mention the fact that their numbers keep replenishing after every fresh kill, bite or even scratch. (So you’re telling me that zombies’ obvious stupidity and clumsiness comprise some kind of secret strength? That’s blatant nonsense. See above for my thoughts about zombies’ strength in numbers…or lack thereof.)

Honestly, in a zombie vs. vampire fight (fair), who would win? What if the fight wasn’t governed by traditional codes of honor?

Django: Well, if the vampire was dumb enough to bite the zombie, it would turn INTO a zombie, right? So I dunno. Does that count as a win for the zombie? (No. Vampires aren’t dumb – this isn’t some Team Edward shit, I’m talkin’ Bram Stoker style. Dracula wouldn’t bite a zombie, he’d use his super strength to snap that motherfucker in half.)

"Twilight" by Zombie Liquorice

Jason: We actually did a shirt based on this age-old battle.  The Zombie will always win, mainly because he is not thinking about high school girls or when the sun is about to rise.  More often than not, the zombie is only interested in one thing: brains.  That, coupled with his inability to feel any pain and the fact that he is undead, really ensures victory.  Not to mention that there is probably a horde of zombies just around the corner waiting to mop up whatever is left.  For this very reason there could never be a fair zombie vs. vampire fight – no code of honor could ever be enforced. The ref would promptly be eaten as well unfortunately. (Jason brings up some interesting points, but fails to play by the rules of the hypothetical and thus voids his own answers. One zombie, one vampire. If a zombie needs an entire horde of his undead buddies to come and get his back, he’s not fit to even get in the ring.)

If zombies eat so much brain, why don’t they ever get smarter? Brain seems like the textbook definition of “brain food.”

Django: Same reason that eating carrots doesn’t turn you into a carrot. (That would be a valid point if I had asked why zombies don’t turn into brains. Nice try. I eat carrots because they taste good and they improve my vision. I assume that zombies have a similar reason for feasting exclusively on human brains, and I doubt it’s the taste.)

Jason: Let me explain it this way: “I eat really lean, muscular meat, but I am still fat… What gives?”  You see what I did there – clever, eh? (Yeah, about as clever as a zombie attempting algebra. If you just ate lean, muscular meat – if that was literally the ONLY thing in your diet – you probably wouldn’t be fat. And since zombies eat nothing but brains, they shouldn’t be so stupid. Who’s clever now, Jason?)

Vampires were the ultimate monsters for ages, mostly due to the wealth of artistically legitimate movies and books devoted to them. Is it possible that zombies’ cultural cachet will recede in the future if somebody like Stephanie Meyers writes a teen romance novel featuring a really sensitive zombie who refuses to eat brains, thus sparking a trend of emasculated zombies in popular culture? Would this make you angry?

Django: If someone tried this shit right now, there would be gigantic backlash against them. It would be a massive fail. It would be hard to pull this off. Vampires really have no down side. They can’t go out in the sunlight, sure, but they don’t age, they’re strong, they’re sexy. Zombies are rotting. They eat brains. They are dumb as hell. You’d have to bastardize zombies pretty good before they appealed to young girls. (“Zombies are rotting. They eat brains. They are dumb as hell.” This is the guy DEFENDING zombies, ladies and gentlemen. I must say, though, I agree on all counts. This makes me wonder if I don’t like zombies because I am, in fact, a young girl.)

Official Assault Zombie T-Shirt

Jason: Would this make me angry? Not so much anger, but more white hot loathing.  However, I know this will never happen, as I have already said that what makes zombies so cool is that they must all act a certain way to be classified as zombies.  If someone ever tried to break this mold or screw around with how zombies operate, the amount of book burnings that would take place would put another, bigger hole in the ozone. And no one wants that, right?  Zombies are here to stay; now lets just learn to love it. (I’m sure people felt the same way about vampires before Anne Rice and that crazy Mormon were so successful at making them seem sensitive. Not only do I refuse to love your precious zombies, I’m now actively rooting for someone to ruin their appeal by pussifying every even mildly cool thing about them.)

