We love Motion City Soundtrack here at Assault, and their new record My Dinosaur Life is by far the best thing we’ve heard yet in the new year. So imagine how pumped I was to see that frontman Justin Pierce did a little feature with MTV (apparently they want to get back into the music business) wherein he teaches you how to play the new MCS songs “Disappear” and “The Weakends” on guitar. This kind of stuff is always rad for people (such as myself) that are too damn stupid to figure out guitar tabs. I’m sure our own Mr. 51% will be all over these videos, and you should check ‘em out too – learning how bands actually play their songs is pretty damn cool. Obviously this isn’t Eddie Van Halen teaching you to shred the fuck out of “Eruption,” but I know it’ll take me at least two weeks to absorb the mad knowledge Mr. Pierce is kickin.’ So click this link (or the pretty picture to your right) and you’ll be transported to a dreamworld of guitar magic.

At Assault, we’re all about doing it yourself, and we recently got into contact with a band on Twitter called Trippy Wicked. Needless to say we liked them, and their new album and were delighted to find that they’d posted an in-depth how to on releasing an album on your own, independent of any record label. We’ve asked their permission to repost their blog as we feel it’ll probably help a few of you looking to for help on releasing and promoting your own indie record.

Topics covered include:

• Why release your own music?
• What goes into releasing an album?
• Pressing CDs
• PQ sheets and CD Masters
• Cover Songs
• Artwork
• Digital Distribution
• Spotify
• UPC/EAN/Barcode
• ISRCs
• Physical Distribution
• Release Date
• Websites and Web Presence

On 30th October 2009 we will release our debut full length album Movin On. We recorded in June this year, there’s just under a month to go before the release date and there is still a hell of a lot to do. I’m writing this still in the thick of it to get a real sense of what’s going on. So why are we releasing it ourselves and what actually goes into releasing an album?

Why release your own music?

Because you can. It’s 2009, we are living in the future, worldwide digital distribution is available for pennies, worldwide physical distribution is available at your local Post Office, you can do your own marketing, YouTube exists, MySpace/Facebook exists, Twitter exists blah blah blah and so on. The mid 80′s are thankfully nothing but a distant memory.

The possibility of releasing our own music had always been at the back of my mind and I had tested the water with a few labels to be met mostly with silence. I could have contacted a lot more labels, spent a few months hassling them for a response and then maybe getting a release early next year if we were lucky but we decided to go it alone and get it done ourselves. I probably wouldn’t rule out working with a label in the future but doing it ourselves is the best way for us right now.

What goes into releasing an album?

As much or as little as you want. There’s nothing to stop you making an album, burning the CDs, designing/printing/cutting/folding/inserting the covers and inlays yourself. I did this for our first 2 demos and selling something you made entirely from scratch like this feels damn good.

Movin On, however, is a full album and a lot of love and effort went into writing and making it so there was no question about making this a proper release. A lot goes into preparing for a proper release even for an underground band. More than you may realise. I’ve learnt a lot about barcodes, ISRCs, CD Replication/Duplication, preparing artwork for print, why pictures on screen look different when they’re printed, how to include cover songs, digital distribution, red book standard, PQ sheets etc.

Pressing CDs

I went with Testa-Rossa in the UK based on a couple of recommendations from friends and so far so good. They’ve been quick to respond to my questions and quick to email any forms I need to sign. As a general rule if you want fewer than 500 copies you’re going for duplication and anything over this you’re going for replication. Duplication involves CD-Rs and a process similar to burning your own except with much larger and faster machines. Replication involves the creation of a glass master and metal stamper to ‘press’ your CDs. There are lots of pressing plants and it’s worth checking out their websites to see what information they offer about things like artwork as the amount of details varies from place to place. There is debate in the underground DIY community on the merits of using replication of duplication but for me replication is the more professional route.

Before this gets under way though you need to approve the artwork and we had ours sent to us as PDFs. Printed proofs can be ordered at cost (both time and money) for the super careful. You also need to sign an IRP (Intellectual Property Rights) and Sound Recording Copyright form. This is basically where you state that yes this is your own music, you own the sound recording copyright/publishing rights and if not you have to specify who does.

PQ sheets and CD Masters

The format for writing CDs is Red Book. Red Book specifies various standards such as the physical parameters of the CD, max playing time, data storage, ISRCs (more on these below) etc. A PQ sheet lists all the track start and end times, ISRCs for the songs and track names. PQ sheets are used as a check-list when the glass master is created. The chances are you wont be doing this part yourself though and it will be handled by whoever created your master CD. For us, the PQ sheet was created by Testa-Rossa and I had to check the tracks times, names and ISRCs and sign it off as ok before they started pressing the CDs.

Cover Songs

We recorded a cover song and right up until the last minute we were going to include it on the album. I had sought the advice of friends that were involved with or ran record labels and the advice was, don’t worry about copyright, you’re a very small band and if the publisher picks up on it they’ll simply come and ask you for the royalties you owe them. This didn’t quite sit right with me as I knew full well we had a cover song and that really I should do something about it if we were to use it. During the process of sorting digital distribution and getting the CDs pressed I would have had to have lied several times either stating the copyright/publishing right was ours or that we had gone through the necessary steps for using someone else’s material.

The actual steps for using copyrighted material are actually relatively simple and I chose not to do them out of sheer laziness. Running a band, releasing an album and working a full time job is time consuming to say the least. The basic process is to identify who owns the publishing rights, write them a letter stating what you’re going to use and then pay them monthly royalties according to your sales. CDBaby give a really good description of this process in their artist FAQ. We may well include the cover on our next album though because it’s an awesome song that needs to get an airing at some point.

Artwork

You have to have some good artwork for your release even if it’s a digital only release and by good I mean appropriate to your sound and style. If you can’t do it yourself and you don’t know anyone that can help find someone on deviant ART or Flickr who’s work you like, contact them and see if they want to help out. The world is full of the most incredible artists and I’m sure many of these will jump at the chance to create something for your music. Our album cover was taken care of by a friend based on some rough ideas we described to him, a lot of which were taken from the experiences we had whilst recording.

