...and I'm loving how the type design was done.

First and foremost, a big THANKS to all the members of this very welcoming community: to all the voters, bloggers, designers and to those of you that are the trifecta. In particular, thanks go out to those individuals that supported some of my very early designs such as zipperking, FRICKINAWESOME, againstbound and jaywalkergraphics. There have been many more over the time that I've been here, but those names stick out, so thanks guys.

And thanks, of course, to Threadless for printing it.

^That's the important bit^ Read on only if you're curious how the design came about.

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About six months ago I'm digging through my parent's attic and stumbled upon an old typewriter. Not the same model as depicted in the artwork, but equally interesting. I've always enjoyed purely mechanically devices. They look neat and you can deconstruct them to see how they work...sometimes even put them back together. There isn't any of the hand waving magic that most of us have to accept makes modern electronics work.

It's not only the pleasing aesthetic of the typewriter itself but also the very specific sound the keys make when struck that I liken to wind up music boxes. So these two elements knocked around the brain for a good while and then this came out...sort of...

There is, of course, such a thing as a musical typewriter which has the traditional keys/letters/numbers replaced with musical notes/symbols. The idea was to leave the setup of the traditional typewriter intact, standard keys and all, but to color them like piano keys.

So five months later, I finally drew that concept up, scanned it in, fixed the line work in illustrator, colored it in photoshop and...voila...it looked like crap.

I tried a few different angles to see if that would improve the design before it became clear that just coloring in the keys didn't make the image read the way I had hoped, no matter the perspective.

So I was just going to scrap the idea, but tried it once more with actual piano keys. And that seemed to work. I went through the same process as before,added in the sheet music as the last step, as was very pleased with how it all turned out and submitted it for scoring. So that's that.

Sorry, that was pretty long winded.

Anyway, I'm thrilled an honored to have had a designed picked up, so thanks again everyone.

This is, perhaps, for a somewhat limited audience, but a few may find it valuable.

Since generally only one size screen (or set of screens) is burned for all sizes (per gender), this template lets you see how the same size design looks on various size tees.



Click image or here for template.

Shirt sizes should be accurate relative to one another. Dimensions taken from the size chart page.

I'll add new templates here as I make them. All are sized for submission 640x800.

They're not perfect, but they are free...though a 'thank you' or some STPs from time to time are nice: http://www.threadless.com?streetteam=NiNTH+WHEEL

All templates contain the shirt colors in the threadless submission kit as well as some additional American Apparel colors.



All have been posted via sendspace. Let me know if any of the links stop working and I will re-upload. Download link for each can be accessed by clicking the respective image above.

I know I'm not disciplined enough to do one a week, so I'm going to shoot for 26 this year.


Completed Scoring (High to Low):



Final Approach 3.03
(Removed - Printed Elsewhere)






Let's Make Things More Complicated 2.71
(Removed - Printed Elsewhere)






(StyleSwap)