I ♥ Zazzle
When I can’t find the “perfect” T-shirt for a gift for someone, I love being able to go to Zazzle.com and make one of my own. It’s a site that allows you to design your own T-shirts and affordably order them in quantities as few as one. The printing quality is far better than the previous transfer technologies, although not as good as a professional silkscreen, although that has production costs that make it impossible to use for individual and small runs.
This was my first effort, a gift for a friend who's the sound engineer for the Broadway musical Wicked, to thank him for helping me get house seats when I took forgelives to the show for his birthday. There were T-shirts available with this saying, but they either had ugly art or design, and/or an even uglier big honkin’ © symbol with the name of the company right under the text. Nothing annoys me more than a big ugly copyright tag on an all-text “funny saying” T-shirt, especially when all they’ve done is taken a non sequitur already in common usage. So I designed my own.
This one was done for the founder of the Brooklyn Leather Posse, which sadly hasn’t reached critical mass yet and has been sorta dormant - possibly because we now have the all-NYC Leather Invasion. Zazzle has a large variety of clothing to choose from, and now imprint on all sorts of things, including caps, ties, travel mugs, mousepads, buttons, and now even custom postage stamps.
This one was made for a very special bootpig.
This is my latest effort, to congratulate Matt/badfaggot on having been selected to be a judge for this year’s International Mr. Leather contest.
Zazzle could use a better selection of typefaces (and kerning tables!) - although as you can see above they have a large enough selection that you can usually find something that works - and their interface can be a little wonky occasionally (it reminds me of early Microsoft releases, in that you learn that you need to save your work as you go along). But I like that it allows you to combine art and text elements in your design at their website, for those, like myself, who don’t have skills in design programs like Illustrator and Photoshop - or the programs themselves. The service is hard to beat - I usually receive my custom T-shirts in two days, and I have a special, unique gift for the same price of what most commercial T-shirts sell for at shops and online stores.
Nonetheless, I’d like to hear from those who have used other online T-shirt design and printing services that allow you to order as few as one, to learn how they compare. And I'm still looking for a place that will embroider the waistbands on jockstraps.