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

The one tool you need in your toolbox as a band (which basically makes you a small business owner) is to install and configure Analytics on your website. Do yourself a favor and get off of MySpace. At the very least MySpace should just be used as another avenue to reach fans, not your only or primary point of contact. For this particular tutorial, we use WordPress as our content management system of choice. I recommend WordPress to anyone who asks me simply because of how easy it is, and how easy it is to integrate Google Analytics.

If you’ve already setup Google Analytics you can skip down a ways on the page as I go into the aspects of Google that will mean the most to you. It’s a good idea to look over the initial setup to make sure you’ve done everything properly. The way I setup Google does enable tracking on a few more important items that you don’t get by just copying and pasting the code Google supplies to you.

Get WordPress or a something similar CMS

With WordPress you have two choices to setup your site:

1. Download the software and install it to your web host (Recommended)
2. Host your website remotely on yourname.wordpress.com (less freedom)

Some hosting providers like Media Temple have a one click install for WordPress. This helps things along considerably. If you can’t afford your own domain name and/or hosting. Signup for an account on WordPress.com. Your name will be YOURNAME.wordpress.com to start, but you won’t be able to have complete freedom over the look and feel of your site.

If you have no other choice, start with option 2. You can always export your data and import it to your own web hosted .com later.

Signup for a Google Analytics account using your Google account name

I’ve had a Gmail account for awhile now so all I had to do was go to Google.com/analytics and sign up for an analytics account.

Setup your profile

Setting up your profile is as simple as putting in your website address for each website you have. If you want to setup e-commerce tracking for your online store you have to enable this option later. For now, just enter in the basic information for your site.

Our site already has a profile so the additional site we just setup appears below that domain name. (assault.it.com) You’ll also notice that the status icon is a little alert. That’s because we need to actually setup the embed code on the site.

Click on the edit link on the right, and then click on the Check Status link over to the right

Now you’ll see what we need to get our hands on which is the Google Tracking code. (On the right) You can just copy and paste this into your site if you’re not using WordPress, but it’s better to integrate it with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin so you can enable additional features not offered with just copying and pasting the code.

If you just copy/paste the code into your site you won’t get any of the additional benefits setup like goal funnels so don’t do that.

Leave this window open for now, and I’ll explain how to implement this code with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin in the next step.

Download/Install/Activate The Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress to your blog

You’re better off using the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin for a 3 reasons:

1. The plugin will track outbound clicks to see where people are leaving your site and what links they are clicking on when they do leave your site.
2. The plugin will automatically put the proper code on all aspects of your site, and when an upgrade is available it’s as easy as clicking upgrade.
3. Your downloads will automatically be tagged as /downloads/wp-content/uploads/your-file-name.zip so you can get an idea of how many downloads you are getting.

To download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin you can either add it through the administration interface by going into your WordPress Admin area: http://www.whateveryourdomainis.com/wp-admin and then click on the arrow next to the Plugins link and click “Add New”.

Then, do a search for “Google Analytics for WordPress” and it should be the first result. Install and move on to the next step or install it manually via the directions for installation on the plugins’ WordPress page which I have pasted below:

Input your Google tracking code

Remember the code we left open in another window from before? This is where we need that code again.  You just need the id off of your tracking code which I’ve highlighted below, not the entire copy/paste code that Google gives you.

Copy that part of the code and paste it into the configuration text box like I have below.

Set up your settings similar to how I have to ensure you’re tracking downloads as well as outbound clicks from your site.

Collect the data!

Gather several weeks worth of data before you really go in and analyze where people are coming from and what parts of your site are most popular.

What’s important?

Depending on how you are using your site there are a variety of things that could be of importance to you. (Besides just actual traffic of course)

If you’re using your website as a place where you can push your music to the fans with downloads then that’s going to be one of your most important areas to pay attention to. To view your download statistics go to the content report, and then “Top Content” section.

Then filter your content by downloads by typing “/downloads” into the text box as I have below:

Another thing to pay attention to is your  traffic sources. How are users finding you? Google searches? Reverbnation? MySpace? Twitter? Blog posts?

Want to increase/decrease the date range?

Been a few months since you installed the plugin code? How about increasing the date range from the past month to the past few months? Or past few days? Do that on the dashboard where you see the calendar:

Setup Goals (AKA Super Fucking important)

After you’ve ensured your data is being collected you’re going to want to setup goals.

Goals allow you to setup a flow on the site for how they find you up until they actually do something. (For istance,  download a file off of a specific page)

There are 3 types of goals you can setup, the most important to us being the URL destination which allows us to set a user path for a visitor coming to our site. Name the goal and select URL destination and you’ll see the rest of the Goal Details options that I have in the screen capture below:

“Goal URL” is the second have the the name of the page the user should end up on, and goal value is something to set up if you’re setting a monetary value for something like a digital download. For instance, if you have a file uploaded to your site as I have above, your goal URL would be downloads/wp-content/uploads/name-of-the-file-you-uploaded.zip

Note: You can take this link from the information in your Top Content section like I showed you how to do above.

If you want to track users from say, your homepage to your downloads page you can enter in the separate steps a user would take to get from your homepage to your actual file download.