So, there you have it. This study effectively concludes that zombies are lame, vampires are better, and I am (obviously) best. I’d like to thank Jason and Django again for participating in my little study, and if you don’t go buy some product from them (here and here) you’re gonna have a zombie Oswald Hobbes at your door demanding fresh skullmeat. So get out your credit card, and check out our very own store here at Assault where we feature a pretty rad zombie shirt. And if anybody wants to collaborate on a film script about sensitive zombies, email me at oswald@assaultinc.com. I’ve got a lot of good ideas.

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

Our newest set of brushes is here! I created a handful of various high resolution brushes of fire and flames that I didn’t end up using on a project, and thought it’d make for a great brush set. As always, it’s a free download. Unzip, and double click on the .abr file to install to Photoshop.

Download the Fire & Flame Assault Photoshop Brushes

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.

One major skill that I’m relieved to have learned while in college is how to take good quality pictures. One of our ideas with Assault was to get pictures of our shirts on rock bands rather than on stock mock ups like every other apparel company. We felt it was the one thing to set us aside in a small way from everyone else that would also be a great way to network with bands that we were fans of.

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that live concert photography is probably one of the hardest forms of photography. You can’t depend on your camera’s automatic mode if you want your photos to look professionally done. You can’t use a point and shoot camera. After a few practice shows though, and with plenty of practice and tips from our friends, we were finally able to nail down our process which we’re going to share with everyone, cause we’re awesome.

Lookout! Giants at the Metro Chicago

Account for lighting & other variables

If you’ve been to Assault’s Online Store you know that we try to get photos of people wearing our clothing during rock shows where there are any number of variables that you can’t account for. Such as:

• The crowd
• The amount of lights
• The layout of the venue
• The variation in color and intensity of the lights

To help you get started doing your own photography under these conditions I’ve prepared a few tips and techniques that will help take your photos from sorority party-girl self shots to Rolling Stone worthy concert photography. (Maybe not THAT good, but close)

As always, we’ll try to accomplish quality results as cheaply as possible.

Equipment: Digital SLR Camera

Your little party camera, aka the point and shoot, isn’t going to cut it. I’m sure it’s got plenty o’ megapixels, but the most important thing is that you get a large image sensor to capture more color information. I started off with a Nikon D70 DSLR that I bought off my friend Dennis Burnett for $300 bucks. It’s older than my little sister’s point and shoot, but the photos still look ten times better.

If you shop around I’m sure you can find a decent used SLR. Try Craigslist, or Ebay. (Does anyone use Ebay anymore besides Nigerian scammers?)

Not only is the camera body important, but it’s important to have a decent lens on your camera. I stuck with the zoom lens that came with my camera to start, but eventually purchased a Nikon 50mm prime lens to help in the low lighting situations.

Equipment: External Flash

A Hero Named Hope live show at the Metro Chicago

The quickest way to make your photos look like an amateur Kenny Powers photo shoot is to only use the built in flash. Buy a decent external flash. You’ll be able to shoot from further away. You can also get a better amount of light around your subject. Along with a softer light, you’ll also be able to adjust the intensity of the light so your shots aren’t washed out and overexposed.

I bought the Quantaray QDC 900WA for my Nikon D70 for $99 bucks. It looks like you can buy the same one online for the same price. Google it.

External flashes can also have a diffusion cover of some sort put on them to reduce over exposure and ensure that your subjects are softly lit.

Chris Huebner from the band, From the Broken

Camera Setup

Put your camera in manual mode. When I first started I asked my friend Dane Sponberg for some settings to start out at. Here’s what he had to say:

Try using these camera settings as a starting point:

• 800 ISO
• F4 or 4.5
• 1/30th of a second shutter speed
• Flash set to +1

If the stage lights aren’t coming through, either bump your ISO up and turn your flash down, or leave the shutter open longer, like 1/10th of a second. Just watch that, cause the longer the shutter is open, the blurrier it will get.

