tShirt Sites
1st edition — by Patrick McNeil — Jan. 9, 2008
The Site Type
tShirt sites are all the rage and are a rather popular style in fashion. The range of tShirt styles available are broad and range from clever and humorous, to ultra stylish, to crud and obnoxious. The quality of these designs varies just as much. We won't be looking at actual shirts so much here, but the web sites that sell them of course. This is another one of those topics which could grow exponentially.
Interestingly the very first sponsor I had for Design Meltdown was a tShirt site! The site was
Dirty Coast Press
. Their name refers to their root in New Orleans and not necessarily to crude content! I ordered one of their shirts a while back and it was kind of funny signing for the package that said Dirty Coast Press on it. And it always makes for a funny story when my wife wears that shirt. Anyhow, on to the point. This sites design plays into its "dirty" theme with a nice and subtle distressed deign. And of course the t-shirts take front stage with a nice flash movie showing them off. What strikes me most about this site though is the unusual color pallet. If anything these colors are playful, which works well with the subtle humor found in the t-shirt designs.
Another distressed style site which has very different t-shirt designs is
tshirtaxid.com. The decorative and bold layout clearly reflects the style of shirts to be found here. And perhaps this is the primary goal of a tshirt site, to not only function as an ecommece site, but as a sales tool to hook people into digging out their wallet. The experience of purchasing t-shirts seems to be half of the fun. Buying a funny shirt from a lame messed up site simply doesn't seem as "cool." And of course being cool is so much a part of the t-shirt community.
Sample Usage
Links
Genopal (Color pallet creation software)
COLOURlovers (Excellent color pallet collections)
Kuler - pallet builder from Adobe /
ColorBlender.com (The
best tool I have found for easily creating beautiful color pallets)
Great color browsing resource (Named colors, by hue, etc)
Color
Scheme Generator
Color
Blender (On MeyerWeb)
Color In Motion
Color Schemer Online v2
Color Schemer Gallery
Color Symbolism