I handled the rest of the CD inlay myself. Most, if not all, CD pressing plants will supply templates for you to use and insist that you do so according to their strict guidelines. Preparing artwork for print is different from preparing artwork for your computer and you need to be aware that the colours of your artwork on screen will vary when printed so make sure you print out tests as you go. Basically your screen is displaying colour by mixing red, green and blue and on paper colours are created by mixing cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) so the two systems are interpreting the same colour information in different ways. My experience has been that the same colours appear more vibrant and full on screen than in print. You’ve also gotta know that black in print is not just black; it’s a mix of the four colours. When printing black in CYMK all four colours are laid down at about 75% and the art department of the pressing plant will tell you exactly what they require. There are a million and one descriptions of the difference between RGB and CYMK so go feed your head.
Any template you use will most likely specify a certain amount of bleed as well. This is where the artwork stretches beyond the physical edge (e.g. 3mm) of the format you’re designing for to allow for any minor inacuracies of the cutting machine. If someone else is doing your artwork make sure they are aware of this and don’t design an image that would suffer from losing a few millimetres here and there.

Digital Distribution

Setting up digital distribution was tough and stressful because deadlines were looming. I had been planning on using CDBaby for some time but changes to the company earlier this year have let down a lot of independent artists and labels in a big way. This was a major problem for me as one of the main aims was to get the album into Spotify. There are currently very few options for independent artists to do this and CDBaby has been the main contender for a while. I very nearly went with them but their tarnished reputation and bad customer service with my initial contact led me straight to RecordUnion. Immediate responses in the affirmative to the questions I had made it a no brainer. I took the risk and went with the lesser know service. So far so good.

Spotify

Dear America, I’m sorry you don’t have Spotify yet and I really hope it gets sorted soon. It absolutely rules and is big news over here in Europe. You have to use it to ‘get’ it but it’s basically an enormous library of music with a slick interface and works mind-bogglingly fast. I have a premium account so I can listen without adverts and use it on my phone. Listening to Pantera, Cowboys From Hell as I type this in case you’re wondering. Anyway at the time of writing there are 3 services you can use for digital distribution that will push your music to Spotify: CDBaby, RecordUnion and DittoMusic. After I discounted CDBaby I had a quick look at DittoMusic but the budget website and fact I had to pay before uploading any music or doing anything really put me off. I’ve just checked their website now and it’s looking a lot better so they may have upped their game recently. If Spotify is not your concern there are many other distributors to choose from. I used TuneCore for our EP Lowering the Tone and they were and still are excellent to work with. Research a few and work out which is best for you.

UPC/EAN/Barcode

In order to get your music into the digital stores you will need one of these and the digital distributor will be able to provide you with one. If they don’t then go somewhere else. I paid $10 for ours; cheap as chips. UPC stands for Universal Product Code, EAN stands for European Article Number and is basically a UPC with a extra digit in front (add a 0 to the front of your UPN and you have an EAN describing an America product). A barcode is a graphic representation of this that can be read by machines and uber-geeks with 20-20 vision. If you REALLY want to learn more about this have a look at the info on Wikipedia.

Once you’ve decided on your distributor, upload your music, artwork and complete any required details, buy a barcode, set your pricing plan if this is available, set a release date (generally allowing for the 6 – 8 weeks maximum time get your stuff live in the digital domain) and press the big red button. RecordUnion didn’t offer any pricing plans so everything will just be set at each digital store’s defaults. Others like CDBaby and TuneCore will allow you to choose different price bands for the digital stores that offer them.

ISRCs

International Standard Recording Code. An ISRC is a code that uniquely identifies a recorded song (or music video recording). RecordUnion provided me with ours once I’d uploaded the songs. You need to send these along with your audio master CD to the CD presser and they will encode each track with its corresponding ISRC. When you get your CD back and put it in your computer iTunes (or whatever) will look up the code and know what each track is and where it’s from.

Physical Distribution

I’m currently planning on selling the album using Big Cartel though I’m keen to see what the ReverbNation/Audiolife tools are like once they are public. I haven’t set this up yet though and the CD mailers I’m going to use literally turned up in the post today. I went for cardboard pizza box style instead of jiffy bags. Don’t just get the cheapest jiffy bag you can find because posting CDs is really not that expensive and if you take pride in your work package it so it won’t get damaged. I’ve also been contacted by a couple of online web shops that want to stock it and I’ve identified some others that I’m going to speak to. As far as I can tell the way this works is that you send them a bunch of CDs and when they sell some they let you know how many and you invoice them.

Find the online stores that stock your kind of music and make contact with them. I haven’t bothered with trying to get the CD into any independent shops yet as I’ve heard this can be time consuming and quite difficult. I’ll look into it for the next release though. I previously used PayPal buttons to sell Lowering the Tone through our website and MySpace but they were awkward to set up so I’m trying a different method this time.

Release Date

We waited until certain parts of the process were out of the way (getting the final master, artwork + CD layout complete) before deciding on a release date. There are so many factors involved and unforeseen changes to any of them can ruin a short deadline. Make sure you do set yourself a deadline though and take note of Parkinson’s Law; work will expand to fill the time given to it. If you give yourself a year it will take a year, if you give yourself four months it will take four months. Take into account that pressing CDs and pushing music to digital distributors takes time. The pressing plant we used gave a turnaround time of 10 to 15 working days. That’s up to 3 weeks and this doesn’t include approving artwork + any amendments, signing IPR forms, copyright disclaimers etc. Digital distributors will want you to upload your music up to 8 weeks in advance (the maximum I’ve seen, some are less) of your release date to allow the digital stores enough time to get your music listed. There’s no reason why you can’t have different physical and digital release dates though.

Websites and Web Presence

There’s a lot of debate and advice about what you should or shouldn’t do in terms of all the available places you can locate yourself on the internet. They all need working at and you need to understand how each one works. First up get yourself a website where you can pull all your online stuff together. I rebuilt ours over the last couple of weeks and it went live last week. If you don’t know how to build websites there are various services to do this for you. I have no experience with any so do some research but to start with there is Bandzoogle, Host Baby and I think ReverbNation offer a service in partnership with Bandzoogle. I also wanted a blog as well. I had used WordPress previously but found it to be far more complicated for what I needed and was a hassle because it’s constantly being updated. You need to install the updates yourself and it’s more than just a click of a button. I went with Blogger because I use it for my photo blog and is very simple and user friendly. If you want even more simple than this I’d suggest Tumblr.

