So I sent this guy, Glenn Jones, an email about a week ago asking him to answer some questions for my dear readers (all 12 of you, love you Mom!) and sort of do an interview via email. I had stumbled upon Gennz Tees via a post on reddit and was simply amazed. As quickly as I could I pounded off a list of questions but sadly I never heard back from him. At first I was angry and then I realized that it was truly jealousy leaking out the sides like mayo in a Fish sandwich.

From the info I can glean from cyber stalking him, he got his start designing shirts for Threadless and after gaining what was surely a quick following and reputation he managed to start his own storefront with a company called Despair. from there it appears the rest is history. He seems to have turned his hobby into his career and designs shirts for a living now. Oh, he’s also from New Zealand which may explain some of the brilliance of his sense of humor. Walking around upside down all day apparently makes you very comical.

The fact is this guy is good. So good in fact that I recently found  out that I am still capable of crying. As an artist I often admire other peoples work, but as a t-shirt designer I am far to bitter for basic emotions like adoration. I often feel like I did on my prom night, woefully unprepared and inadequate. I am doing the best I can, but guys like this make you want to crawl into a little arty hole and die. Then I remember I do this part time, that I am doing pretty good all things considered, and I have a lovely redheaded wife that lets me do things to her that are illegal in most states. With that in mind I swing back to the “oh my fucking god this guy is awesome” side of the house.

So no reply huh?  It may be that I am a small blog fish in an otherwise massive fish pie (mmmm…. fish pie), but more than likely this guy is retarded busy.  I know I would be if my brain was full of great ideas like his. So lacking a formal interview of sorts I figured I would just share some his work with you and hopefully he will get back to me with answers to the questions I sent. If not ,well you get to feel as useless as I do after viewing his amazing work.

Without further ado check out his store at http://store.glennz.com and gaze ye inadequate scrapes upon the wonder that is his work.

So here is the final part of the tutorial/walk-through of the design process I use. I am feeling like crap today so this post promises to be extra cranky. The whole tutorial is here.

I’ll be honest I’m not super happy with the final design, but I never like my own work, so I guess that will be up to the t-shirt buyers to decide if it is worthy. But after several hours of print-screening every inane step I took, I am not about to start over on a funnier or more intelligent design. Besides this tutorial is not so much about how to make a funny shirt but rather the process I use to create the artwork for a shirt. So if you think the design sucks by all means post a comment to that effect and I will be sure to kill myself because of I have not received the adulation of some random 12 year old on the internet.

So without further griping let’s get on with it, my carpal tunnel is kicking in already. So when we last left off I had finished inking the artwork in Photoshop through a tedious process of retracing my original pencil sketch.

Thankfully this next bit is a lot less tedious and after years of doing it the whole thing only takes a few minutes to complete.

So the first step is to save the original picture as a JPEG somewhere. I keep the resolution fairly high, but not retarded. Because the final will be vector it is not all that important that the resolution be better than 800 pixels at it’s widest side. It just needs to be high enough to keep the shape and undulations of the lines that give it the organic hand made feel.

As well you must ensure that your final save of the JPEG is strictly black and white. No part of the image that is supposed to be black should be left unfilled. This must be a two tone image only or illustrator will do some crazy shit with the mistakes you make. So be sure, especially if you did the last bit with a pen, you clean your image up so it is flawless tone wise.

So once your image is saved go ahead and open up Illustrator. We are going to use the Live Trace plug in so hopefully your version of Illustrator has it.  I am fairly sure that Inkscape or whatever you Linux lovers use has some sort of tracing plug in, so the basic ideas here should apply. Once Illustrator finishes taking the hour or so it needs to get it’s act together and start, you are going to import the JPEG into the program. In Illustrator they have decided to call this “Place” just to confuse the shit out of you so you have to buy the Adobe courses and books. It is found under the File menu.

Once the file is placed you will see the image you created smack dab in the center of the canvas just waiting for you to ruin it.You’ll notice along the top of the screen you have the “Live Trace” button. We’ll use that function to make our trace.

Next to the live trace button there is a small arrow button pointing down. Hidden in here are presets that you can use to create the style of trace you want.  Adobe hides all the good stuff  in spots like this so when you are fiddling around with stuff be sure to see what these drop down menus do. Anyways we are going to select the “Comic Art” preset because ….that’s what it is….and then sit back and wait while your piece of crap dell computer tries not to have aneurysm.

Usually on a good computer this takes a few seconds, and on a crappy one it causes the program to hang or have  a BSOD all over itself (Google it if you’re a newb and don’t know what BSOD means). The result often doesn’t look any different, but that is only to the untrained eye, which is a stupid expression, but if you zoom in you will see all the pixels are gone and you now have a vectorization of your rasterbatory exploits. That also would make a great domain name, www.rasterbation.com….I might have to think about buying that one. But I digress.

