Conscientious t-shirt buyers guide
Michèle, my glorious leader (non-football department), has prevailed upon me to buy some new t-shirts for myself. Being an awkward bugger I never really like anything I see when I go shopping and with her infinite wisdom she suggested that I buy some online. A simple task some would think. An easy mistake to make. Being a conscientious type (some would say tight-fisted and over-cautious) I have done a scary amount of looking before buying, then buying and looking some more before buying again. In order not to let that effort go to waste I hereby present a list of tshirt sites for the conscientious/over-cautious buyers amongst you. This list is the first part of two, this one is the sites that were useful to me and which I have bought (or am in the processing of buying) shirts from, the second part will list other sites which haven’t quite taken my money yet.
The most helpful site in my quest, by a long way, was Preshrunk, an excellent blog which features different t-shirts every few days. As well as a nice thumbnail of the shirt detail it also tells you the price along with a little blurb. I don’t like all (or even most) of the shirts featured but it was and is amazingly useful in finding good stores. I can’t recommend the place highly enough.
Giant Robot Printing prints a variety of rather nice copyleft including the lovely red aeroflot which I purchased for the stupidly low price of 5 dollars (plus shipping).
Don G. sells the wonderful <nerd/> t-shirt in glorious gold and Futura. None of the other shirts on the site really grab me and I could do without separate pages for each slight variation of colours but I really like the quality of the <nerd/> shirt. One piece of advice, don’t order XXXL unless you like to wander around under a small tent.
Spreadshirt offer the ability to print your own tshirts through a flash interface. I ordered one to see how it turned out and I’m happy enough with it. The one drawback to the self-printing is that they will only print graphics on light colours, typically white or light gray. I’d love to be able to print on other colours as well, something I’ll keep looking for.
A List Apart sell ALA t-shirts. Cool. I like the XHTML fist one. Yes, I know that the fist has five fingers; what are you, the type of person who dislikes the Simpsons because they only have three fingers? Strangely I’m less taken by the t-shirt designs of Jason Santa Maria despite absolutely loving his site.
White Frog do an interesting range of their own designs on a nice site. Not many shirts there, 12 currently with 2 designs making up 5 of those. I’ve bought Gray Anatomy and I don’t care if it is a cliche, I like it.
Preshrunk has been absolutely invaluable in finding most of these sites and the others I’ve checked. I now subscribe to the Atom feed to keep up with when the site is updated, that’s how much I like it.