Ban T-shirts Blog

I’ve always favoured front prints for my designs. The vast majority of shirts are printed on the front and I guess it’s cool to clock other people’s reactions to the message/design on your shirt.

But yesterday I received an interesting email from a guy called Dennis who suggested that it is much better to put the message on the back of the shirt. His reasoning is that “After years of really investigating this I have found that when a person wears a message on the front if you are in close proximity to another person they will AVOID reading the message because they don’t want you the wearer to see them doing it, but when it’s on the back people pay close attention and will actually go out of their way or stay behind you, without being observed, to read the message, usually several times.”

And I think he has a good point – but more so with T-shirts that carry a very textual message. Most of the designs on Ban T-shirts have very little or no text (although there are exceptions, such as Be Afraid) – observers will be able to take in the visual message with just a glance – so I think front prints are still most appropriate for these shirts. But the only way an observer can read a text-heavy shirt is by either stopping the wearer in the street and asking to read their shirt (not very likely if they don’t know you) or by having the message printed on the back of the shirt. The text can be read from behind without the observer worrying that they are staring at the wearer’s chest. So if you have a message that can only be communicated in the form of text then a back print might be the best option.

Dennis also mentioned that he liked the Last Fish T-shirt but that he would prefer to see a logo (without text) on the front of the T-shirt and the full text of the design on the back. I think this would work well for that particular design. I went a similar route with the Global Warning T-shirt because I really wanted to get the (two words of) text on the shirt somewhere and I didn’t think they fitted in very well on the front, so I went for a big logo on the front and a small version of the same logo on the back with the text underneath.

We will always have our personal preferences for back or front prints, and I still think most of my designs work best on the front of the shirt – but Dennis certainly convinced me that the back of the shirt is the best place to put messages that carry more than six or seven words of text. What do you think?

the last fish t-shirt

I recently interviewed S&M artist Mistress Clarissa for the interviews section of Ban T-shirts…. click here to read it.

Mistress Clarissa

I thought I’d share this email I got today because it is typical of the kind of emails I get from scammers. I don’t know exactly how their scams work – but I suspect that either they are variations on the well-known “we need a bank account where we can deposit $100,000,000, you can keep 10%” which usually emanates from somewhere like Nigeria and which results in the victim’s bank account being emptied of its contents, or they will do a chargeback on the credit card after you have shipped them their order for thousands of shirts. Who knows. Anyway – this is the email:

My name is larry john i am with the Presbyterian Church of God (if he’s “with” God then he must be trustworthy, right?) and i will like to order a T SHIRT,below is the specification of my inquiry (poor grammar and spelling is another big scammer giveaway):Models

Gildan heavy cotton
Sizes;Mediumsize and 2xl
Colors white only (the chump want to order 3000 shirts – but only medium and 2XL? Ha! ha!)

if you have any sizes (ooh, I wonder, would I have any mediums and 2XLs? Nah we only do smalls and larges, you need to try the mediums and 2XLs stores, matey) of this you can email me back with a total cost of that or you can email me back with any one that you have . (So now sizes are irrelevant! F**k it – who cares if it fits or not!)

Quantity:1,500 pics of the Mediumsize and 1,500 pics of the 2xland add me the total cost as one . (Shit, you want me to add up? That’s gonna cost you extra!)

kindly email me with a total pickup price of 1,500 pics (so now it’s just the 1,500? Not 3,000?)…..I will like you to
send me an email response with the picked up price for this sizes (Oh man – now you want to pick up the order? Won’t that involve a lot of travelling on your part? Or maybe you want to beat me to death and steal everything I own too?) and if you don’t have this size or type available kindly email me with the sizes you have available (er, yeah, you mentioned that already). I will like to know your forms or terms of payment you accept Kindly respond to me as soon as possible for us to proceed further with the order and your phone number.
thank you
larry john

The other big giveaway is that I am blind copied on the email (he put an email address at yque.com in the To: field). So there is no mention of my name, my website or anything that could distinguish it from a form email. This is not even a particularly bad example of this type of email. I’ve seen worse examples and examples where the scammer has made more of an effort to appear authentic. I sometimes get several of these each day so I have got fairly skilled at identifying them.

