posted on Wednesday, August 14, 2013
In January 2012 I began to create a minimal geometric composition each day and post it on a tumblr blog called Geometry Daily. After 500 posts this little art project gathered an impressive audience. Many pointed out that the graphics would look great on t-shirts, so I jumped at the opportunity to produce some. Here is the story behind the (just released) first two Geometry Daily shirts:
Ignition
I think the most astonishing thing for me about the Geometry Daily project is how many awesome people all over the world I got in touch with through it. Putting my art out there seems to click with many and I am very thankful for the discussions and collaborations with all those friendly people.
One of them is Nikolas from Stuttgart, Germany, who got in touch after I dropped a side note that I was thinking about shirts. Nikolas is currently busy starting his own eco fashion label OMPROD and working on the first collection. He not only wanted to get Geometry Dailies on shirts like many others, but he also brought all the tools necessary to really do it: A full professional silkscreen printing workshop! We swapped emails and geeked out on the phone for hours about fabrics, cuts, inks and graphic styles. It became clear that we had to do this together, the first official Geometry Daily shirts.
Preparation
The design and experimentation phase began. I do not have a lot of experience with fashion design, but I knew that I would not just slap one of the graphics on a shirt and be done. The graphics are at home on a square sheet of paper, the fabric of a t-shirt spanning around a human torso is a very different canvas. Also, a shirt always works together with the appearance of the wearer. The cut of the shirt and the positioning of the graphic needs to fit the body shapes. And a shirt is always combined with other clothing with certain texture and color. A plain white shirt is probably not ideal.
Some iterations on the way to the final design
I selected some possible graphics and experimented with color combos and positions. We had a lot of fun on the Geometry Daily Facebook page when I posted a poll with two different designs. The most comments I ever had on a Facebook post!
Nikolas sent several packages of test prints. Gradually we settled on a shirt, two colors and two prints. We had to rule out a lot of great possibilities on the way. But I wanted this to be THE Geometry Daily shirts, my personal vision of it. I always asked myself "Would I personally wear THIS in real life?" and acted accordingly.
The first shirt
The “gray one” is based on #109 Vice versa, a graphic I made in April 2012. I have a very special feeling about this one, because it was one of the first posts that were seen by a wider audience on tumblr. It also has interesting proportions that makes it ideal for a shirt print. The upper triangle is centered and points to the collar (and the wearer’s head). The lower triangle stretches to the right running towards the arm pit. The whole graphic is rather large, so that it slightly bents around the torso, making for a nice interplay between the body and the geometric shapes. I love how the focus point of the graphic comes to lie on the wearer’s heart …
The other shirt
The “green one” has a more traditional position and comes from another very popular post, #366 The nautilus fracture. This post closed the first year of Geometry Daily and therefore is also something special. The composition is based on the Golden Angle and some random flip-flop-ing, which makes it both harmonious and complex. I always thought that circular shapes fit perfectly on a human chest (see Iron Man or Ben Sherman’s iconic target shirt). The graphic is hand-printed with blue ink on leaf green shirts. A terrific contrast, if you ask me.
Materials
Nikolas and I were certain that we would only work with materials that are environmentally friendly and ethically produced and traded. The shirts we print on are Fairwear certified and made from 70% bamboo fibres. The fabric is soft and durable and flows beautifully around the body — a bit like silk. It has some slight texturing in the color that plays very well with the hard-edged graphics. The cut is modern, but not too fashionably skinny. Everything is printed by Nikolas by hand with eco-friendly water-based inks.
Details
I wanted it to be clear where the graphic came from, but I would have hated to spoil the graphic with some bland logotype. So we had woven labels produced that carry the URL geometrydaily.com in a very elegant and non-disruptive way. They are sewed around the bottom seam.
On the inside the shirts hold another silkscreen print with branding and numbering. There are only 81 shirts of each design. (I chose 81 because it is nine squared, a much more interesting number as 80 or 100.) There might be more designs in the future, but no reprints. The number of each individual shirt is rubber-stamped on the printed white field. I already do this “limited edition” thing for my silkscreen prints on paper. But with shirts this is even more “limited”, because obviously we needed to do different sizes. There are only 13 shirts of size S and XL, 28 of size M and 27 of size L. So please get your shirts as long as they last!
Epilogue
Producing these shirts is not without a bit of risk. Nikolas bought shirts and inks and invested many hours printing and stamping and sewing. We both do not know if anybody on this planet will ever really buy these shirts. If there are, we both would be very happy to think about more designs — and Women’s shirts!
What do you think, did we make something you could wear? What graphics, colors and styles would you like for the next round? Please feel free to comment below!