This shirt was designed around the same time that Proposition 8 made headlines in the state of California. Proposition 8 was side note to an election ballot that was primarily used to strip away the previously granted rights of gay couples to legally marry. The new wording of the ammendment essentially stated that, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

What most people don’t know about Proposition 8 is that it marked the first time in American history that the rights of a group of people was taken away after being granted by law. Who do we have to thank for this black mark on the history of our country? None other than the Roman Catholic Church, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons.

These two groups were heavy proponents of Proposition 8, even donating hefty sums of money to the overall campaign in favor of passing the amendment. Does that sound fair? A tax-free organization that is allowed to contribute around 50% of the total budget to lobby against a cause it opposes? A tax-free organization that doesn’t even reside in the state where the election ballot ammendment vote is taking place?

No matter the person, no one should have their rights limited, and no book should dictate the status quo. Gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights. The pursuit of happiness should belong to every man woman and child. Repeal prop8.

This shirt was designed by me, (Tim Toomey) and depicts an 8-legged spider stepping on the bill of rights which grants us our basic freedoms.

To purchase the Anti-Proposition of Hate Section 8 T-Shirt click here
(Currently priced at $22.99 but you can get 10% off with the discount code HANDHSAKE)

More images of this shirt

Shirt depicted below on Kyle Smith, lead singer of the band, A Hero Named Hope

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!

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

High resolution 1984 image

For some time now I’ve wanted to design a shirt inspired by 1984. The newest member of the Assault team, John Staniforth took on the challenge to bring this entire deisgn to life,  and this is the final product which I’m proud to say is some of our best work yet. 90% of the design work came from Stani’s mind, and the other 10% was myself adding color and a few other elements to, “take it to the next level.”

This Orwellian design’s focus is on the subject of totalitarian rule; rule brought about through the tyrannical control of thoughts, beliefs and ideals. By censoring and controlling the doctrine of which people live by, through the constant barrage of the oppressive propaganda machine, power is taken from the outreaching open hands of the many and tightly grasped by the clinching fists of the elitist few.  Through surveillance, censorship, fear of random violence, fear of torture, fear of nuclear war and death, freedom becomes not only an unspeakable word but an unthinkable and unobtainable ideal.

This design was created using a combination of digital matte painting, as well as grafting images together in Photoshop to achieve the final look. It also utilized several custom Photoshop brushes and shapes that we’ve created using our custom Photoshop brush tutorial.

If you’d like to see this shirt in high resolution, click on the image above. You can buy this shirt for $22.99 currently on the 1984 t-shirt product page over at Assault.

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.

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!

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!

After attempting to debunk how Tom Muller did some of his work for Wired magazine I decided to ask him a few additional questions such as  where he gets his inspiration from, and how he got involved in graphic design. Here’s what he had to say…

AssaultBLOG: You mention in pretty good detail how you got out of college in Antwerp and were sort of poking around the yellow pages looking for a “real world” job as your father had pushed you to get into as soon as possible, and that you wanted to get into “THE COOL STUFF”. I know that looking back on college there was a few things I wish I had done differently… and was wondering if you could go back would there be anything you would do differently?

Hmm… Not really. I had a great time in college actually. I didn’t always see eye to eye with my teachers (who does?), but overall I had a good experience; and especially my graduation project was something I had complete control over and that kind of kick started my professional career. The only thing I’d change if I could go back is pay more attention to design history.

AB: Are there any somewhat non-traditional or unusual places you look for design influence?

Anything and everything really. I don’t go looking for specific things to get inspiration. Can be anything – something I see, read, hear… very random.

AB: Most designers struggle with knowing when a project is complete, and personally I know I always have a hard time deciding when a design is done–Can you think of one or two projects in the past ten years in that you were most satisfied with the results? Was there ever a really challenging project that you had a hard time nailing down ideas, or deciding when a design was finished?

