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

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to come home at the end of a normal 8 hour work day only to have to sit back down at your computer and start plugging away at more design work, or more development work like I do every day.

There’s a few things I’ve done in the past that always seem to help me find the motivation, and/or inspiration to get back to work. Most of the things I do are somewhat non-conventional in terms of what some “finding inspiration” articles tell you such as, “Go see a museum!”, or “go walk around the park!” Those suggestions never seemed to help me, and it always felt like I was wasting precious time. Here’s a few tried and tested ways that have helped me stay focused, motivated, and inspired to do more work after an already long work day:

FFFFound (or FFFound with WordPress)

If you’re going to surf the web, try to limit your surfing to places like FFFFound, or start your own personal bookmarking service with WordPress like I did. It doesn’t take long to go through literally hundreds of all sorts of different pieces of illustration, photography, and graphic design pieces that you surely can find some sort of idea, or at the very least some really weird shit that might spark an idea.

A Collection of Good Quotes

I made a post of my most favorite inspirational quotes that I refer to quite often while I’m in the middle of designing t-shirts. It helps ground you and at times can give you a new theme for a design idea. Clipping them with Evernote, or just pasting them into your Facebook profile is what I like to do.

Graphic Novels

Believe it or not I have found graphic novels to be a great source of inspiration for my design work, as well as some of my writings here on the blog and on twitter. Some of my favorites:

• V for Vendetta
• The Killing Joke
• The Watchmen

The illustrations are fantastic, and sometimes the symbolism, themes, and characters are the most interesting part of the novel more so than even the artwork.

Watch Academy Award Speeches

Besides Memorial Day when Saving Private Ryan is on TV unedited, the only other time I tear up in front of the TV is when I watch the Academy Awards. Maybe it’s because I was a film student and ultimately wanted to be a big time Hollywood Director, or maybe it’s because you actually get to see people achieving their ultimate childhood dreams right in front of your eyes. Besides Intervention, you’ll never see a more honest dose of, “reality television.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P552i5xx8ww

Put a shitty Action Movie On in the Background

This may sound counter intuitive to helping get yourself motivated, or inspired, but I’ve found that when I put on old action movies that I’ve seen plenty of times, like Underworld, Doomsday, or Death Race, that it’s actually easy for me to ignore them, and focus on what I’m working on. Plus there’s no temptation to actually sit there and watch what ever may be on. Trying to watch something like Heroes or Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles always has me whipping my head around to see what’s going to happen next. Not so good if you are supposed to be working.

This is going to sound weird… but try trance music

You don’t have to listen to any specific kind of trance music, and I’m an expert on the subject by any means… For some reason, though, I am able to blast through design work and programming. Much like the shitty action movie, it focuses your mind on the task at hand, and doesn’t allow you to become distracted by what you’re listening to.

I can’t think of any time I was ever compelled to sing along to trance music like I do when my iTunes shuffles to “Fat Bottom Girls,” by Queen, or “Beat It,” by Michael Jackson. Best part about trance music is that you can find it for free in the Radio section of iTunes. Some of my personal favorite free, streaming stations are Vocal Trance, and House music from DI.fm.

Honorable Mentions: Turn off AIM, Turn off Twitter, drink Red Bull.

Have any of your own little ways to get motivated? How about posting 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 Photoshop Brush Set 1 (2mb .abr file)

From time to time I like to export my brushes to upload onto our webserver for backup. (We currently have several thousand custom Photoshop brushes in our library now) We’ve decided to release a few of these brushes at a time to the readers of the site for free!

To install the brush set simply double click on 08312008_assault_set1.abr file after it’s been downloaded and it will launch Photoshop and install the brushes to your brush palette. (To view the brushes hit the “b” key and right click anywhere on your canvas and scroll down the window. You should see the new brushes there)

Have your own brush sets? Know of another link I haven’t included? Post it in the comments!

Photoshop Brush Resources

• Deviant Art
• Brusheezy
• Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
• How to create your own Photoshop brushes

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

The Skull Wing Assault shirt was made in similiar fashion to the Red Assault and Green Assualt shirts. This shirt is printed on the American Apparel 50/50 Jersey T-Shirt which in our opinion is the best/most comfortable shirt on the market now. (They’re also sweat shop free!)