Unfortunately I would suggest MySpace is still a must as most people expect you to have one and lots of promoters and webzines exist only on MySpace. It’s a good place for someone to have a quick listen to your music but make sure it’s not the only place. I gave up using iLike because its user interface was a pain to use and I don’t think anyone ever found us there. Twitter and Facebook are the some of the most popular at the moment and both are good when used well.

I’m using SoundCloud to host our music for streaming and when the album is released I’ll be making the whole thing available through them. They provide a very great customisable widget for you to use and their website is very slick and very user friendly. You can host your music with most of the usual suspects but for now I’m going with these guys for embedding our music on various websites.

Until recently I was using ReverbNation for our mailing list but I switched to FanBridge because I could customise the HTML of the signup form and their pricing plan is better for me. I’ve also been listing gigs and hosting music with them for a long time but I’m not sure how beneficial this is. They do provide lots of widgets for gigs, music, videos, mailing list signup and so on but they’re very heavily ReverbNation branded and not customisable enough for me to want to use them everywhere.

The one rule for ALL web presences is DO NOT SPAM. EVER. MySpace is an absolute shithole for this and if you spam me on MySpace we can never be friends, online or offline. Don’t send messages saying “I see you like so and so band so you should check us out and let us know what you think”. What I think is that you sound desperate and no I’m not interested in checking you out. The problem with spamming is that places like MySpace and Facebook make it so easy to do. Think about how many event/band/group/page invites you get that mean absolutely nothing to you and then make a conscious decision to not contribute to this.

This is pretty much where we are at with the release right now.

So what’s left?

The CDs are being pressed and the digital content is currently being pushed out to the digital retailers and streaming services all ready for 30/10/2009. T shirts are still to be designed and printed as well as stickers and badges, press packs have to be made up and I need to contact some bloggers and publications for reviews and interviews. There are also internet radio stations and podcasters to investigate (not looked at this at all yet). Gigs are being lined up for the end of this year and the beginning of 2010. Once the CDs are here I’ll be packing up a bunch ready to send out in time for release date and making up press packs for those that want a hard copy. I’m also going to look into some more web shops.

Money, time and effort are the three major factors to consider. A lot of the time you’re balancing the money you’re able to spend for services with the favours from friends you’re getting. You can’t hassle friends to hurry up if they’re doing an awesome job for you and doing it for free so you have to work to their timescales. There was a month or so when there was nothing I could do except for wait for a couple of parts to be complete and this was an odd time for me. I prefer to be getting my hands dirty rather than waiting round but I know when it’s time to step back and let the guy with the skills take over.

Everything else is just plain hard work especially if you’re gonna do most of it yourself. I’ve spent the last couple of years learning about and catching up on where the business and industry side of music has come from and where it’s going by putting in a lot of time reading various blogs and books. The last month has been the busiest this year and I’ve been working an hour at home before my day job, an hour at lunch and every spare hour I can grab in the evening and weekends.

If you need any inspiration for hard work and going DIY with any aspect of your music read Henry Rollins’ ‘Get in the Van’ Right now. You could also try reading ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ and watching ‘DIY or Die’.

If you’re thinking about releasing your own music stop thinking and start doing because you have complete control and it’s so rewarding. Just under four months ago we drove away from Dorset knowing we had the makings of a stonker of an album in our hands. In just under four weeks we’ll be releasing it. Roll on the 30th.

Check out Trippy Wicked’s website to get some of their music and be sure to checkout their blog. They’ve got some great info on there.

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.

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

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

Spend only what YOU can afford

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

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

Before you EVEN start your t-shirt company

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

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

T-Shirt Printing Equipment

Storenvy Printing and Free Online T-Shirt Stores

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

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

Akumu Ink

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

Online Store Systems

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

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

Domains are CHEAP! Buy one and forward it

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

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

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

Sole Proprietorship, Partnerships, Incorporation

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

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

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

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

“Doing Business As” or DBA Certificate

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

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

Federal Taxes, State Taxes

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

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

Small Business Checking Account

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

Accepting Credit Cards

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

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

(Opens in iTunes)

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

SSL certificate for secure online transactions

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

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

Launching your store

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

I Am The Trend - Your Guide For All Things Independent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lookout! Giants at the Metro Chicago

Account for lighting & other variables

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

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

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

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

Equipment: Digital SLR Camera

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

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

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

Equipment: External Flash

A Hero Named Hope live show at the Metro Chicago

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

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

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

Chris Huebner from the band, From the Broken

Camera Setup

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

Try using these camera settings as a starting point:

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

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

A few additional pointers, tips and tricks

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

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

Some final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Trace your design in Illustrator:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0yNFH99cWg

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

3. USE LAYER MODES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Need more help still?

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

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

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

Reducing image colors in preparation for a screen printing in Photoshop

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

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

Image > Adjustments > Posterize…

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

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

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

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

New Document Presets for Screen Printing T-Shirts

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

18x23 canvas with 300 dpi resolution in CMYK color mode

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

Getting Pantone color codes for exact color matches with your printer

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

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

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

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

2 minute color separation in Photoshop

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

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

• Click a color on your design
  

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

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmspWZqbc2Q

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

T-Shirt placement templates and mock ups

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

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

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

Related Links & Resources

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

I 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.

Hi I’m Jon Kruse. I run Mediocore Clothing and the blog How to Start a Clothing Company. When Tim and I got together to discuss writing a guest article for each others’ blogs, I was stumped on what to write about. In the end I decided to write about something that has helped me a lot but most people pass over it because they consider it common sense. What is this you ask? It’s called asking people for Help!

I use a three step approach

1. Connect on a personal level with someone.
2. Ask them for help.
3. Give them the tools they need.

When I first started I was very timid and I didn’t want to ask anyone for help. I would make up absurd milestones in my head that I had to reach before I would post on certain forums, websites, or even email friends that own clothing companies about helping me out. Looking back, I wasted too much time trying to do things by myself when there were so many people that wanted to help me and knew so much more than I did. It wasn’t until I let go of my fears of asking people for help that I finally started seeing returns in my business.

I hear from a lot of t-shirt companies that are starting out and looking for advice. I always tell them to have a great relationship with the t-shirt blogs and I have a couple articles about the subject “How to get your cool t-shirt reviewed“, “How I became one of the top online t-shirt companies by being a nice guy“. It really amazes me how many people will come back and say “ohh they wouldn’t post my shirt, it isn’t their style” or something along those lines. You will never know unless you try, and doing nothing is the fastest way to fail. I have had plenty of blogs post my shirts that didn’t really fall into what they normally post just because I have a good rapport with them.