Other giveaways are that they almost always want to place huge orders and that they like USING UPPERCASE!! (The title of this email was “TO ORDER______” – with inexplicable multiple underscores). Also they usually indicate that they want to pay by credit card – that wasn’t mentioned in this email but I am sure Larry would have mentioned it pretty quickly if I had replied to him.

I’d be interested to know if anyone knows how the scam actually works.

Just for a minute let’s forget about the reams of data, the statistics, whether it’s wetter, drier, hotter or colder than usual. Let’s use our heads! Billions of tons of trees and plant matter containing carbon dioxide have been compressed over millions of years and have formed coal, oil and gas. All that CO2 is being released in one huge blast over a what is a comparatively extremely short period of time. And the intensity of that blast has increased over the last few years as countries like China and India catch up with Europe and North America. Countless vehicles, power stations and planes belch CO2 into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is just a few miles thick. Immense amounts of forested area have been cut down.

How could this not affect the planet?! The problem I have with global warming skeptics is their complete and utter lack of imagination and common sense – combined with a dogmatic pig-headed determination to pounce on any tiny piece of news that might indicate that is still not a “scientific consensus”. Use your heads for Christ’s sake! Think about it! All that CO2 that was built up over millions of years – released in a few decades…. and you’re saying…. “nothing”?

There are two giveaways going on at the moment, where you can get yourself a free T-shirt of your choice. One is at sweeps4bloggers, which ends on November 11th, and the other is at Organic Girl, ending on November 19th.

Ban T-shirts is happy to announce the winners of the TCM Pumpkin carving contest for 2009. First prize goes to Brad Alderman! Brad wins the weapons of mass distortion T-shirt and a TCM signed Divided by Night Vinyl.

Grand Prize Winner! Brad Alderman!!!!

The runner up prizes go to Dan, Valerie Fraser and Grand Prairie (Alberta Canada) who all win a TCM Divided by Night Vinyl for these great pumpkin carvings:

Dan's pumpkin!

Valerie's pumpkin!

Grand Prairie's pumpkin!

Well done to the winners, all the pumpkins look fantastic. Bring it on for the TCM carve up 2010!

Could Dan and “Grand Prairie Alberta Canada” please contact Janine Johnson at greenwavefounder@gmail.com and resend their pumpkin pictures as your email addresses were not captured when your photos uploaded?

I got this email which was kind of funny so I thought I’d post it. It’s nice to see there are people out there with opposing viewpoints who don’t want to shut me up!

Visited your site today.  I won’t be buying anything – because our ideologies are completely different.  However, this is what I love.  This IS free speech.  Do I agree with you? No.  But I don’t give a shit.  Free speech provides the checks and balances that all people need – regardless of political/religous affiliation.  Keep it up.  If I see your shirts on my childs back, I’ll probably rip it off of them and burn it, and spend the rest of my days wondering how I failed them so miserably.  But other than that – keep up the free speech.  When I fight for free speech for my conservative views, I’ll keep you in mind – because I’m fighting for you too, no matter how screwed up I think you are.  I love it.

How I’d love to send a free shirt to his kids!

A few people have asked to see the Stop Shark Finning shirt in black, so here it is – in black. This design is also in women’s sizes small to XL, and men’s sizes S to XXL. In white it is also available in XSmall. With this T-shirt we have raised over $2000 for Sea Shepherd, an organization that we believe in and which is making a real difference out there in the ocean.

Stop Shark Finning

Ban T-shirts has hooked up with the guys in The Crystal Method to offer you the chance to win a T-shirt featuring a brand new design by Ban T-shirts called “Weapons of Mass Distortion”. The shirt is inspired by a song by The Crystal Method called, not surprisingly, “Weapons of Mass Distortion”! The winner will also win a TCM signed “Divided by Night” vinyl, the latest full length release from these masters of electronica. TCM are an extremely accomplished duo made up of Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland and have been recording since the early 90s.

To be in with a chance visit this page about the “TCM Carve Up” 2009 Pumpkin Carving Contest!

Ban T-shirts is proud to be associated with TCM and recommend that you visit their website and MySpace page. Electronic music is a genre that I admit I am not too familiar with – but I was blown away by the music these guys make.

Weapons of Mass Distortion The Crystal Method T-shirt