A few additional pointers, tips and tricks

A few of my personal additional settings/tips that you may also benefit you are to:

• Shoot in uncompressed raw mode
• Try not to overexpose, digital imagery picks up more color information in the blacks which is more easily fixed in post than an overexposed shot
• Bring an extra CF or SD card
• Charge your damn camera. I can’t count how many times I’ve been burned on this
• Use Lithium batteries in your flash so it charges up faster
• If your camera is older like mine, clean off the contacts with rubbing alcohol to ensure the external flash will work
• Shoot LOTS of images. Many will not turn out.

Some final thoughts

If you’d like to see how most of my early photo sets turned out you can look at our Flickr Photo feed. The most important thing to do when getting the shots in the show is to make sure you are shooting in NEF Raw mode so you can edit the files later in Photoshop.

The more color information you have the easier it is to make your photos look even better in post. My next tutorial will cover how to edit the photos and color correct them to make them look even better.

I almost quit the idea of starting my own clothing line altogether when I first started out because I literally didn’t know what to design. What could I put on my t-shirts? No one likes a shirt with just a logo on it–unless you’re Nike. I didn’t like semi-offensive parody shirts. I couldn’t use band names. I couldn’t afford any sort of licensing to use comic book superheroes. Essentially I was left with NOTHING.

The insecure designer in me was ready to quit

Not until I finally sat down and started listing things I thought were cool was I finally able to think of things that couldn’t be owned by anyone, that I could use as centerpieces to my work or at the very least hidden accents that would add to the detail. The finished list contained things that were cool for use in a t-shirt, that I would not get in trouble for using. My list ended up looking something like this:

Wolves are cool. Three wolves is better.

Animals

• Wolves (Mostly serious on this one)
• Cats
• Dogs
• Dead animal skulls
• Spiders
• Tarantulas
• Hawks
• Bald Eagles
• Bats
• Werewolves
• Giant Bugs
• Wolverines (Thank you spell check for this suggestion)

Cool Symbols

• Radioactive Symbols
• Stars
• Devil Horns
• Crosses
• Crossbones
• Poison Labels
• The Sun

Affliction has sort of (tm)'d this look.

Affliction-ize (if that’s what you’re into)

• Skulls
• Chainsaws
• Blood spats
• Lasers
• Barbed Wire
• Machinery
• Welding sparks
• Vampires
• Rays or bursts of light
• Broken Glass
• Grunge Textures
• Rust Textures
• Torn Paper
• Scratches
• Music notes

Military & Vehicles

• Atomic Bombs
• Airplanes
• Jets
• Guns
• Tanks

This also would have worked under the animals heading.

Nature

• Fire
• Explosions
• Floral Shapes
• Lightning Bolts
• Smoke

Other notable items

• Fist Pumping (in general this is a cool thing to do)
• High Fiving?
• Any sort of public domain imagery, or things over 75 years old

You get the idea. Are Pomeranians cool? Meh, but hey I’m sure that guy is out there who thinks they are… and I’m pretty sure he drives a bright orange Mazda Miata.

Feel free to add your cool things to the list at the bottom. Even if they’re inappropriate, which probably makes them all the more awesome.

AssaultBLOG’s top three trafficked pages to date are still the Photoshop custom brushes and brush dynamics tutorials I wrote within a few weeks of each other just over a year ago. Since then, my brush collection has grown to over a thousand brushes and it even came to a point to where I had to buy a new laptop because my brush library outgrew my system’s ram. Sometimes I just wish there was an easier way to preview, and manage my thousands of custom brushes that I’ve downloaded.

Luckily, now there is. Brush Pilot from Bittbox is a simple, yet powerful application that finds all your Photoshop brushes, allows you to preview, and install them.