If I had 4 pages I could enter them all in each field and name each step to determine how many users are able to make it through the entire goal funnel.

At Assault’s online clothing store, we use goals to track our user’s sticking points in our shopping cart check out process. If we find there are a lot of users abandoning their carts after they get to a specific step in the checkout process, we know there must be some sort of usability issue.

One of the coolest aspects of the goals and e-commerce tracking is that you can determine where your actual converted sales/downloads are coming from most. (Meaning the websites that send you the most downloads and money!)

Google analytics goals are critical when determining what social networks to push your music to the hardest, which blogs to keep pimping your free gear to cause their audience buys digital music, which twitter users are giving you shoutouts, etc. etc.

I say again, setting up Goals and Goal Funnels will give you visual proof of where you are having success with getting your music downloaded. I can’t stress this point enough!

If you find most of your users aren’t getting to your music downloads, then you need to give them a clearer call to action on all your pages.

If you’re users are bouncing after :20 seconds and only visiting one page, then they’re not finding what they came to your site for.

There are HUNDREDS of things you can learn from all the data Google gives you. Are your fans primarily hitting the page on the site with your pictures? Are they coming to the free download of a song you offered them that got plugged by a blog? Are they looking at your bio because you have a hot chick lead singer and they want to see if she’s single? (Assault‘s top viewed page on our store is for our zombie t-shirt. Go figure.)

Analytics is the key to your online strategy. It tells you what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. It’ll also tell you what your fans want more of, and if you’re getting them to the right place in the fewest amount of clicks.

Want more info? Did you get stuck at a certain point? Want some one on one advice? Send me a message on Twitter or post in the comments. I reply to just about everything that comes my way.

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

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.)

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.

Convincing Mom and Dad to let you go move to LA to be a professional musician probably won’t fly with most parents, but believe it or not it is possible to learn another skill to help you get a step closer towards your ultimate career goals; albeit a step from a different direction. You may even find another skill you enjoy along the way.

While my parents would have supported me had I told them I wanted to be a professional musician and not go to college, they surely wouldn’t be paying my rent while I play open mic nights at the Double Door inbetween shifts at my $7.15 an hour barista job.

Here’s five careers you may enjoy just as much as music that can also help you achieve your ultimate goal of being a professional musician.

5. Writer

This may be the most obvious item on this list because obviously, good song writing elicits better music–but hey you could always just have Diane Warren write your music like Aerosmith did.

4. Teacher

While there may not be a possibility to network directly in your industry like some of the other jobs on this list, as a teacher you get weekends and summers to go play shows and go on tour. It seems to have worked for Art Garfunkel, Gene Simmons, and Sting.

3. Social Media Specialist

No, I don’t mean a twitter PR zombie that you find producing assloads of worthless shit that no one cares about–that’s not a Social Media Specialist. I’m talking about a specialist who not only has a good network of friends and knows how to launch an event, but can also write press releases and get your announcements syndicated through Google news and in all the local publications in the area.

Now that everyone’s on the Twitter bandwagon, you can find literally hundreds of other musicians, and music journalists that are within reach of 140 character message or less.

2. Sound Designer

Maybe a no brainer, but a talented sound designer can not only help get your music recorded in a high quality manner, but they can also be a good resource for networking with other bands and people in the industry. Chances are good if they have the proper access, you can save yourself a few thousand dollars experimenting with studio equipment, or renting studio time to lay down your fat beats.

Trent Reznor started out working as a janitor and assistant sound engineer in his earlier career and he recorded demos during unused studio time leading to him getting signed to his first record deal. Not too bad for a college dropout. His most recent endeavor with Janes Addiction just launched this past week: Nin|ja2009 and has CD quality audio available for free!

1. Web Designer/Developer

While you may disagree with a good portion of my list, I’m almost positive this is one of the jobs you can agree with. With music going digital and major record labels pouring all of their dollars into lawyers pockets instead of towards making quality music, now is an even better time to become your own producer and distributor of content and music.

If you have the tools to build your own site, and design your own graphics, you’ve saved yourself a ton of time and money trying to find someone else to help you with the details. Any decent web developer/designer can make a custom Myspace page, create your own merch store at a place like Big Cartel, implement a blog into your site, and get your music online and distributed to the masses. More importantly, a resourceful designer/developer can also build an entire unified online presence for your band that extends to the print world as well if need be.

Honorable mentions: Morning Radio Jockey, Copyright Lawyer, Graphic Designer, actor, (It’s doing wonders for Joaquin!)

Have another job I missed? Share it in the comments!

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)

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

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

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

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 Assault Shirts Blog is looking better than ever. Bloody spatters, zombies, and those fancy swirly things–my favorite combination of photoshop brushes. I will eventually be supplying a huge amount of custom brushes that I have gathered over the years, but for now you’ll just have to settle for a testing version of this blog’s WordPress theme in a .zip file. I offer no support for this file, and it is a testing version of a modified theme called Dark Water by AntBag.com.

I repeat, DO NOT ASK ME FOR SUPPORT ON THIS FILE AS I BARELY HAVE TIME TO FIX MY OWN SITE’S PROBLEMS. I recommend checking out the Official WordPress site for any blog related issues not pertaining to our fabulously designed shirts.

Assault Blog Theme download 1.0