Get Info: #tshirt

Media Darling: T-shirt design

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 19 May 2025 15:54:00 +0000

I was looking through Comptiq, Vol. 41, April 1988 and spotted an illustration showing the relative size of 2” floppy disks—used in some word processors at the time—compared to more common floppy disk sizes at the time: 8”, 5”, and 3.5”.

Which got me thinking about the ever decreasing size of storage and how it might make for a nice illustration on a T-shirt. So I created technical drawings of the following media in decreasing size:

5.25” floppy disk
3.5” floppy disk
MiniDisc
CompactFlash
SecureDigital
MicroSD

T-shirt

Various sizes and colours.

gingerbeardman.creator-spring.com/listing/media-darling

Stickers (To Scale)

Roughly to scale, on clear vinyl.

gingerbeardman.creator-spring.com/listing/media-darling-decal-floppy

gingerbeardman.creator-spring.com/listing/media-darling-decal-minidisc

Sticker (Not To Scale)

Not to scale, on clear vinyl

gingerbeardman.creator-spring.com/listing/media-darling-decal-colour

Alt Store

Some buyers may choose to buy from my alternate web store which ships from the UK.

www.tshirtstudio.com/marketplace/gingerbeardman

This store has more limited colour choices, though you can edit that during checkout. YMMV.

Moai-chan-dise

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 19:19:00 +0000

Let’s celebrate!

we just hit 1000 games at my database of moai in video games 🗿
today is Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day) in Chile 🇨🇱

So here’s some “Moai-chan-dise” ✨

t-shirts and stickers in both silly and serious styles
special “relaxing” sticker by @Vxcl

T-shirts

Various sizes and colours.

Stickers

3-inch longest side, on clear vinyl.

Special Edition Sticker

3-inch longest side, on clear vinyl.

gingerbeardman.creator-spring.com/listing/moai-relaxing-sticker

Alt Store

Some buyers may choose to buy from my alternate web store which ships from the UK.

www.tshirtstudio.com/marketplace/gingerbeardman

This store has more limited colour choices, though you can edit that during checkout. YMMV.

My “Bubble Era” T-shirt Store

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m relaunching my “bubble era” T-shirt store on @teespring with international shipping in time for Christmas! teespring.com/stores/gingerbeardman

Retro games, computers, scooters and other cool logos on your favourite colour T-shirts!

These T-shirts have been a side-project of mine for many years—I redraw old logos as vector art, just for kicks! The oldest designs—CHOP and SPRINT—date back over 15 years to the time when I realised how easy it was to get T-shirts printed

Every so often I pick a design out of my folder of ideas and draw it up as vectors. I find the process of redrawing shapes with “good paths” quite relaxing and therapeutic, kind of like an open-ended puzzle game. (glyphsapp.com/learn/drawing-…)

Hachisuke (ハチ助 in Japan; Hu-bee in USA) was the mascot of HUDSON SOFT. Apparently a mixture of bee and mouse or cat! Sometimes referred to as “a fanciful depiction of a bee”. After seeing this vintage T-shirt I set about redrawing it using old photo ref

The main outlines of Hachisuke were easy enough to draw, but the halftone dots on the hat took some thinking. Eventually I achieved the effect using a series of dotted lines. And I found a bug in @affinitybyserif Designer whilst doing it! (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

One of my other favourite logos is for an old game called BILLIARDS which features a balloon style typeface. At this time magazine layout and graphic design was likely to have been done using phototypesetting rather than using computer. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

DENGEKI G’s ENGINE magazine evolved from covering just the PC-Engine and games by NEC, to a broader range of games. The G in the title refers to Gals and Games which means there is often a broad range of content in the magazine, if you get what I mean. 🍑 (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

HIPPON SUPER! magazine was known for having a different tone than its main competitors, such as (Weekly) Famitsu and GAMEST. It had a whole bunch of logos over its lifetime, but I think the first one is by far the best. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

As much as I enjoy figuring out the best paths to represent a shape that was probably originally drawn/cut by hand, I’m happy to take some short cuts at times. Here on MSX・FAN I use two rectangles to cut into neighbouring shapes when I should have just used thick strokes

The “Oh!” series of home cpmouter magazines are some of my favourites, and each of them (there are dozens!) had wonderful logos. I redrew a handful of them in black and white so they work on dark or light coloured T-shirts. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Oh! MZ is probably my favourite of the bunch, featuring amazing cover art including Syd Mead’s Blade Runner concept art for no reason other than it looked cool.

The Sharp MZ-series of computers couldn’t do bitmap graphics so everything had to be done using the character set, which lead to this genius set of Hanafuda cards:

Oh! HIT BIT is a magazine specific to Sony’s line of MSX computers and was a real joy to redraw as it’s geometric nature allowed me to use a grid! I LOVE GRIDS. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Speaking of grids, there’s a cool app for macOS called KARO GRAPH which is a “graph paper” vector drawing tool with always-on grid and snapping to encourage structured drawing. I really dig it; you might too: (apps.apple.com/gb/app/karo-gr…)

This next logo, for PASOCON SUNDAY, was spotted in a YouTube video of an old PC-focussed TV show. After spotting it there I managed to find higher resolution versions of it in Japanese magazines from the same era: (youtu.be/Bwpsbg6j0DI?t=…)

I should mention the custom type old Japanese video game magazines used to headline articles about various games. SO COOL. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Articles often contained custom illustrations. I chose to take them out of their original context and surroundings and place them as large as possible on the front of a T-shirt. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

Another love of mine are “bubble era” Japanese vehicles, from crazy vans with skylite roofs to cute scooters. All of which seem to have the coolest names. (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

If you’re into those check out my collection of old Honda scooter brochures: (flickr.com/photos/emsef/s…)

Moving from Japan to USA @scottekim has kindly given me permission to reproduce some T-shirts he designed in the 80s for CGDC (Computer Games Developer Conference, which became GDC after they realised games are also on consoles) and HACKERS’ CONFERENCE (as worn by @AndyHertzfeld)

Back in the UK 80s music TV series “The Tube” had a logo that was actually a neon tube light. Drawing this was similar to the previous BILLIARDS logo, but its more freeform nature actually made it more difficult! (teespring.com/stores/gingerb…)

UNITS “digital stimulation” is the album cover for the 1980 release but I added to the bottom of the design to make it look better on a T-shirt. The original artwork was created with strips of translucent plastic and the print on the T has the same effect! (discogs.com/Units-Digital-…)

Sensible Soccer T-shirt

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 23 May 2002 11:00:00 +0000

I won a competition in a magazine that resulted in my design for a Sensible Soccer T-shirt being put into production by a company called Joystick Junkies.

By early 2004 they were available to buy at online from the BSI Merch website and Amazon UK, as well as on the UK high street at all River Island stores, and to buy wholesale from Big Ben Interactive.

T-shirts were spotted in the wild as far afield as Canada and Australia!

Design

It’s a shame they didn’t have the budget to do the lines along the shoulders and around the neck!

Eagle-eyed pixel-peeping viewers will notice that the final design isn’t actual Sensible Soccer sprites.