Okay so it’s confession time, I am really good at a lot of things. I am a rock star with Photoshop, Drawing, Photography, web design, and apparently good in the sack, but I am at best a roadie when it comes to Illustrator.  So what happens next is kind of confusing to me, but Illustrator takes your vectorized version of the image and does something in the trace process with the image that groups in a way that isolates it and frankly I haven’t a clue how to edit it in it’s present form. So I have, after years of smashing my face against a brick wall, come up with a way to make the image it has created usable for me. All the Illustrator snobs out there by all means rip me apart for this next step, but this works for me and I can kill you with a spoon because I am also a ninja, so shut your gob. All kidding aside if you can explain this please enlighten me, I want to learn.

Basically the step, that I know is not right but I do anyways, is to flatten the transparency.This is usually done to get rid of extra shapes and convert text to outlines but it seems to have the side effect of getting rid of all the superfluous Illustrator noz that usually stumps me. To do this I go under Object -> Flatten Transparency:

I basically check everything in this box, I know there isn’t any text but I like the uniformity of the check boxes all being checked. What can I say, I’m weird that way.

Once that bit of image hackery is done we are ready to move on to the next part of this process. Now we need to “ungroup” the parts of the image we have made. Basically in vector programs the parts that make up the file are called objects. These various objects are “grouped” and stacked in a way to make our picture and to make them into one unit. So any changes to one object affect all objects in the group.

This is usually very handy, but not in this case. For us to edit our image we must first ungroup all the objects. To do this right click on the center of the picture and select “Ungroup”.

Once the image is ungrouped we need to remove the background. Now this might prove a bit confusing, but when you imported and trace the image in illustrator it treats the white background or your raster file as an object unto itself. Because our artboard has a white background it is invisible but trust me it is there.  To remove it we click on the white space outside our main drawing and you will see that it creates a blue border around all the selected objects. In this case there should only be one selected object and it should trace around the outside of our drawing on the interior and be a rectangle around the exterior like below.

In the image below you will see that I have placed a green rectangle behind our object to demonstrate the effect of removing the background object. Objects in Illustrator have an order they are stacked in, in this case I have placed the green rectangle at the very back, or behind the other objects. As a bit of UFI you can order objects in a vector file by right clicking them and changing their order.

Now comes the fun part, color! For the next series of images I select each object that comprises the rabbits core (not the black lines) and color them individually.  For the more astute of you out there you can select multiple objects by holding shift and selecting them. But if you are new to this take it slow, you don’t want this to be as awkward as the first time you had sex.

Once the object is selected you pick a color by double clicking on the color option at the bottom of  the toolbox (that’s the rectangular list of buttons you don’t know how to use on the left). There are two types of color boxes there, one is for the “stroke” (an outline you can create around the object) and the other is for the core color of the object.

You want to double click the core one (it is the solid square without the red line through it in the images below). This will open the color picker. From here you select your color and hit okay. Magically the object changes to that color, and you rinse and repeat picking different colors until you are done.

Selection of Object for Coloring

Color picker in Illustrator

First Object with Color Applied

The hare complete with color applied

So that is basically it for the coloring. If you are just following along in this tutorial to see how to trace and color your drawings you can stop now.  Sure I will feel used and betrayed that you didn’t read the whole thing, but eventually after some heavy drinking I should be able to get over it.

For those of you still with me, now comes the fun part, we get to take our cutesy Disneyesque hare and turn it into a filthy visual pun that will find it’s way onto a shirt for some disenchanted teenager to wear to school and get in shit when a teacher smart enough to figure out what it references sees it.

First I save this file as an EPS and AI file to be put aside for future use in stock imagery catalogs or somebody else’s cutesy store to sell. I always keep components of my work because I never know when I can use them again or make a few bucks here and there with it.

So once that is done I get ready to add the hair to our hare. See what I did there, that’s funny. Anyways I select the brush tool in Illustrator (fifth from the top on the left) an pick a brush from the brushes pallete that is small and the right size.

Brush Selection in Illustrator

Once that is selected I simply draw the pubes on the hare, magically corrupting our cute little bunny into a pubic hare t-shirt design. I used the same color as I did for the interior of the ears.  Because spreadshirt has a gay 3 color rule (black is a color) this is necessary to keep the image suitable for flock printing. I add the hares one by one making sure that they look as pubesque as possible.

