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Tshirts and sweats, silk-screened or commercially printed with Indian designs or school designs (here is a Heart of the Earth Eagles T much reduced) are always popular with students and are good moneymakers for school groups. On the web, you can have a permanent display with ordering info. And you can do much more with it than say size, color and show the design. Look at the T's advertised on Beastie's Page. All these T's are UNIX daemons (a kind of system utility) and were made for various special occasions and people. Beastie describes the history of these T's, the artists who did the designs (sometimes it was a whole work-group), and how it relates to the history of the UNIX systems programming world.

The same thing can be done with T's you have made for sale. ID the artist who designed it, and say a bit about him or her. Tell the meaning of the design if it has one to the artist. If it's your school symbol, tell a little about it. Check out Beastie's daemon T's catalog web page.

Beastie's Home Page--This is the catalog of quite a few UNIX daemon T-shirts, plus one St. Olaf's computer science UNIX design. Rather speciali-interest group of customers for these!

There are 2 ways to print T's and sweats. The nicest-looking are silk-screened. This can be done on dark shirts--black, bright red (the most popular colors), navy. Silkscreening is limited to 1-8 colors (the newer machines can do 11). The type of design should be what's called spot-colors. Each run through--black (or white on black or red shirts) is usually last--is a separate color. Colors do not mingle in the dot-patterns that let 4 colors mimic every color. The color of the shirt itself can be incorporated in your design, in places where there is no ink, as the red background in my Heart of the Earth T does. The ideal program for designing this type of T is Macromedia (formerly Aldus) FreeHand, with Adobe Illustrator a distant second. The reason for this is that FreeHand is the absolute best at laying out fancy type around circles and ovals--but it's also a lot easier to work on the designs that Illustrator is. FreeHand is also best for making buttons. Silk-screening equipment is not that expensive or difficult to use. Many schools could afford it, both to screen team and school shirts and jackets, and to make them for sale to raise money for school activities and groups.

The second type of T or sweat is made by what's called "4 color process printing." Schools cannot afford this equipment and it is difficult to run. But in most major cities there are services that prepare such T-s for commercial giveaways, teams and anyone who pays for it. These designs can use photos or scanned paintings, looking somewhat like magazine color pix, but coarser. The catch is that the inks are transparent. These must be printed on white (a poor seller) or very light colors--beige, light grey, light blue, yellow. There is thermal dye printers available that do light-colored T's in a kind of "imitation process color printing" that can look quite good, if carefully designed. It too must print on light-colored cloth. These printers cost about $800 new.

Whether you're taking it to a commercial service or using one of these thermal printers, the program you'll most likely use for your design is Adobe PhotoShop. There are no competitors.

California artist Fern Mathias (Yankton Dakota), has this equipment. She frequently takes her equipment to powwows, along with a lot of pre-done shirts in designs she knows will be popular. At the powwow, she can (for a higher price) customize designs and lettering for "personalized" T's. She's given a lot of thought to the fact that light-colored shirts are not popular sellers, and has developed designs specially to make them attractive. I have one of hers that is light heather gray. Around the neck is a broad "hairpipe bone necklace" with a "turquoise bead medallion" in the center of its V. The necklace continues more shallowly above the shoulders in back. This unique design looks (and is) very special, and changes the plain heather grey shirt from something that looks like it should be worn for jogging to an attractive party shirt--especially with my turquoise jewelry. At powwows, when Fern brings her equipment, people usually want unique lettering. She has some planned program templates for names and slogans, so she can change her designs quickly (on her computer) and print the customized shirt.

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