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t get paid to write this post, and I just used the demo, but I can tell you that if you’re like I was with an older machine, or just a ton of brushes–Brush Pilot is a must have for your machine. $15 bucks, 3 pints of beer, 3 foot long subs from Subway. Totally worth it.

Almost two months ago, Assault had the honor of being reviewed by Buy-Tees.net.  After reading what came from that review, I felt compelled to dig in on the mind of Paul, co-owner and main contributor at Buy Tees.  I was very impressed with both the writing style and in-depth review of the art itself, rather than just a bland t-shirt review.  If you aren’t familiar with their site, I recommend you BEG Paul to check your stuff out; he has this uncanny ability to actually tell you things about your work that you may not have known.

I had the honor of interviewing him to try and get a little insight into what drives him, enjoy!

First and foremost, what is buy-tees.net?

Hmm… well I suppose the clue is in the name heh. It’s a t-shirt reviews blog first and foremost–although it’s probably not quite like any other you’ve read. I do have a tendency to quote the world and his wife and just about every homespun philosophy imaginable when I get cracking on a review. I am probably what you’d call a ‘natural blogger’ – I’m from a creative background in both the fine arts and literature and so I suppose it made sense to hone my abilities by venturing into blogging. It just so happens that I use the excuse of t-shirt reviews to express my opinions to the world.

What drove you to start it?

There are two answers to this. The first was simply to promote a few of my own t-shirt designs, way back when I’d decided to set up my own independent t-shirt label, I was sick of the enormous profits and poor service that many major print-on-demand sites were offering and so I thought I’d have a bash. Promoting the label was a total nightmare, besides which the overall costs of setting up a label were beyond my reach at the time and so I thought a blog would save on marketing costs and be a good way of drumming up business. The second reason came along within a week or two of blogging. Essentially, I found that a lot of other designers were in the same proverbial boat – vis-a-vis they also hadn’t two pennies to rub together and needed quality sources of promotion and marketing without the extortionate expense of traditional advertising such as Adwords or hiring an SEO expert. So I filled the gap, featuring designers’ work in return for a back link to the blog.

I know buy-tees.net is made up of yourself and another silent partner; is there anyone else that is part of the team?  Do you ever have guest posts and if so, how do you go about selecting the individual?

Short answer no – I have had offers – although for the main part they’re rather self-promotional in the main. I’m not exactly an objective reviewer myself, I am however an artist and so I know when I see something conceptually or visually superior and that always urges me on when it comes to deconstructing the mindset or ethos of a brand/designer. I’m also not ‘in it for the money’ as they say – I make a few dollars from the odd banner now and again but it doesn’t even cover hosting most of the time.

I have always enjoyed the company of artists, whatever medium they may choose to specialize in – it just so happens that I believe t-shirt design has until recently been treated as a rather lowly distant cousin of say illustration or graphic design and thought it’d be rather satisfying both personally and for the arts community at large if someone could give this niche a boost.

My partner helps out with some administration of the site from time to time and we discuss our reactions to designers’ work, we like to bounce ideas off of each other and see if there’s anything more I can add to the review than the usual ‘pic and click’ offerings out there.

How did you go about setting up your site, and what tips/suggestions can you give to others?

In truth I’d say exactly the same thing now as I always have, if you enjoy what you do, if you take pride in your work, if you can offer something truly original in whatever form the world will slowly rub its eyes, stand up and take notice of what you’re doing. There are plenty of options out there for marketing but I’m not the best person to ask, I am not a marketing expert, I simply enjoy being creative and sharing the results.

I designed the blog myself, I suppose I could revamp it but ‘if it ain’t broke why fix it?’ There are plenty of gorgeous looking sites out there with very little to say or offer, no matter what niche they cover, it’s funny how people make a distinction between the online and offline world.