Unfortunately because the minimum object size restrictions of spreadshirt would make the pubic hairs too big to look good, I am going to have to relegate this one to the digital print bin. Which is fine, it’s just a different print process. I add some clever text giving our pubic hare it’s own scientific name and we are done:

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial/walk-through and now sod off.

Cheers,

Shawn

In this second part of the tutorial (see the tutorial as a whole here) we will cover the steps to prepare our sketch for illustrator. This will involve inking the piece with Photoshop, correcting my fuck ups and thickening the lines for style and effect.

Okay, so when we last left off we had isolated the pencil from the blue under sketch in photoshop and made a levels correction to get ready. This next step I like to call the rasterbation before the vectorfication. Now obviously I made those two words up, but basically what I am doing is using a raster program to prepare a file for vector conversion. If you are completely new to this, I highly recommend that you educate yourself on  vector vs. raster. Click here for a fairly decent explanation.

Why vector? Well because I think it makes the picture look cleaner. I use vector for all my cartoon work even if the final is going to be a raster product.  I always use vector for the inking (see image below for an example). This is one of my personal style things. I like a clean, calligraphic look  to my cartooning. Conversion of the black to vector is a key element in that process. No other technique I know of cleans the ink up as well and keeps the organic quality of a hand drawn image. I think that Illustrator and Photoshop both have there strengths in different areas, and so I use both programs to get the look I am going for usually. Photoshop for basic inking always and sometimes shading, illustrator cleans up my mistakes.  Depending on the look I am going for I use one often more than the other, but I almost always use both. Below are some examples of my previous work demonstrating when Illustrator or Photoshop is used more heavily.

As you can see the image onthe left is fairly devoid of shading, and the one on the right has a bit of an airbrushed look. Depending on the piece one program may lend itself to the style I want more than the other. But I can’t think of a digital cartoon piece I have done where I didn’t use both. This technique has evolved over many years of trial and error and I am very happy with the process. Frankly I don’t care what you do, and besides this tutorial is all about me and feeding my ego.

As well my Print on Demand supplier has two major print processes (all print types here). The first is called flex which requires a color limited flex file and the latter is Digital Printing. Depending on the look I want for the shirt I will use on or the other. The former is generally better quality so I try and use that as much as possible, but there are color restrictions and size issues to take into account when designing for the flex process. Frankly it can be a pain the ass sometimes so I often say fuck it and use the digital print method which can reproduce any crappy drawing I come up with. The quality is pretty decent and my own personal laziness has been known to take over. At any rate these are the things I consider when developing the piece.

So back to the design process, I am aiming to create a flex style print so I will do the majority of the work in illustrator after I get the basic drawing done and cleaned up in Photoshop. When we last left off I had isolated the pencil drawing and was about to start the inking process. This is fairly straightforward in Photoshop. I simply create a new layer for the inking process and select a hard edged and pure black calligraphic brush. These are found in the brush pallet’s pop out menu. I begin tracing on my new layer inking over my under drawing.

I use a tablet to do this, and you can either splurge on a ridiculously expensive Wacom Cintiq monitor for this or by a cheaper pen tablet from them or another company. Or if you feel like torturing yourself you can attempt this with a mouse. To be honest if I could find my damn inking pens you can do this whole part on paper with pen, but I like doing it with the tablet anyways so that’s what I am going to do. You cheap bastards can do it however you want, but I’m not going to show you how in this tutorial. So I continue tracing over the under drawing, as I go I make small corrections to my original drawing. I continue until I am completed tracing the basic under drawing.

You’ll notice the corrections made to the feet. This is the beauty of drawing everything 3 times. As you go the drawing gradually improves and you never feel like you are spending a great deal of time with any one step. I find drawing monotonous so this is a good thing for me. The final step I take now is to thicken the calligraphic lines where appropriate.  To do this I eliminate the under-drawing layer from the process by creating a new layer between the ink layer and the under drawing and filling it with pure white. This just helps me see what I am doing better, and I then begin the thickening process.

Because cartoons  with solid colors have no opportunities for adding the gradations of light and shade, I use the calligraphy brush and line thickness to emphasize what should be the darker areas. Basically if it would be in shade (presuming the light source is from the high left of the page) I make that line thicker than those lines that would be in brighter lit areas. The image below shows where I am making the line under his belly almost three times as thick. This is because this area and the bottoms of his feet would be the darkest parts of the image.

So I continue this process until I complete the whole drawing. I should also point out that I made a correction here to the belly which was skewed to the right. I used the elliptical marquee tool to correct this and get a perfect oval shape for the belly.  I continue until this process is entirely complete and I have the following image as the final stage for this image in Photoshop.