Once I started making a personal connection with blog owners, I did the same thing with my customers. When you join my mailing list I give my background and what I believe in. I tell them about when I got fired from my job and decided to pursue something I really was passionate about–starting a clothing company. A lot of people can connect with my story because they know someone that has lost a job or have lost a job themselves. I always give out a couple of coupons with every order and ask my customers to tell their friends about my shirts. Some people will do this without you asking, but the simple act of asking someone to do something makes it a lot more likely that it will happen.

So let me go over those steps again.

Make a personal connection with someone.

I read a book called “You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself”. There is a ton of good advice in there but one of the stories that made a strong impression on me was about tipping waitresses. It said that when it came down to how much tip you would leave you would tip more to a waitress that made a personal connection with you over a waitress that provided the best service to you but didn’t connect with you. This is the opposite of what most of us were taught, that hard work and dedication will pay off, but really the most important thing is connecting with someone and making them feel like your friend.

How to connect

Myspace, emails, facebook, twitter, these are all great ways to connect with your fans. Johnny Cupcakes really has this nailed down, and even though he has only said one thing to me over the internet, I still would call him a friend. He also does things like a showing of gremlins and a free pizza party and these stories spread through the Internet like wildfire.

Ask them for Help

• When was the last time you helped someone for no reason at all?
• When was the last time you helped someone when they asked you?
• Just asking for help will increase the chances of them helping you tremendously.

Give them the tools they need

You have to make it as easy as possible for someone to help you or else they won’t do it. So many times I hear a band or artist asking for votes for a contest, but if I get to the website and I have to fill out a long form I usually just give up. This is how it is for most people, so give them the tools that will make it easy for them to do what you’re asking.

• When you want to have a blog post a new shirt, give them already hosted pictures to use, a bio of your company, and information about the shirt. The less work they have to do, the better.
• When you want a customer to tell their friends about your company, give them coupons to hand out. Get them on a mailing list with emails they can easily forward.
• Just doing these simple things will increase the chances of someone helping you.

Now get out there and ask for help!

Assault's most recent HTML Email blast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Images are disabled for security reasons

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

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

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

5. Fast, Good, Cheap – Pick two

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

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

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

The Incorrect Process

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

Two Ways to send your HTML Email

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

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

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

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

Other email services:

• Mail Chimp
• MyEmma

This past two months Assault has been nearly radio silent. After reading a post by Seth Godin on goals We realized that part of that reason we had slacked off was because we didn’t have any clear immediate goals in front of us. We met, and exceeded all of our 6 month goals for Assault and even most of our 1 year goals, but we didn’t have any new goals for 2009, and we decided to revise our goals. We’ve been doing just okay in the sales department and we decided it was time to take what we have and move it to the next level. Here’s what Seth Godin had to say about goals:

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

Since restructuring our goalswe’ve been more productive in blogging, researching printing equpiment, and doing new designs for our next line of clothing for Spring.

Quick Tips for your Goals

1. Set goals that are just barely out of reach, you’ll try harder that way
   
2. Print them out and put them in your wallet, closet, locker, and desk so you don’t forget them
   
3. Cross them out as you go, trust me it helps when you feel like you’re doing nothing
4. If you’re in a partnership like we are, split your tasks up and assign them to who they are most relevant to
5. If you haven’t, bookmark or subscribe to Seth Godin’s RSS feed, he gives great insight no matter what industry or business you’re in.
   

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

Don’t give away your shirts for free

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

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

GoMediaZine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monitor your site traffic for forum post links

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

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

Give coupon codes to sites that review shirts

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

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

Know of any good tips that I missed?

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

I’ve been a daily visitor of ffffound for some time now, but I have never been lucky enough to receive an invite to actually use it. It’s a GREAT source of inspiration for all types of design, and I constantly refer to it and the QBN pic of the day thread for some good laughs and beautiful pictures. After realizing that I had a spare domain name I decided it was time to try and hack together a WordPress theme with a few plugins that would emulate ffffound, and its related images feature.

Download the theme and necessary plugins: VNovember_ffff.zip
To see the final working version of this theme+plugins: VNovember Image Bookmarking

Preface – What this theme + plugins will/will not do

I knew my version wouldn’t function exactly like the real thing, because I don’t really know how it works, and because I am somewhat limited to what WordPress has to offer. There were a few key elements of ffffound that I felt were the most important and useful part of its service, and I’ll be trying to replicate that functionality with WordPress and a few Firefox addons:

• Related images and recommendations based on post content and tags
• Displaying related images on homepage and post pages
• Displaying tag counts on the left side of the page
• Come up with an easy way to post the images via iPhone, Scribefire (direct from Firefox) and an easy way to thumbnail the images. (CSS for now)

***I recommend using a blank, fresh WordPress installation with no posts. (Not even the Hello World post) Or else you’ll have to go through your database and unpublish all your content posts or else they will start showing up in your related posts section when we only want images to show up

Upload the theme + plugins

I was able to accomplish most of this with some fancy CSS for IE and a few workarounds. For the most part the site is very easy to post to and looks very similar to ffffound. All you need to get this theme working is the VNovember_ffff.zip which contains the WordPress theme and the necessary plugins. To get these plugins individually you can go to their respective homepages:

• Yet Another Related Posts plugin (This one you’ll have to take from my zip as it is modified to work with images instead of using only text)
  
• Configurable Tag Cloud plugin
• SEO Friendly Images plugin

After downloading the zip do the following to get your files in the right place.

1. Unzip the theme
2. Upload the files in the “plugins” directory to your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate Configurable Tag Cloud plugin, SEO Friendly Images plugin, and Yet Another Related Posts plugin via the WordPress Plugins page
4. Upload the theme files to wp-content/themes so that the vnovember_ffff directory resides in yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/vnovember_ffff

Configure the plugins

Now that you have all the files in place you need to configure them. The Yet Another Related Posts plugin has settings, but I’ve made custom function arrays for them so you should not have to modify the settings page for this plugin. If you would like more/less related images to show up you can edit the functions in the single.php file and the index.php  file included in the vnovember_ffff theme directory.