If you’d like to download some of the custom shapes used in this design you can get them for free here.

I do believe that I primarily used custom brushes for this shirt, not shapes, and you can download the custom brushes here. There is also a brush set that I used that contains the winged shapes you see here. They are modified slightly, but the shape I started with is in this downloadable Photoshop brush set. There was also one font that I used for this which I can’t seem to track down but it is called Skulls TS 2. Download Skulls TS 2 Font face for free here

As always we ask that you keep buying our shirts instead of just downloading our brushes and making your own! We got mouths to feed!

Want to design this t-shirt on your own? Download all the custom Photoshop shapes that I used to make this design. Double click on the .csh file and they’ll install themselves to your Photoshop custom shapes tool. (You can access this tool by right click on your canvas when using your custom shapes tool.)

All we ask is that you don’t design the exact same shirt and then try to sell them. if you do this Mr. 51% will have to hunt you down and do scary things to you.

To download the high resolution image of this shirt click here, or click here on my t-shirt SEO optimized link here which we will call the t-shirt design download green grunge free. (or you can click the image to the left.

The Red Assault T-Shirt is by far the best and my personal most favorite graphic t-shirt that I have designed to date. Unlike all the other graphic t-shirts out there, this shirt costs just $19.99 and features an over-sized print on the very trendy American Apparel 50/5o jersey t-shirt. It’s one of the few shirts where you can actually see the name of the FUCKING BRILLIANT company who made the shirt, Assault.

It being that this shirt was created in a half hour (yes, most of the designs take hours, but this one poo-pooed itself out in a few minutes of brilliance) I’ve decided to supply you with the tools to make the magic happen on your own designs. Granted, there isn’t a sweet printing company like Merchspin to make the magic actually, physically print onto your t-shirts, but it’s a good head start.

As always, like it? Hate it? Comment below? I’d love to post a tutorial series on how I design my shirts, as well as give some insight to the process as to how we make this all happen… Anyone interested? Email us, comment, let us know and I’ll make it happen.

Red Assault Shirt custom photoshop shapes

The first Assault Apparel item Craig and Tim have seen first hand, (via photo on the internet) This print features an oversized design done completely in black on a white American Apparel 50/50 Jersey T-shirt. (sorry girls, for now it’s guys only)

The print is oversized and goes over the seam as well as over the collar. It easily adds 3 inches to your forearms and 10 inches to your chest muscles. (even if you have moobs, we’re all gonna be there some day anyways)

It being that this was one of the designs that came to light via some hardcore miller lite drinking and house music listening, I highly recommend you wear this shirt to the club and to any important presidential speeches, especially if you’re gonna be on TV. We need all the free press weez kin git!

Like it? Hate it? Want to download the photoshop brushes? Let us know.

This shirt originally looked a bit more like the Punisher’s logo, but in fear of getting sued by DC Comics I decided to dress it up like an old Spartan Warrior. Take that Marvel! I made this using many of my custom shapes and custom brush sets in Photoshop which I have decided to post here on this as a free download. Do with them what you like, but don’t make an exact copy of my shirt and get it printed on your own! Let me save you the trouble by pointing you in the direction of the Skull Spartan Warrior’s product page on our official store.

As of now it’s only $22.99, if you can’t afford that then you shouldn’t be able to afford an internet connection.

As promised here is the zip containing several items: click to download the custom Photoshop skull shapes, and the custom star random brushes. Click the image to the right to download the high resolution image of the Skull Spartan Warrior T-Shirt. I cannot take credit for the custom shapes, but the custom brushes are all mine baby. You’re getting a spartan warrior custom shape, and a few skull shapes that I found on my long trek through the internet.

For those of you new to Photoshop, you must use custom shapes and brushes in your designs. They’ll save you hours of time and it brings you to the next level of Photoshop. Be sure you have a high powered machine of some kind cause they tend to eat up processing power and RAM. I prefer using my Dual 2ghz Powermac G5 with a gig of ram. (I know I need more) Photoshop CS2 runs like a charm!

Download custom photoshop shapes of skulls, spartan warrior in vector format