And now we have an image ready for import into illustrator and vecorization of our rasterbation. Next tutorial will cover the vector conversion and the coloring, oh and we will add the pubic hair too. I’m so excited about the pubes!

So this is the first part of what will  be a three part series on my own personal design process. I am by no means the very best in the world at this, but this is the technique that I have developed for myself. So if you think I am doing it wrong, sod off and write your own tutorial Mr. Smarty Pants. This whole set of tutorial/how-tos will be one big post in the forum, so if you found this with a Google search I suggest you look here to see the whole thing.  I do not claim to be a “graphic artist” but what I lack in athletic abilities (I can still kick your ass though) I make up for in my ability to render naked girly pictures with a pencil. I am proud to say that I have  taught myself everything I know. Admittedly Mr. Rolston, my eleventh grade art teacher, gets some credit, and my dad who was an illustrator for years, and all the artists that wrote books that I read. But other than that, and a bunch of other people that showed me stuff over the years, I am self taught.

I find it funny that in today’s day and age the polished products that I produce don’t impress. Many times I have had someone who has seen and bought my graphics and digital designs stunned to see what I have rendered with a pencil. I always get the “I didn’t know you could draw!” speech.  It seems that people think that as soon as you use digital tools the computer magically does all the work for you. This is obviously not the case. But at any rate my point is that you should have some idea how to draw to proceed with my techniques.

Secondly I am a geek too, I love computers, software and gadgets. I have a ridiculously large computer and am presently typing away on a Sony Bravia flat screen TV.  To my right is a Cintiq Wacom tablet monitor and on it is Photoshop ready and waiting for me to prepare pictures for this little post.I am not rich, but this is where I spend most of my time, so it follows that most of my money goes here. To be fair I started out with a slow computer and a screen I stole form someones garbage pile.

In this process I use colored pencils, regular pencils (or a black pen, I can’t find my damn pens right now), photoshop, Illustrator and I use my tablet (but it is not entirely necessary). My computer is old but fast.  My philosophy with computers has been to buy the most ridiculous machine I can at the time and then not replace it for 5 years. I think I save money in the long run, and I have to grovel and go down on my wife less often to convince her to let me get one. Although I love going down on my wife so that is a bad example.

Okay so let’s get started. Generally what happens is I get an idea for a shirt by taking a long crap and thinking hard or I just steal it from another medium. For instance, in the interest of full disclosure, this shirt idea comes from an amusing 4chan style motivational poster somebody sent me.  I  never Google it to see if someone has already done a shirt like this, because I don’t want to be affected by their design style, artwork or choices. So I am simply hopeful that this hasn’t been done as a shirt yet, and get right to it. And besides if someone did this already, fuck them, mines gonna be better.

I should pause here and just rant a bit on the whole etiquette as I see it with the t-shirt design community. As an artist I cheat, I use all the evil tools, like projectors, tracing, etc. Or at least I do for my photorealism work. To be frank I don’t really care how I get to the final piece, just that it takes to look good when I am done. I have rules mind you, but I can draw well enough that I don’t need to waste my time blocking things out when there is a projector in the room. So if you think that breaks the rules of art, then first off I don;t think you know squat about art, and secondly, well piss off. I also use Google images heavily for inspiration when planning a piece and typically I will find a style or picture I like, and replicate it to some degree. I firmly believe that all artists copy and good artists steal. I think it was Picasso that said that.

The fact is that t-shirt designs and cartooning/graphic work in general is not a noble pursuit as far as I am concerned. Sure I may be rendering socio-political commentary and that may have a profound value in our societies. Bt at the end of the day this shirt will mostly be about pubic hair  (no really, that’s where I am going with this). So I will let you stay on your high horse and have some fun down here in the gutter.

As POD designers we must be artists, comedians, graphic designers, web designers, marketing experts, and business people. And most of us do this  in our spare time between real work shifts. Given that I cut myself a little slack. Sure my shirts are usually original, but everybody I know wants that “I Support Single Moms” stripper t-shirt. That shirt design is sold by every company and every shop I have ever seen in my market. Of course I am going to sell one of my own, I’d be a fool not too. I do this to make a little extra cash, not change the fucking world.

To be brutally honest, I gave up on my dreams of being a pure artist long ago, because frankly I had other interests like feeding my family and wearing clothes in public. Maybe when I am rich I can paint my naked body red and defecate on a canvas to make a point, but for now I am happy to live in suburbia and have a real job. So to summarize, I don’t have the time or the energy to commit to truly artistic, pure and noble t-shirt designs, to be honest that whole statement sounds ridiculous to me. That’s not too say that there are those that don’t achieve this, but many do it as a conglomerate of talented people or are freaks of nature. The guy behind amorphia-apparel.com is an example of the latter.

