The brief: “to create and manipulate text in a way that it becomes the design rather than just being a part of it”. After launching a new design competition, community t-shirt designers from Threadless have united text and image, and the results are beautiful. With phrases like ‘A Piece of Cake‘, and ‘Pigeons are Rats with Wings’, the designs are diverse to say the least, and quite often take forms you really wouldn’t expect. The ‘Piece of Cake’ design by Philip Tseng uses the shape of a slice of cake, and the textures of chocolate frosting, sponge and even a little ‘of’ shaped cherry to quite literally spell it out.
Can you see it yet?
And Catalina Aguilera’s design sparked by ‘Never fitted in…‘ almost brings a tear to the eye, as it shows a sobbing personified pentagon stood in front of a shape sorted that, you guessed it, doesn’t have a pentagon shaped hole. To make it worse, all the other nicely fitting shapes show little sympathy. Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious just how the text fits into the visual interpretation, these tees are pretty ingenious. It got me thinking of slogans I’d like to see interpreted into t-shirt design. How about ‘Bob’s your Uncle’, or one of my favourites: ‘I’ll be there in a jiffy’? The possibilities are endless….
Aww, never fitted in