Salespeople annoy me, they are for the most part impatient, desperate to sell their wares and rarely listen to their prospects views and opinions. I’ve actually worked for a few major companies in a marketing capacity (many of whom probably rather I hadn’t) and they all seemed to make the same common mistake, forgetting that the public consists of millions of individuals, each with their own way of seeing and doing things. The only thing I have learned about marketing this last year is that excitement is infectious, if you can share the thrill of what you do then others will want to as well.

What sets buy-tees.net apart from the many other resource sites/blogs out there?

When I first set up Buy Tees almost every t-shirt reviews blog out there knocked out posts with a title, a photo, a price and a link. They may not like to admit it but I’ve seen a lot of those very same blogs turn my way, almost all of them will now,  at some point or other, wax lyrical about a designer or label. I am of the opinion that if you can’t pour your heart and soul into what you do why bother?

I have received so many emails from designers thanking me for helping them reach the next level of success, for saving a brand, even reinventing one that I can’t keep track anymore. I suppose the biggest difference, without wanting to sound arrogant, is me. I am different, I am an artist and I need constant sources of inspiration and so it’s a two-way street, creative people contact me, ask for my opinion or help and I, for the main part, am glad to help. You could call it a calling, or perhaps that’s a little over dramatic, but it certainly adds something special to my life.

You appear to get very personally involved in each of your reviews.  What approach do you take when reviewing a brand or particular shirt?

I can’t say there’s a formula, I’ve always been good at ‘reading people’, I don’t mean I am some kind of psychic, I don’t tell fortunes or read tarot, I just understand basic human motivation, especially when it comes to creative outlets such as t-shirt design. It’s as if I sit down and look at a body of work and imagine I have created the tees in front of me, then I work out why, where the inspiration came from, and how well it has been conceptually resolved.

I do have a habit of making up my own layman’s terms for things and this I’d call ‘logical progression’. You take things, no matter what they are, one step at a time, a creative mind follows a pattern, built up over years of experience, interactions, events, actions. If you for instance had been a backpacker for the last decade I’d expect a lot of cultural reference in anything you did, an openness to new experiences, an understanding of geo-political and historical boundaries, a longing for freedom, a zest for adventure. That would show in any creative outlet you pursued. I suppose I’ve specialized in ‘what makes people tick’ and try to connect with them personally through my opinions of their work.

Being creative is rewarding, connecting with other creative minds is probably as exciting as it gets for me.

I am very impressed with your writing form and style; do you have a background in literature?

Thanks, I have to admit I do get quite a bit of praise for my writing style which even now surprises me. I write the way I talk, which yes, must be exhausting for everyone involved. My mother was an English teacher, she taught me to read and write within the first few months of my life.

I’m the guy at the party at the end of the night, when you’re trying to get everyone to go home, who just won’t shut up.

I did write a screenplay once, it was almost accepted by Fox Searchlight in the mid 90s, they decided against it in the end saying it was too hot to handle, imagine The Matrix with more body parts and you’re half way there. I actually trained in conceptual arts at college, don’t ask, it’s all twaddle, but the tutors did force us to justify everything we created, however absurd the reasoning, and so I got into the habit of deconstructing everything and everyone around me until I felt I was about to burst – hence the outpouring of opinion at the slightest opportunity.

Are you involved in any other sites other than buy-tees?  If so, what?

Yes, I’m an artist, you can visit my site at http://paulbaines.co.uk – there’s also my arts blog at http://paulbaines.co.uk/category/blog where I review other contemporary artists. I’ve recently been approached by a major arts publisher who wants to feature my designs in a student textbook for illustrators which quite surprised me as I’d never considered I was an illustrator – but there you go.

I work on rather a large scale, at the moment I’m offering digital prints up to 44″ x 55″ in size however I’m in the midst of creating my own silk screen print studio and will be hand printing limited edition signed and numbered A1 prints by the end of summer if all goes well. It’s hard to explain my work, you will probably either love it or hate it. I have a few ties with the UK graffiti movement, I’m also hoping to have a few outlets and galleries selling my work by the end of the year.