So anyways, I will get off that tangent and get to it. Here’s how I work. First I collect ideas, in this case I got this picture in an email from a friend in Nigeria who I am sending some money, but that’s a different story. Here’s the source of the idea:

Funny right? So I think it makes a great mildly offensive pun (my favorite kind of shirt) and can be expressed well in cartoon form. So the first thing I do is go to Google for ideas. It’s hard to explain what I am looking for, I guess the stylization that others have used in certain parts, the common denominators that help people identify a cartoon as a hare or rabbit. It’s not like I can’t draw it without Google, but I like to have it as a reference. So a quick image search for “Cartoon Hare” and I am off.

I grab my sketchbook and with my blue pencil bust out the basic illustration. I try and keep the look original, this isn’t really that hard mind you. I have been cartooning for years so my own style is well established in that vein. For the young fuckers that may be reading this, never use the word fuckers, and keep working at it. Your style will evolve when you get to be an old bastard like me.

In the meantime copy other peoples style as much as possible.  To be honest my style is a weird blend of old school and americana cartoon types, admittedly cutesy, and fun as hell to draw. But I like to think I add an edge to my designs that my boyhood hero Walt Disney would blush at. For instance in this design I am adding pubic hair to a cute cartoon rabbit. BTW Disney himself is still a hero of mine but his company can go to hell. So anyway here is a pic from my sketchbook:

I am just getting the basic drawing done, mostly just getting my idea on paper and then roughing it out.  You’ll notice I am lazy, the feet are poorly positioned and the hands look a little fucked, but I fix things as we go along. I got the basic feel of it done and that is all good. From there I take out my handy pencil (or black pen, if I could find the damn thing) and do an over drawing that is a bit more refined. I should emphasize that very little time is spent on this part. I literally bash this out in minutes. The real work comes later in photoshop. So here is the pencil over drawing which is a touch more refined.

I have not added any “pubic” hare yet. That will come later. I always try and get the most out of the drawing, and this basic cartoon hare will make a nice addition to my stock image collection. So I will  actually get two pieces out of this when it is complete. I will likely sell the basic rabbit design through my stock image agency. If it makes a few cents it’s all worth it. POD design is all about passive internet income and there are a lot of places where you can make it. I will also add this basic rabbit design to the marketplace at spreadshirt.  Somebody might sell it and make me a few bucks which is always good.

So next up we need to drop the under sketch. This is easy because it is blue. In photoshop I simply go to the channels and select the blue channel. As soon as I isolate the blue channel all the blue pencil work disappears. This is because of additive and subtractive color theory, but I’m not going to get into that. So here is what it looks like:

Blue Channel Isolation in Photoshop

From there I Select All (Ctrl+A), Create a new file (Ctrl+N) and Paste (Ctrl+V) the channel in the new file. This gives me my blue channel isolation as a new file. From here I apply a levels (Ctrl+Alt+L) correction to make it closer to black and white.

Levels Adjustment of Sketch

This is imperfect but from here I will clean up my illustration using my tablet and photoshop brushes. Keep in mind I am lazy as hell, so I do this very quickly. If I could find my damn pens this would look much better than it does because the gray of the pencil is not the best to work with, but it does what I need it to.  In the next Part of this tutorial I will cover the true inking of the piece in Photoshop and finalize the raster portion of the design process. In Part 3 we will go through the vector portion. Stay tuned for more of this tutorial.

So I do alright with my t-shirt designs. I will admit that I sell most of my shirts through the marketplace in spreadshirt. I have tried a few other companies to see if I could get anything to catch but spreadshirt seems to be the one that is working best for me.  I picked them initially because the quality of their printing methods was top notch. Over time I must say that I am happy with their service and the quality of their printing may even be overkill in hindsight, but it’s all good. I sell very well in the marketplace daily. I also have my t-shirt storefront. I spent time and hours coding a SEO friendly site and worked hard so it could grow up to be a real site one day. This post is kind of about that struggle.

So about a year ago I was trying everything I could to drive traffic to my t-shirt site. I still got a huge amount of sales through the marketplace of my POD supplier (spreadshirt) but the pickings were slim on the site I carefully crafted by hand. The hours put into the site hardly turned a profit and frankly I was stumped on how to compete with the big boys. SEO is an industry unto itself and I quickly learned you cannot become an expert over night, or even in a year, so don’t expect to. There is no way you will get top ranked pages on a new site, and frankly it is the specific terms people are looking for that make good SEO, not the sutff you say about your site. What I mean is it will take forever and tonnes of money/effort to get to the first page of Google when someone types in “funny t-shirt”. But if you have a shirt that says something about how awesome bananas are, you might get first page for “funny banana t-shirt”. The key is to integrate good descriptions of your shirts with a well designed site. You will get hits to that shirt, not your landing page, so make it easy for visitors to keep browsing.