From your WordPress Administration you need to add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar. There are two sidebars with this theme, one on the left column and one in the bottom above the footer. Add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar1 and apply these settings:

Tags, Uploading Images, making it work

The way this theme works is by using the tags you apply to each post to determine which images are somewhat alike. Every time you tag something the plugin will search through your posts and find other images that are similar and display the closest matches.

The easiest way to get images posted quickly is by using the Scribefire Firefox plugin. It takes just a few seconds to upload an image, add the tags, and publish the post all from your browser window. (You can still post from the WordPress Admin if you’d like) You can also snap pictures with your iPhone and use the WordPress iPhone application to post images directly from your phone.

If you decide to use the Scribefire Firefox plugin I recommend turning off the max image with option so that Scribefire isn’t trying to put inline styles in your image tags.

Some important things to remember:

• This theme does not have any commenting or trackbacks enabled
• There’s no need for multiple categories-just use tags
• This theme will only work and display properly if you only post images in your post body section
• You can hot link to images or upload them. I recommend uploading images to your own server and putting them in your posts rather than stealing someone else’s hosted images.
• This theme assumes your WordPress blog only has images, no textual, content related posts. If you want to have content related posts as well then I recommend using pages.

Plans for the future

A couple of plans for the future of this experiment (hopefully with some help from others!) would be to:

• Automatically pull the images src attribute for creating a link to the full size image from individual post pages using JQuery. (I haven’t quite gotten this to work yet)
• Create and cache thumbnails to related images on the fly with phpThumb. (not quite sure how to get this done either)
• Keep thumbnails to their proper aspect ratio (currently the related thumbnails scale improperly if they’re too tall)
• Possibly port this to WordPress MU so you can actually have user accounts with their own image bookmarking

A head start on the JQuery solution that I couldn’t seem to get working:

$(function() {

var imageSrc = $(“div.entry-content p img”).attr(“src”);
$(‘<a href=’+ imageSrc +).prependTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
$(“</a>”).appendTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
});

This seemed to get the proper image source URL, but it would never append the proper link href to the images. Please let me know of any problems you are having as well as bug reports in the comments, and if you can offer solutions to any of the three items I outlined above.

Happy image bookmarking!

A co-worker of mine recently found a great article in Wired that had some really beautiful looking “lasers”, as he called them with some light bursts and motion trails around them. He wanted some insight as to how one could emlways wanted to write a cool trendy tutorial so I’ve decided to unwrap the trendy light trails with a handy Photoshop tutorial.

Download Source PSD
Download Custom Brushes used in this tutorial

Begin – Choose a source focal point

To start out you need some sort of focal point so I figured a picture of one of our t-shirt models, Kendra, would do just fine. After extracting her from the background using various techniques (pen tool, magnetic lasso, and masks) we’re left with a blank canvas and a girl. If you can, preserve your layer masks.

Drawing Lasers and Motion Trails (option 1)

There are plenty of ways to make the little lasers, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that there really isn’t any right or wrong way–so for demonstration purposes I will show you the two ways I made my lasers in the above image. The first way of which is by using the pen tool and making a wavy line like I have done below:

After you’ve drawn your path you need to select the brush tool by hitting the “b” key or by selecting it from the toolbar on the left. Right click on your canvas to bring up your brushes window and select a brush with a very soft edge that (depending on the size of your image) is about 7 pixels wide.

After you’ve done this, select the pen tool again by hitting the “p” key or by clicking on the pen tool button to the left. Create a new layer (Layer>New>Layer) and then right click on that path and goto the “stroke path” option.

A window will popup. Check the “simulate pressure” option and make sure your brush tool is selected. Then click ok.

You will notice that you have a brush stroke going across where your path is and it should go from thick to thin at certain points in your curve with simulated pressure.

Now to get the glow effect on the brush you need to apply a layer glow. (Layer>Style>Outer Glow) Here are approximately the settings that I used with the color #006cff:

You may notice your glow may not have the intensity that you want. The best way to remedy this is to duplicate your layer by selecting it in the layer box and hitting apple+j or cntrl j and then merge those two layers together by hitting apple+e or cntrl+e. Here’s what mine looks like currently

After making one of the lasers this way you may want to repeat the process with another path, or you may want to just move your other path down and transform it. Save the paths you create as we’ll be using them later in the tutorial by going to your paths layer, and dragging your “work path” to the new path icon which should give you something similar to this in your path window:

Creating Motion Trails and Lasers (option 2)

Now one way to make very smooth consistent “lasers” is to use the above method. The other way, which may be a bit more quick and dirty but looks just as good is to brush the lasers on by hand. To do this, create a new layer and select a brush similar to the one you just had, except size this one down a few pixels by either opening the brush window (F5) or by hitting the “[” key which will scale down the brush size one pixel at a time. Then, by hand, draw several “lasers” from right to left across the canvas as I have here:

Somewhere between creating the live demo of this tutorial and writing the actual tutorial I did manage to forget a few screen captures so forgive me if there is some slight inconsistencies in my lasers. (I re-drew mine for this demo, but the actual lasers in the image were slightly different–but they were created in the same fashion) Now that you have several white lines you need to apply the blue glow effect to them. To do this, copy your layer style from your previous outer glow layer style and paste it onto your new layer. (Right click on layer with style and goto copy layer style, then right click on the layer you want to apply the style to and click paste layer style)

You can also recreate the layer style from scratch by going to layer>style>outer glow. and enter in the same settings that we did above. After you’ve done that your image should look something like this:

A few things to note about my image:

• My previous lasers have their layer modes set to things like color burn, and overlay to give some variation in the colors as you can see here.
• I’ve moved Kendra into the foreground in front of the lasers because… well because she’s the focal point!
• After getting my second laser technique down I decided to duplicate that layer and motion blur the layer to give it a bit different of a look from the first layer of lasers.

Add Light Bursts and thick Motion Blurs

It’s at this point that it might be a good idea to reference our original source inspiration to get an idea of what else they were doing with their design. I notice with some of these images that they use a bit of a blur with some of their lasers, as well as lasers of a different thickness.

The first thing I do is repeat my first technique for creating lasers, only this time I use a thicker brush and I’m going to blur the thick laser as well as distort it to give it a smokey feel. I repeat my first technique above by creating a path and a thicker brush and stroking my path.