Where do you see buy-tees heading from here?

Who knows? I was recently offered a very tidy sum for the blog, a major t-shirt producer wanted to buy it, and keep it as an archive which was very tempting and rather flattering. However I’d had so much feedback asking that I continue I didn’t have the heart to sell up. So what does the future hold? I really couldn’t say, perhaps it’s time for a t-shirt book? In the long term if the art career really takes off I will have to find a worthy successor, if not I will probably continue to review t-shirts until I drop. Either way it will be an exciting ride!

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

I recently took an hour out of my day to figure out how Ustream works and do a live broadcast with some SEO and Blog Tips for all the small t-shirt and apparel websites out there. It went live on Ustream, and is now found at Watch Tee-V. I packed as many tips and tricks into one hour as I could think of, and answered a few questions along the way.

Even if you’re not in the t-shirt design industry I still think you’ll find some good tips in there.

Don’t Forget

Assault will be at the Belmont Arts and Music festival this weekend in Roscoe Village in Chicago! Great deals on EVERY shirt in EVERY size that we have in stock plus a chance to get to meet Craig and I face to face!

I knew, from the vision I had in mind, that I wanted a nearly symmetrical design radiating from a central focus. In this case I found an image of the face of “Big Brother” from the movie 1984 to be the focus. Feeling that this imposing figure had all control over the populus (and viewer) through methods of fear, propagation, and surveillance I knew I wanted everything to stem from his mind and to point, visually, to his face as the central focal point.

I then began to layer in the imagery I thought were either directly available to work towards the theme or that linked to subjects indirectly corresponding with the theme. So, for this design I focused on this idea of “Big Brother”, of being watched, controlled, enforced, manipulated, opressed, etc… Here, I have an an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud rising from his destructive mind, and guns like crossbones on a pirate’s flag flanking his left and right.

Remember the central theme of the design at all times

During this particular design process, I thought of the current state of surveillance I thought of tools of oppression and fear propagation; televisions, loud speakers, and weapons. I wanted this endless  barrage of surveillance equipment to be erupting from behind his face.

Here, I’ve added elements such as CCTV cameras, some loud speakers and a couple TV’s.

At this point most elements are only made on one side and then copied over, flipped horizontally and added to the other side of the design.  This is only done for the sake of speeding up the production process. Once the design is filled out a bit more I will add/subtract elements to make the design asymmetrical.

Here, I’ve continued to fill the design out more, adding more TV’s, speakers and cameras. At the top and bottom I’ve added different antennae elements to elongate the design and begin to break up the symmetry.

View the design in different sizes

When doing a design with so many various elements all working together in a relatively tight space, it is important to take breaks to look at the image at different sizes.

The reason I do this is to remain focused on whether the design still works, whether it is balanced, i.e. are there so many elements that the design now feels overwhelmed and cluttered or is there still room for additional elements. I felt at this stage, there were enough primary elements, and only smaller tweaks and touches were needed. So here you can see, I’ve added static and eye elements.

Once these final tweaks were completed the design was ready for the addition of color, and more abstract complimentary design to aid in grounding the existing design elements. For this, I passed the design along to Tim.

The finishing touches – done by “third world Timmy”

Finalizing this design from Stani boils down to two steps:

1. Breaking up the symmetry as much as possible by adding “Victory” text elements. (The brand of cigarettes from the book, 1984) and moving megaphones, microphones, tentacles, and antennas. This is mostly accomplished by using custom shape tools and graphing things together the way I want them to display. I’ve also added some custom brush splats in the background to give the design more volume.