Next you gotta spend money to make money. Don’t dump all your profits on that cute redheads cam site, reinvest in your fledgling business and you will get returns. Shirt designs is the only “zero-investment” up front business I have tried, and until I spent the money on a “premium shop” I wasn’t making any. The same goes for traffic, to spread the word, you are going to need to spend some money. But like a good drug dealer, never use more than you have. You still want to make a profit, so invest cautiously and your site will grow slowly. As your site grows, so will your profits will grow with them.

Design the shit out of yourself. Get good at designing shirts and update your site as frequently as possible (kind of ironic me saying that). there is no easy money in this world, and the reality is t-shirts pays jack shit at the beginning for all the work you put it, but it is passive income in the long run. What I mean is you get paid for doing nothing. Build a large inventory and sell in your POD marketplaces and money will come in while you are masturbating on that hot read head’s cam site. that is the real rush in this business, money for nothing. But of course that’s a lie, you spend hours, days and weeks of no pay work getting that inventory/site up and running.

At any rate here is a small list of things I have tried and the success or lack thereof I had:

Paid Advertising – Marginal Success, because I don’t have a tonne of capital to put down it is hard to measure the effect of advertising. I still occasionally advertise but it is hit and miss. I stay away from Googles Adsense, Facebook and other major advertisers when you are starting out. The cost of clicks and the selection of sites to advertise on is overwhelming. Successfully using Adsense is probably a profession in itself that requires a degree in click-o-nomics. I recommend Project Wonderful, and AdEngage for starting out. They have affordable rates and an easy to use interface.

Giving stuff away – I have done t-shirt giveaways, but only when I had enough money to cover the costs. This seems to be a good way to drive traffic to your site and I have had moderate success with this one. It also is a great reason to spam your friends and family and anyone else. A good contest always helps.

Use another site to drive traffic – I started a funny video site to drive traffic to my t-shirt site. I have an ad for my shirt site on the same page and it rotates through with google ads. This seems to be the most successful technique I have used. The small amount of advertising I have on the video site also offsets the cost of running it. It doesn’t make a profit yet, but it’s losses are easily covered by the sales at my shirt site. It’s also a sly way to link my site through larger ones. I submit a funny video to I-Am-Bored.com for instance and I get thousands of hits on my video site, which leads to hundreds of hits on my t-shirt site….pretty clever eh? Just be aware that these secondary sites can have a high overhead and updating them takes a lot of time. Thankfully I have some friends who enjoy that sort of thing and they help me out.

Affiliate Marketing – I honestly found this one baffling, it is very much on my to do list to figure out how it works, if someone can enlighten me that would be great.

Spread the word – I tell everyone I know about my shirt site, and I often get huge orders from that. I also wear my shirts all the time. This is very important.

Social Networking – Meh…. I think this ship has sailed. It does generate traffic, but not a huge amount of sales.

Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Reddit, etc. – Spamming these sites is a sure way to soil an otherwise good internet reputation. Be careful on these sites.

Good Site Design – This seems to be a key for SEO, you cannot just link a domain to your POD shop, you have to design a site that interacts with it. As well you need your site to include pictures and descriptions of your products locally. This takes more skill and time, but it definitely pays off in the long run.

Link Exchange – This seems to be hit and miss, sure you get traffic from it, but really it seems to hurt your SEO in the long run, you will get slapped hard on SEO if you run a link farm. Be very careful doing this. Only link people you genuinely think are good sites, and related to what your site is about in some way.

Top Lists – Evil, bad, stay away. You might get 5-10 hits a day from it, but it will hurt your reputation in the long run. It makes you look amateurish. Which you are, but you don;t want your customers to think that.

The saga continues for me, I am by no means a traffic expert, but I am seeing some growth in my profits and traffic from the varying things I have tried. It is definitely a learning experience and a slow growth thing. You will not throw a site up tomorrow and have hundreds of visitors to your site. You have to plug away at this stuff, and over time that curve on google analytics will start to go up. Just keep trying.

By all means if you are having success with some techniques, let me and my readers know, comment below or post it here. Now if you’ll excuse me there is red headed cam girl that needs my attention, oh and sometime later I have to work on my site redesign.

Cheers,

Fuzzy

A funny thing happens when you leave a forum unattended for a few months/years. The sickest most depraved sons of bitches on the Internets go fill it with disgusting material. While attempting to clean my forum, and ban the 400 or so bastards that had joined for no good reason,  I stumbled across a spam post that made me sick. One of these sick pricks had posted links and images of poor innocent young girls in very inappropriate outfits and poses. Several in fact.  Not technically kiddie porn, but you’d have to be a sick bastard to think these were sexy.