Don’t forget to re-apply the previous glow layer style to get the right color blue neon on the outside. The next thing we want to get on this specific laser is some distortion. To get the right kind of distortion on this laser I want to use the glass filter, and in order to do that I need to put my white laser on a black background. To do that I create a new layer (Layer>New Layer) and fill it with black and place it below my white laser layer. I then merge the two layers by hitting apple+E or cntrl+e. After you have the laser on black you need to apply the glass filter with these settings (or something close to it):

This should give you a fatty laser beam that looks something like this:

Now those of you who are beginners are thinking, “OH NOES!? Where are my beautiful laser beams and motion trails that I made before?!?” Don’t worry they’re still there. What we need to do now is one of two things. You can either set this layer mode to “screen” which will act just like a real screen and make all the black invisible…

…or you can use the magic eraser tool. (Shift+E or hold the mouse down on the eraser tool till you see the magic eraser.) I don’t quite recall why I used the magic eraser, but for some reason it seemed to be the quick and dirty way to get this done so we’ll stick with it.

After selecting the magic eraser tool and clicking on the black areas of the image, I duplicated my fatty laser beam and set the layer mode of my copy to overlay to give it a more intense glow effect with a slightly reduced the opacity. Here’s what my layers currently look like.

Bring out the focal point with large light bursts with brush modes

After looking back at the reference image, I think our design still needs more of a focal point for our lasers, so we need to add some distorted light bursts. There are plenty of ways to do this whether it be using the lens flare or light effects, but I prefer to use good old custom brushes with layer modes. To start out, pick a dull tone of the color you want your light burst to be. I’ve chosen a dull blue (#1b294e if you want the hex code) Create a new layer. Then you need to set your brush settings to something similar to what I have here:

In order to get that intense bright look it’s important that you set the brush’s mode to “Color Dodge.” Then you need to pick a place on your canvas and click in roughly the same place three times as I have done here. You’ll notice that the more you click the more intense your color dodge becomes. I’ve clicked three times and ended up with a shape that looks something like you see below:

To polish off our light burst I want to add some white in the middle of the burst so that it doesn’t look like such a tacky gradient. To do this I simply set my brush mode back to normal for the layer mode and set my foreground color to plain white. After clicking in the middle of the current light burst you should see a nice gradation to white. Now we don’t want this perfect looking sphere shaped light burst showing up–we want it to be distorted, and for that you can use almost any of the distortion filters that Photoshop has to offer, but I recommend using a combination of the shear filter and the liquify filter.

After getting your gradient sheared to your liking, I recommend setting it’s layer mode to “lighten” and also duplicating the layer once and set that layer mode to “color burn” to give it a more intense look. (refer to PSD to see my final settings for this) I ended up duplicating my layer three times, and to make each layer unique I ran another filter, the liquify filter with these settings and adjusted my layer modes to give it the desired look.

At this point in the tutorial I’m not going to go into exact detail of each and every step because I’d be typing all day–the more you experiment with layer modes, masks, and layer modes the better the image usually turns out. I use a combination of all of those things to get to my final image as you’ll see in my final PSD which you can download here.

Add masks to light bursts for texture

After I get the desired intensity with my large light burst I merge those 3 layers and add a layer mask to hide certain areas of the burst that I don’t want. (Plus the source image appears to have a textured look to it) I select a dirty brush and paint a mask around desired areas of the image to hide/show more of the light burst. There are plenty of tutorials out there that teach you how to use masks and if you’re not using them along with custom brushes then I highly recommend you start doing that.

Rinse, Repeat, add color, use different distortion filters

In order to bring in some more color I’m going to repeat some of my earlier steps to make more lasers, except this time I’m going to use a purple color instead of blue, and instead of using the liquid filter, or the shear filter, I’m going to use the ocean ripple filter. First things first, you need to put your newly created lasers onto a black background so the distortion will work properly as I have outlined above. Then select the ocean ripple filter from the distort menu and apply something similar to the settings you see here:

The edges should be a bit rough looking and to smooth these out we’re going to slightly blur the ripples using the motion blur filter. Make sure to set the direction of the blur to mostly horizontal so it doesn’t lose it’s overall shape.

Experiment with your design!

To add some more volume to my composition I duplicate those new laser levels several times and experiment with different methods of transformation and layer modes/opacity.

Ultimately, the design is going to really come together in these phases and you’re not limited with what you can do. If at this time you wanted to completely change your design’s colors you could do so and continue on–or you can re-arrange the layers to get different effects on every layer.

Experiment! Save versions of your file so you can revert back in case you don’t like what you see. There’s been plenty of designs of mine that I worked on for several more hours and then ended up actually using a design that was done much earlier on in the process. (Look at our Radioactive II t-shirt design. It ended up being done alot sooner than I thought it was and I ended up throwing away what I had once thought was the “final” version.)

It’s hard to take your hands off the keyboard/mouse sometimes and actually decide when a design is done. This method of saving versions of your design is a great way to be able to look at your design later on with fresh eyes to see that maybe it was done a long time ago!

Clean it up! Accent the Focal Point!

Cleaning up your final composition and adding bits and pieces to the design is what’s going to give it it’s focal point, and if you haven’t been doing so already it can be really good to experiment with some of the same techniques using type. Before I get into adding type to my design, I’d like to touch upon adding a bit more variation to my color palette.

One thing I tend to notice about my design as it gets in the later stage is that I may want to add some variation in color to certain layers. The best way I find to do this is to utilize the clouds filter which I think is one of the most dynamic filters in Photoshop which is often under utilized by Photoshop n00bs.

To a beginner the clouds filter looks like just that, it makes pretty clouds, but once you learn how to use layer modes, masks, and custom brushes, the clouds filter can become your best friend for making your designs interesting and more dynamic. In this particular instance I’m going to use the clouds filter to add some more variation in color to my lasers by choosing a purple and a blue using the color picker tool for my foreground and background colors. After running the filter>render>clouds filter with purple and blue set as my foreground and background colors I decide to set my layer mode to overlay, and I also duplicate the layer and add a layer mask to it so that it’s hidden in various places. After getting the desired look that I’m happy with, I merge those two layers together.

