Tee Offed

"Ohya.. they r making ur shirt design. U shud promote too..lolz"

Inn Shan, my Class Dictator Representative,
in an SMS nearly two weeks ago

I meant to blog about this ages ago, but there seemed to always be something else I'd rather talk about. In fact, there's about 7 other posts that I'm simultaneously working on which I'd rather finish writing than do this post. But since the design was already exhibited to all the other batches/classes (and before the news becomes staler than it already is) I decided that I can no longer put off writing this.

If you guys don't already know, a couple of colleagues from my class and I were approached more than a month or two ago by Inn Shan (along several others esteemed individuals from other batches who were in turn approached by their own class reps), to design this year's T-shirt for my college - which I suspect is too cheap to hire a professional to do the job. Of course, at that time Inn Shan told me about this design thingamajig, he also told me that I only had the weekend to work on it *WTFonlytheweekend?@&#@^*;%*

I voluntarily joined this no-prize-for-winning-except-for-bragging-rights-which-is-good-enough-for-me competition last year and lost. This year, I honestly wasn't thinking of joining at all. My previous entry sucked donkey nuts. I used *falsecough* colour pencils for it¹ because I can't paint to save my life. Hell, even a chimpanzee has more water-colour painting talents in its penis than I do in my entire body.

I'll see what I can put together over the weekend," I told Inn Shan. Of course, this time around, I'm not going to be fiddling around with cissy colour pencils or crayons - not since I managed to bring my Photoshop skillz up to a roughly do-not-suck-donkey-nuts-anymore level [evil_overlord_laughter.mp3 not found].

I managed to complete my design after dinner on Saturday night (or Sunday, I don't remember²) and passed the "blueprints" to Inn Shan over the MSN Messenger. Of course, when he told me later than the submission date had been pushed forward a week later, I felt like smothering him under the derrière of a morbidly obese woman. I don't like to rush my work. I like to spend weeks and weeks procrastinating before panicking and actually doing any work the night before the deadline.

But strangely enough, mine got picked. I have a nagging feeling that not many people submitted their entries. Gosh, maybe NO ONE submitted and I won by default! Okay, okay, don't tell me. Just let me pretend that my design beat two or three hundred other kids', alright? It does my ego good.

So, that's all for back-story. Here's my original entry;

The boobs side.

The butt side.

Clean, decent design with a lame, generic tagline (derived from the college's motto of "Inspired by Life"); the sort of design that the living fossils the lecturers would love.

Afterwards, I have a sudden attack of conscience for lying so blatantly on the t-shirt that I immediately rustled up a more honest version;

I'm definitely printing one for myself. Stickin' it to the Man, yeah!

The man-shaped thing on the Butt Side was based on one of the cute cut-outs of smart-ass people exchanging wisecracks exhibited at the landings of the staircases at the Lecture Hall building³. They reminded me of the monolithic stone heads of Easter Island;

My college's idea of humour.

Just a couple of days ago, Inn Shan came to me and told me that I have to make a change to the Boobs Side of the shirt. It turns out that the fossils faculty liked my design just fine (especially the Butt Side, I was told), but they didn't like the idea of the big checkered letters of MMMC being placed so near the groin.

Damn, they saw right through my frame of mind.

I find it odd that the same bunch of stuffed shirts that authorised such wiseacre-ism in the interior decor of their lecture hall complex (picture above) should be so touchy about the college's initial being displayed near their students' genitalia. I mean, what's wrong with that, really?

Of course, if they actually figured out the real reason for the positioning of the letters, they'd boot me out of school (or worse, into the formalin tanks where they keep the dead bodies⁴);

Nothing expresses love for the ol' alma mater like a big gun to her name.

So, the order I got was to shift the letters higher up (and I was to perform this feat in one night). One night is more than enough, yes, if I merely shift the initials to say, the level of the right breast (heck, even fifteen minutes is enough for that) but doing just that would make the shirt look daft. Really daft. Retarded-IQ daft.

So I had to redesign the entire Boobs Side of the shirt and that took me till late in the night (and a huge chunk of the a.m as well - I slept at four). A large amount of the time was spent staring at the original design waiting for some half-baked idea to pop into my oven. There was no "Eureka!" or "By Jove, I got it!" moments when I finally thought up the new front. All I had was a pretty sedate "Err, maybe I can do it this way" moment.

Here's the result;

The new boobs side.


The new butt side.

Last year's winning design got screwed pretty badly by the lousy printing job done by the local t-shirt mill (mainly due to the design complexity, I suppose) so I made mine with only two colours (three, if you count the shirt's colour too).

My only complain about my design was that it's white. I hardly ever wear white myself save my lab-coat, which I put on before I go to class everyday⁵

Anyway, I think the shirt looks better with its colours inverted like this;

What do you think?



Adding commercial apparel design
to his repertoire of talents,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ Don't laugh. It's unkind to laugh at the "slow" kids.
² Well, if you've been following k0k bL0k all this while, you'd realise that I'm really, really, really bad with dates and time. I once asked a friend of mine which month it was while filling up my examination answer script.
³ Better known as the Interact Building.
⁴ Now you know why my college seems to have an endless supply of cadavers for us to dissect. Lesson: Don't mess with medical school faculty members.
⁵ Not because the weather's cold or that it looks stylish - but because it has huge pockets for me to keep my camera in (which I carry with me every I go, as many of you guys suspected I do).