To be honest I’m really happy with the stuff I’m currently doing. That’s not to say that my older work has lost its value, but looking back I can see the errors and me struggling a bit finding my way and style if you will. I’d say the work from 2004 onwards is the work I’m most proud of, where I feel that I finally got into a direction I’m happy with – with the Mam Tor Publishing and Ashley Wood projects in particular.

AB: You mention in your blog that you were highly experimental with Photoshop in its early stages ten years ago when it had a 99 layer limit. Since your beginning use with Photoshop has there been one feature, or technique that you can remember learning that totally changed the way you work and design in the software?

Well, “highly experimental” is mildly overstating that I basically didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning and just playing around finding my way around the application and being very impressed with lens flare effect and the like.

I think the computer as a whole changed my way of working, because I got into it pretty late (I was 24 when I finally got my own Mac at home) and used to draw and paint more. So going digital was a complete change for me.

AB: The design work on hellomuller.com spans a broad range of mediums–is there one particular medium that you’ve found you enjoy the most and if so why?

Its all of them. Its all graphic design, just applied to a different medium – be it in print or on screen. I like both, thats why I do them. Although I love doing web design, I need to be able to do some print work to counter balance looking at html and work at 72dpi all day.

Being able to switch between designing a site, or a book, or a logo is what keeps everything fresh and interesting. I don’t want to be doing the same thing all the time.

AB: Are there any mediums you would like to transition into in the future that you may have not already tackled?

Designing a title sequence for a feature film would be interesting to do I think. And comics/graphic novels of course. That one is always high on the list, its just a matter of finding the time and putting my money where my mouth is.

AB: I know you recently launched a website collaboration with your wife…what is it like to collaborate with her, and do you find that collaboration in general makes for better design? Or is there a perfect formula for the number of “chefs in the kitchen” where the design work tends to turn out the best?

Collaborating with her is great. Design-wise we really click in terms of what we like, how we approach a problem and execute it. She’s much more technical than me, so when we’re designing a book for example more often than not she’ll end up designing the actual guts of the book while I play with the more superficial stuff like logos etc. She’s also really good in cutting through the design bullshit and go for effortlessly simple solutions, whereas I’m always trying to come up with needlessly complex visuals and over design it to the point where a seemingly random dot is actually placed in some grid I made up. Just for that dot.

AB: Do you feel it’s important for designers to do personal work and use their skills to address social and economic issues as well as to keep their own voice?

Well, one aspect of being a graphic designer is that you have to realize you’re working in a service industry, and that its our job to communicate other people’s messages. Whether that’s for a global corporation or the local salvation army.

On the other hand I think its very important that designers initiate personal work, if only to keep things interesting and grow creatively.

Relevant Links:

• Comic Book Tattoo – The graphic anthology of the year
  
• Hello Muller
• Tom’s Blog
• Mr. and Mrs. M (Tom and his wife’s site)

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 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.

The Radioactive II T-shirt was conceived in a night of furious T-Shirt design by yours truly. I belted out I think 3 shirts that night. (I was consuming Miller Lites until I couldn’t see straight, at which time t-shirt creation came to a hault) Like most of my t-shirt designs I had an idea of what I wanted the design to look like at the begining of said process, but generally they end up looking nothing like the original vision. The hardest part is trying to decide when the shirt is done. This mostly explains why there are two versions of this design.

Crank up the streaming techno/house music from iTunes and be on your way with your custom shapes/brushes and Photoshop techniques that you have mastered over the years, and I’m sure could come up with this design in about 30 minutes. (At least that’s how long I think it took) I took the liberty of tracking down the falcon shape and putting it here for you to download: Fascist Falcon Custom Photoshop Shape.

There’s a famous quote riddled throughout this design that I liked so much I turned it into a custom brush shape and used it on several of the other shirts. I appreciated this quote for the irony of it and it’s direct relation to many of the main themes involved with most of our shirts. I hesitate to reveal who said the quote because I do believe I will be using it for a discount code one of these days.

The design’s print is oversized in two colors predominantly over the left shoulder. Unlike it’s sister deisgn the Radioactive 1 T-Shirt it does not go over the seem, but is equally as cool.