Now that I have the desired color variation I want, it’s time to further emphasize the focal point, which in this case is Kendra the t-shirt girl. To bring more attention to her we’re going to duplicate her layer as you can see above and apply the layer mask to her. Your lower layer should no longer have the mask thumbnail next to it on your layers palette. This basically means nothing is being masked on your lower layer anymore.

You’re going to smudge using the smudge tool and a custom brush to give it the textured glow look that you see in the final image. If you’re not seeing the smudge’s show up outside of Kendra then you probably haven’t applied your layer mask and your smudges are getting hidden. make sure you’re smudging the bottom layer, so that the original Kendra image is on top.

You should see something similar to this:

Duplicate that smudged layer one more time and set that layer’s mode to color dodge:

Copy your layer style you created previously from one of our laser layers and paste that glow layer style onto your top original layer in this instance it’s called “Kendra Original”.

Add the finishing touches and details

I’ve been in the habit of adding little orbs to designs in this style so I create several new layers above and below my Kendra original image and use various custom brush settings to get some of those little orbs and light bursts surrounding my image and focal point.

Color correct and adjust your color palette!

The only other thing I can really think of to do on the image besides clean it up in various areas is to adjust the color of Kendra to match my color palette. To do that I’ll use some adjustment layers on my original Kendra layer (that still has a layer mask on it) The first type of adjustment layer I use is a curves layer:

You’ll also notice there are a few new items showing up here including some of my dynamic brush creations as well as some repetition of the purple lasers that I created before. One final thing to do is to add another adjustment layer which will add some blue hues to the original photo (Gradient Map):

Here’s the gradient settings I used:

Your layers window and image should look something like this now:

That’s about it for now. I’ve gone through and added some square looking brushes with brush dynamics.

I also added the name of my brand, Assault, to my image just because I like shamelessly plugging my product after writing these long tutorials. I’ve applied the following layer style to that layer to give it a similar neon look to it as well. (I’ve also applied a slight gaussian blur to soften the lettering)

Here’s the final image after cleaning up some of the layers and deleting some unwanted artifacts. I’ve also re-cropped the image because it felt nicer with a bit more head room for our center piece.

Conclusion

I’ve decided to post as much as I can from this tutorial so that if you knew 80% of what I covered you can at least benefit from my custom Photoshop brushes, or the original source psd of the graphic so you can see the actual layer breakdown I used to get to the final image. If you want to see some of the other tutorials I’ve written that I may have blazed past in this more advanced tutorial you can find links to them below.

While this may not be the EXACT process that was followed in our original inspirational material this is one of the many ways you could accomplish the same effect very quickly. Here are all of the files and links to my other helpful tutorials.

• Download the source PSD for this tutorial
• Download Custom Trendy Photoshop Brushes from this Tutorial
• Adobe Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
• Custom Photoshop Brushes Tutorial
• Additional Photoshop Tutorials
• Assault – Buy some t-shirts so I can start doing this thing full time!

With Mr. 51% and Saw-Shan’s wedding fast approaching I decided it was time to make it official that I become the officiant of their wedding. Thanks to the Universal Life Church I was able to get ordained online, and for the very low cost of $49.99 I was able to purchase the Classic Wedding Package which includes:

• 1 Ordination Credential
• 1 Wallet Card*
• 1 Clergy Badge
• 1 Fancy Floral Marriage Certificate
• 1 Classic Marriage Certificate
• 1 Wedding Officiant Certificate
• 1 Baker’s Wedding Handbook

I’ll be sure to post pictures of everything I receive when I get it in the mail which hopefully will be in the next few days.

Before going ahead and getting yourself ordained (which took less than 24 hours) I’d make sure to double check that it’s okay in your state to get married by an online minister. The Universal Life Church has gone ahead and gathered the laws from every state about marriage, and as it stands in the state of IL it is completely legal for myself, Timberooni, to marry Mr. 51% and Saw-Shan. (It should also be noted that I am also able to absolve anyone of their sins–which I do for myself on a nightly basis. Feel free to email us if you need something absolved.)

It also may be a good idea to call the Office of Vital Records in your county to double check and make sure you meet all the requirements for performing marriages. Just in case. I’d hate for Mr. 51% to find out that his epic bachelor party went to waste cause he’s still not married… technically.

A trick often employed on webpages is to use a seamless background that can tile both vertically and horizontally. If your website gets alot of traffic and you don’t like paying for extra bandwidth costs you need to optimize your site for every single kilobyte. This generally translates to NOT using a giant JPG as a background. (unless you’re doing silly myspace layouts) This tutorial will explain how to make seamless backgrounds for your webpages.

Step One -- Identify image you want to use as your seamless background

In this case I’ve put together a 500x500 red and gray image that I think will work as a textured background that I created using some of my own custom Photoshop brushes. (created using the custom Photoshop brushes tutorial) It’s important to know the height and width of your image for the next step in the tutorial so be sure to write down or remember what your height and width are. 500x500 may be too large for some websites since you may want to use something more like 100-200px in height and width, but for this example we’ll use a fairly large image:

Step Two -- Offset the image

The second step to properly making a tile-able background is to offset the image. My image is 500px wide and  500px high so I will be offsetting this image by 250px both vertically and horizontally. To do this I use the offset filter. (Filter>Other>Offset in Adobe Photoshop  CS3)

I set the Horizontal and Vertical offset values to exactly 50% of my image height and width and set the undefined areas to wrap around. After clicking ok I get an image that looks like this:

This isn’t quite what we want our background to look like… Ideally our background has no seams in it and appears to be one large image which leads us into step three of the process

Step Three -- Clone Stamp out the seams

One of my personal favorite tools that Photoshop has to offer is the Clone Stamp Tool (s key on keyboard to select it) I’m not going to go into great detail about how to use it except to say that if you’re not using the clone stamp tool then you need to start to.

After selecting the Clone Stamp Tool you need to choose a sample area in the image. Hold the alt button, (or option on mac) and a crosshair will appear, you then need to click in an area away from the seems preferrably in the lower left or lower right area. After clicking you can release the alt/option button and your brush will appear again. You can at this time use the clone stamp tool just like you would a brush and draw over the seams. As you drag the mouse over your seams you will see that is has cloned the portion of the image you just sampled. Here’s a video on Youtube that outlines how exactly the Clone Stamp works in detail:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=45tI5z3PkMU

One trick I like to use when sampling the areas of the image is to use either a soft brush:

Or for instances like this where I have a textured image I like to use my textured brushes:

After you’ve clone stamped out your seems your image should look something like this:

Step Four -- Check to make sure it tiles properly without seams

To make sure it will look alright for for tiling I recommend using the Offset filter again by hitting  cntrl+F or apple+F or you can just goto Filter>Other>Offset and hit ok. The image should re-wrap itself by 250px vertically and horizontally and you should still not see any seams. If you do, repeat step three and clone stamp out the seams.