So I had to delete the whole board. Yes the whole damn thing. It seemed like the easiest thing to do really. I managed to salvage most of the forum, but what a pain in the ass.

The funny thing is that this site started out with the purest of intentions. To build a community that is not under the watchful eye of our POD suppliers. One of the things that drives me crazy about sponsored forums on POD sites is that the management is always lurking around. Sure they answer questions, but if I want to tell people that Spreadshirt or Cafepress sucks balls then I should be able to without fear of repercussion by the management. Don’t get me wrong, there are a fair number of people on spreadshirt’s forum  that wine and complain about stupid things like threadcount, and color variances between shirts and screen (it’s called color management, look it up).  But I wanted a place where people could argue who is the best. BTW Wordans does suck balls.

I also wanted to showcase people that were doing what I was doing, and doing it as well or better than me. Case in point GritFX.com (shameless plug, they’re running a tee giveaway right now). Now I have no affiliation with GritFX. In fact I wish I did, I bet you Manz is hot, but the reality is I liked their stuff. I wished I was more like them. The only thing stopping me I guess is that I am an anti-social bastard with talentless friends, and I’m not Australian. I truly admire the guys behind college humor, my facebook friend Trev who runs Canadaka.ca, and even the 12 year old bastard on the spreadshirt forums who keeps showing off the X-Box he bought with the money he made selling absolutely horrible t-shirt designs. These people are like me, a hint of talent, lack of fear, ability to learn the ins and outs of things and industrious enough to pursue a source of income on the highly competitive Internets.

But then the pedophiles came. They came and molested my sweet innocent little site. They took my heartfelt attempt to reach out to our community, and tainted it. Tainted it with the filthy depraved shit that is going to ruin the internet for everybody. If I had the time, I would seek these pricks out and castrate them, slowly, with a dull rock, and then take pictures of it, and then post them on somebody elses completely unrelated forum, and then the sick depraved people who get off on that sort of thing could get their jollies off of my picset of pedophile castration.  But the reality is that I can’t do anything about it. Although, a funny thing happened as I was fantasizing about sawing off a guys wiener. I got inspired to resurrect this site. To throw it in rehab, get it off the junk and start typing away nonsense again.

I don’t really care if anybodies listening anymore. I think it will be fun to document my struggle with POD. The SEO troubles, the times that my site is perfect until I open it in a different browser, all the same shit us small time guys face.  Because somewhere out there is somebody who has a hint of talent, and a desire to make some money on the internet. He’ll read my posts, browse my forums, and then make himself a little money.

At the very least Manz from Gritfx tells me my post I did on them gets them traffic. At the end of the day that’s all us POD site owners are after. More traffic. Because more traffic = more money. So if I get her traffic it’s all worth it, cuz in my mind she looks just like Isla Fisher. And Isla Fisher is the hottest human being on earth. How can you be into kids when a woman like this exists:

Isla Fisher....Hottest Woman Alive

Cheers,

Shawn

So this site was fun to do, the problem with it is that it took so much work to maintain. First I had to find a suitable site to review (very tricky actually, a lot of crap submissions and not many good ones) and then have to conduct an interview via email, and then when all that is done I had to think of something witty to write. This often took weeks to do and I had promised myself one post a week. That didn’t last long. The fact is I maintain about 4 or 5 other sites of my own and a few more for other people.  So the reality is that this site was far more work than it was worth.

I think I narrowed my focus too much, tried to only work with the Print on Demand community. Tried to avoid the big wigs that are we are all competing with in our basements. The reality is that this is challenging at the best of times and since the recession that has only proven more difficult. Most POD designers I know are noticing significant drops in sales and the newbies are barely able to get out of the gate. But it’s not all doom and gloom, we are surviving and still selling shirts.

So where to go with Elite Shirt Design? Well for starters I cleaned up the forum, and I think I will now just write whatever fool thing comes into my head that has anything to do with t-shirts.  I’ll still do the odd review, but I’m not gonna limit myself to that for now. So in that vein, for all you newbs looking for info on how to start your very own website and then pester me to review it,  check out this post on our forum:

For Complete Newbs to HTML

And join the forum while you’re at it.

That’s it for now!