2. Adding an intense blue color palette. I accomplished this by placing duplicates of the design on top of itself and masking/cloning different color blues to get the exact colors I wanted. I also used custom adjustment layers (levels) and several layer modes (color burn, and color dodges)

The final image:

Related Links:

• The artist statement and inspiration that went into this t-shirt is discussed in full detail in the 1984 T-Shirt blog post
• Assault Custom Photoshop Brushes tutorial
• Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial

After completing my first two designs for team Assault, Tim asked if I’d like to make a tutorial providing some insight into my design process.

Generally speaking I always try to work from general to specific. I also find that for each design, the process is unique. Some designers feel that thumbnails are always useful, some designers feel that just going at it, throwing pieces together and working out the design solutions on the canvass is the best method.

To be honest I do not prefer any standard methodology over another, the only consistent philosophies I try to abide by while working include, working general to specific, maintaining focus on what works for THIS design–don’t hold anything precious, and last but certainly not least, don’t be afraid to try something new!

For the “One Year As A Lion” design I already had a strong image in my head of what I wanted and a fairly certain approach laid out before I began, so lets get into it.

Gather source images

The first step in the actual production process is to search and gather images which I think could be useful. I’ll use ANY resource available, google, flickr, magazines, old sketches, ANYTHING.

When I was living in Amsterdam, taking the train to work, they would hand out free newspapers to passengers. As the papers were in Dutch I couldn’t read the articles, but i took the papers anyway and during my ride I would look through the images for anything that MIGHT be useful in the future. At the end of each month I’d scan all the clippings in that I had accumulated, and save them in a PSD file of reference material.

For this design I knew I wanted a man/lion figure standing out among a sea of sheep. I wanted the lion to be the only source of light as well as the sheep to resemble rocks of a cliff. I searched for sheep, sheep flocks, goats, lions, orangutans, (for fur) clouds/storm clouds/ash plumes, (all for rock like imagery to accompany the sheep) bodybuilders, (for the lion man’s base) barcodes, and skeletons.

As you can see in this image I’ve gathered and extracted various masses of sheep. At this stage we aren’t concerned with color, brightness, contrast or levels. Remember, we’re working general to specific, once we lay in the base of the image we can then work more specifically, tweaking when necessary.

From general to specific

The lion man is a good example of finding anything you think could work to your advantage and going with it.  Here is an image of two different body builders, a random hand, two different lion’s manes and even some orangutan fur to fill out the mane further. None of the images have the same colors, tonal values or contrast. At this point, even the seams between the different images are clearly noticeable. Again, all acceptable at this “block in” stage.

Here the lion man has come a little further, now with both arms and a leg. Where pieces didn’t line up enough i painted in a make-shift base. The further we go, the more layers we build up, the less noticeable the seams between the various pieces will become.

Combining the elements in gray scale

Here we have the lion man with his flock. I’ve gone ahead and desaturated the image so that I could focus on unifying the values to bring the individual pieces together more.

After using several adjustment layers, including: “levels,” and “brightness/contrast”, to even out the values I began painting in areas that needed more visual information before going any further with any additional layers.

Here I’ve addressed all the seams, I’ve added to and unified highlights and shadows and I’ve slightly altered the outreaching hand.

I’ve knocked back the brightness and added a layer of cloud imagery I’ve meshed together with the sheep layer. I’ve began to bring out a focal point and focus on building up the light source. This was accomplished by fading the edges of the flock to darkness and dodged up areas that would be closes to the light source. (his hand)

I’ve also adjusted layers of highlight and deep shadow by dodging/burning/over-painting.

Here, you can see I’ve added a flame for the light source. I’ve also adjusted the shape of his hand. Because I couldn’t find a hand “just right” for my design needs here I took a photograph of my own posed hand with my phone and then brought it into Photoshop for further manipulation. I’ve also brought in layers of hair I had assembled from images of orangutans set to multiply over the base of the lion man’s body.

I should mention that in order to streamline the design process I have a “hue/saturation” layer at the top of my layer stack in this PSD set to “0% saturation”. This way, no matter what color information a new layer or image brings in, as long a it is below this “hue/saturation” layer it will automatically show up as gray scale. This keeps me from having to individually desaturate every layer I bring in.

