Let’s just ignore how long it’s been since I posted here, shall we? Ahem.
I’ve never really understood collecting – the feverish desire to have more, preferrably all of a particular thing – well, it’s always seemed a little bit soft-brained to me.
Then I looked in my drawers.
I have to admit it: I’m a little soft-brained too. I own so many nicely designed t-shirts, I could easily wear a fresh one every day for over three weeks without doing laundry. And as a designer, I’m more than a little in love with typography. Typographic t-shirts are like upperbody heaven to me. Maybe that’s something I should seek professional help with, or perhaps you understand?
So here’s my monster have/want list of typographic tees. Enjoy, and be sure to share your own favourites down in the comments.
Typefaces
Shirts not only set in, but also about particular fonts. No surprise: Helvetica wins the most love, hate, and love to hate.
Ampersands
Everybody’s favourite funky typographic symbol, the ampersand’s become quite a popular subject for shirts. In case you were wondering, according to Wikipedia the ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.
Numbers
I was surprised at how unpopular numbers are on typographic t-shirts, but there are a few good ones out there.
Hand-Drawn Type
All the warmth and analogue fallibility that Helvetica is lacking radiates from hand-drawn typography, which always brings a smile to my face.
Design Nerdery
In-jokes, obscure jargon, phrases repeated to clients over and over and over… these are the shirts to warm the cockles of any designer’s heart.
Just Shirts with Sweet Type
And the grab-bag of shirts that have nice type, but don’t quite fit into any other category.
If you’re a fan of type tees, there’s more here:
- The typography tag on Rumplo
- TypoTees blog
- The typographic t-shirts group on Flickr
- T-shirts on I Love Typography
- Tees on Typographica
Have a favourite type tee that’s not here? Throw it in the comments!