Shawn

Cult Classic T`s

http://www.cultclassicts.com/

We all have a little bit of the love for the eighties and nineties in us. Those of us that grew up in that era at least. No shop seems to capture that nostalgia with a twist as well as Cult Classic Shirts. This shop is a Cafe press site with one of the best front ends I have ever seen. Extremely professional and topical this site design is excellent as are the shirts they sell. I personally find the shirts a tad on the expensive side, but not extreme costs by any estimation, and the quality of the designs may warrant the cost.

The site heavily uses imagery and graphics to good effect and is well laid out and easy to navigate. That said some links seem to lead to nowhere, proabaly becasue the products have not yet been added for the designs.

In conclusion a great site with great designs. Well worth a visit.

Screenshot of GritFX.com

Step one, take a team of Australian artists, designers and writers.

Step two, introduce Web 2.0 and Print on Demand (POD) T-shirt companies to the team.

Step three, let them loose on the internets.

What do you get? Gritfx

Between living out Auzzie stereotypes like carrying ridiculously large knives, and drinking too much Fosters while wearing cork lined hats, these “thunders” from “down-unders” are quietly building a POD revolution. Sure they are a t-shirt site, but in the view of this piker (look it up), they will leave their competitors sales as dry as a dead dingos donger. But that’s enough of me trying to speak Australian.

Gritfx has taken the DIY capabilities of the net and built a network around their individual skills. Not limiting themselves to t-shirts their site is also a portal to a damn fine blog, hilarious movie reviews and a youtube channel. Each of these areas is chock full of high quality content, and drives traffic to their shirt sites. By playing to their individual strengths they have built a site that is the envy of most POD designers. A site with content and quality that makes them one of the elite shirt design sites on the internets.

Now about their designs, Gritfx currently uses two POD companies for it’s products. Their site began, as many of ours do,on Cafepress. They have since opened a “retro” shop through Zazzle and have plans to branch out to Spreadshirt. By branching out they are able to expand product lines and build their brand. All while sticking to a graphic sensibility with clean, carefully developed, and unique work.

Gritfx was founded by Amanda Vare (a.ka. Manz), and Dave Leeflang (a.k.a. Dave) and has grown to a diverse team of artists. I had the opportunity to ask Davea few questions:

Gritfx has been selected as this weeks Elite Shirt Design Site. Keep up the good work and if you’ll excuse me I’ve gotta go get a gutfull of piss.

Note: Elite Shirt Design apologizes in advance for the excessive use of poorly contrived Australian slang found on a third party website. Elite Shirt Design recognizes that we may have got kangaroos loose in the top paddock and are certain that even Australians haven’t a clue what that means.

Featured Site Soge Shirts

SogeShirts.com, the slogan reads “Funny, Instant Ice Breakers”. Now that’s an odd slogan, but as I browse down their site and review the designs my mood changes. Their shirt designs belong on the sweaty chested young adults boppng at the local meat market pretending to like music they don’t. Why? Because other sweaty chested young adults are there with their wares on display. Whether you fill that chest with voluptious mammoglands or just a pair of lonely nipples, Soge Shirts has the shirt for you.

For that matter if you want to get things started off on the right foot for your local snot machine, Soge has a variety of kids designs guaranteed to horrify the in-laws next visit. Or better yet let your swinger neighbours know your interested because junior is proud to display that mom puts out on his pea stained bib (yes I meant peas you sick minded degenerates).

So what is Soge Shirts, why does it stand above so many other “Funny” shirt sites. Well first off these guys are actually funny. Thier shirts are original and unique and their site, while loud and adolescent, knows their market. As a POD affiliate they stand above many others as having original, well illustrated shirt designs. I had the opportunity to ask the guys behind the madness a few questions, needless to say their answers are about as hilarious as their designs:

We started in 1709 making awesome costumes for Samuel Adams, like the indian costumes he donned for the Boston tea party. Don’t believe us check our Wikipedia. Oh we don’t have a Wikipedia so please write one for us devoted superfans. We started making kick ass funny graphic tees in late 2007.

Why t-shirts?

We originally wanted to design a bunch of websites and sell the advertising. It popped into our heads that providing web content for sites sucked ass and that t-shirts were way more fun. With Dave being an art whiz and the t-shirt ideas buzzing like a bunch of sorority girls drinking wine coolers we decided to jump into the fun that is cafepress.

Who is your preferred POD company?

We’re with cafepress but we have a love/hate/megahate relationship with cafepress. Many a time they have shut down designs that would be classics even if the designs were parodies. We had one design with a blond fat Waldo from “Where’s Waldo” entitled “Where’s Waldough” with the fat Waldough not hiding too well.

How do you think of so many great designs?

David and I are t-shirt design robots sent from the future armed with the most popular funny graphic t-shirt designs before they even exist here. We’re beating our competition to the punch for our robot masters and some day we hope we will learn how to love.