I’ve now began to bring in more subtle detail elements. Here I’ve added sheep skeletal information to various members of the flock including skulls, ribs, and spines. I’ve also added to the sheep’s head in the lion man’s hand.  Additionally, I’ve added in bar code elements to the back of several sheep’s heads, a subtle detail.

From my original mental image of this design, I knew that the final design would be a layered “posterized” look. I felt this would best add to the element of ambiguity in the flock. I believed this would also aid in bringing together the sheep and cloud elements.

Having had this in mind, I added another adjustment layer at the top of my layer stack in the PSD, as I had done with the “hue/saturation” before. This time it was a “posterize” modifier.

Bringing it all together with detail

Now that I had all of the basic design information unified, all that was left was detail work. I wanted a hot color palette of yellows and oranges to work with an earthy palette of browns. I tried several ideas before stumbling across the right design solution for this image: I ended up using color overlays and various hue/saturation adjustments.

Finally, dejected, I decided to take a wander through my reference library of images and textures I’ve collected. It was at this point I stumbled across a sheet of brown, discolored and deteriorating paper.

I then made copy layers of this sheet which were then merged and the seams stamped out with the stamp tool. All that was left was to find the most visually pleasing layer setting, which in this case was “color burn” at 100%, a little hue/saturation tweak and bingo!

Even though I felt I had achieved the colors I wanted, something was still missing. It was still too clean. I needed a bit of grunge, a bit more granular debris. So again back to the reference library to find an appropriate overlay.  This piece of paper had just the detailed dirt information I was looking for.

I set this layer to “multiply”, and knocked back the opacity and adjusted the levels so that only the darkest micro detail would show up.

And here we have my final image. I had completed my portion of the design, the base for which Tim would add his own design touches to in order to polish the piece.

The finishing touches by Tim

After receiving the final design from Stani, I decided to add a bit of the “Assault” flair to the design including some text, our hidden logo, (It’s in there I promise you) as well as some abstract splats to the lion and flames. I duplicated the entire design, and set the layer mode of the duplicate to color dodge. Next, I played with the opacity and levels to give the design more contrast, and more importantly a few less colors so we could afford to print the shirt!

What you see above is the final version of the design and you can purchase the, “One Year As A Lion” T-Shirt over at the Assault Online Store. You can also purchase Stani’s other design, the 1984 t-shirt, which we will also have a, “making of” blog post in the near future.

Related Posts

• Tutorial: Creating your own Photoshop Custom Brushes
• Assault Grunge Photoshop Brushes
• Tutorial: Photoshop Brush Dynamics
• Tutorial: Trendy Lightbursts step by step tutorial

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.)

Josh Smith, the designer behind one of my most favorite websites, Hydro 74 informed me that the first, “Back in Black T-Shirt Show” took place a few weeks ago, and some nice footage from the show has surfaced online at Vimeo. If you haven’t seen it yet check it out below, but definitely check out his design portfolio. It’s a constant source of inspiration for me and a lot of other designers out there. You can also find Josh on Twitter.

Back in Black T-Shirt Show from Solid Motive on Vimeo.

The Back In Black T-shirt show was hosted at Palehorse Gallery in St. Pete, FL on Nov 22nd, 2008. This show had an excellent turnout, and showcased the work of talented apparel artists, and illustrators from both sides of the Atlantic. The lineup included:
Dan Mumford
God Machine
HorseBites
Hydro 74
Iron Forge Press
Jeff Hamada
Jimiyo
Los Fokos
Munk One
Pale Horse
Pencil Bomb
Ray Frenden
Rob Schwager
Shanesart
Tech Vector
Tristan Eaton
Julie West
YWFT (Mike Cina)
Zenvironments

If they ever come any closer to Chicago, I’ll definitely try to catch the show. The shirts look amazing!

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.