Step Five -- Define Pattern to save for later use

If your image is going on the web you can export it now and use  the necessary CSS code to tile your background either vertically, or horizontally and vertically as you can with our image and you can see your results on your webpage. Ex:

background: url(path/to/image.jpg) repeat-x repeat-y;

If you want to use the tile-able seamless graphic in Photoshop then you need to create a defined pattern for your image.

To do this, select all (cntrl+a or apple+a) and goto Edit>Define Pattern… then name the pattern and hit ok.

Step Six -- Fill with Defined Pattern

To fill an area with your newly defined pattern goto Edit>Fill… and you should see the fill window popup. Set the “Use” drop down to “Pattern” and then select your pattern from the list below as I have:

After clicking ok you should see that the image (or selection) has been filled in with your seamless texture. You can see the result of my tiled image by clicking on the thumbnail below:

Conclusion

One thing you’ll notice about my image is that it will have a repeating area of lighter red texture and some gray splotches that may be easily seen when tiled over and over again. The way to get rid of this is to keep resampling the original image with the clone stamp tool in the begining steps to get rid of clearly noticeable areas of pattern. The less variation in the texture/colors of the image the less noticeable it will be that the image is a tiled graphic. This technique is currently in use in the main content area of the Assault website.

Additional Links:

• Assault Blog (hint: you’re on it now)
• Assault Shirts -- also using tiled image in center of website
• Creating Custom Photoshop Brushes Tutorial

In my earlier tutorial I went over how to use brush dynamics from a preset brush, but what I didn’t show you was how to actually create your own brushes. If you’re not using custom Photoshop brushes then you’re missing out on one of the best features of Photoshop that will save you a ton of time and bring some new flare to your designs. The first step is selecting what you want to make into a custom brush…

I will be creating two brushes in this tutorial. One is a cement face and  one is an image of Beelzebub from the Public Domain:

Step 1 – Adjusting your image for creating a brush

Make sure when selecting an image to make into a brush you’re using one that isn’t going to get you sued. A good place to start is images in the Public Domain that you can do what you want with! After you have the image open in Photoshop you may want to adjust the levels (cntrl + L or command + L) so that it gets the right amount of contrast you want. The way that brush samples work is very similar to that of a mask except that the darker the tone the less translucent the brush will be.

What’s that mean? What this translates to is that if something in your image that is completely black will be 100% of the brush color you select, and something that is 100% white will not put down any paint at all.

This is an important concept to grasp in regards to creating brushes because you can create brushes of ANYTHING. If you have a wispy image of hair it’ll actually create the same translucency of hair via the brush. In the image below I did 4 things to prep it for being a brush:

• 1. Normal Image cropped to a square
• 2. Bumped up the contrast with levels (cntrl + L or command + L)
• 3. Desaturated (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate) and inverted the image (cntrl + I)  because we want the black information (the only color used to make a brush)
• 4. Painted out parts of image I didn’t want to have in my brush.

This is a great way to bring texture and different variations of  smoothness to whatever project you may be working on. As you can see I’m only going to be getting the black part of the image as the brush face.

Step 2 – Select a square area around create the brush preset

Beelzebub is already prepped for brush sampling because he is black and white, so now all you have to do is select the marquee tool by hitting the m key or by selecting it on the tool palette. Hold down shift to make it a perfect square selection, and drag around the item you want to make into a brush. When you’re ready to create the actual  brush go to Edit>Define Brush Preset… A dialog will pop up asking you to name the brush. Click ok. (screenshot below)

You should now have the brush of Beelzebub selected, if not hit the b key (shortcut to select the brush tool) and it should be selected. If is still not, right click and your brush palette will open up and you can scroll to the bottom of your brushes and you should see Beelzebub there.

Step 3 – Adjusting Custom Brush size and settings

Now you should see the brush overlay and if you click you’ll see that the item you selected as your custom brush appear. If you hit the [ key the brush will increase in size. If you hit the ] key then the brush will get smaller. In this particular example I’ve used my two brushes, Beelzebub and the cement face and set their color blend mode to color dodge to get some cool color effects if I click in the same place twice.

It’s at this point that I recommend you read the Photoshop Brush Dynamics tutorial that I wrote because you can take your custom brush and scatter it around, rotate it, and have it change colors and opacity dynamically as you drag the brush around. (It can even interact with a drawing tablet)

Step 4 – Creating Brush Sets

Something I like to do after I’ve made a nice selection of brushes is to export them into a .abr file so I can access them on all of my computers as well as provide them for downloads to people who frequent the Assault T-Shirts website. To save a custom brush set you need to be using the brush tool. (at least the way I make sets you have to have brush tool selected or you can go into the brush window)

Hit the b key and then right click to bring up your brushes. Then click on the triangle in the upper right hand portion of the window and select Preset Manager…

Then use select all the brushes you’ve made that you want to go into a set by either using cntrl + click or command + clicking if you’re on a Mac like I am and then  click “Save Set..” and save the brush set somewhere on your computer.

Conclusion

This is just meant to get you going on creating brush sets. If you’d like to skip the step of making all your own brushes you can go to some of the resources below and download brush sets for free! I highly recommend giving credit to these people who made the brushes though, and if you’re selling something that uses custom brushes like we are at Assault, then I recommend you make your own brushes from your own images so you don’t get sued.

Photoshop Brush Resources:

• T-Shirts made with Custom Photoshop Brushes @ Assault
• Assault Custom Brushes from this tutorial and a few others I’ve made
• Deviantart Photoshop Brushes – Where I download the majority of my brushes
• Brusheezy – another great brush set resource
• Public Domain Image Resources – Wikipedia page with free public domain image resources
• Custom Photoshop Brush Video – If you can handle the guy’s weird voice, here’s a video that outlines the same topic.
• Another Custom Photoshop Brush Tutorial Video – if you don’t fall asleep this will work for you.