I’ve been in touch with a lot of T-Shirt designers and looked through loads of Online T-Shirt Stores. There seems to be a wide range of stores with different targets and niches, loads of great designs and LOTS of different places of where to find them.

You’ve got your Busted Tees, T-Shirt Hell, etc which has built a brand and doing well.

You’ve got your Threadless, DBH, Redbubble, etc which features great designers and great T-Shirts, these stores usually have a great community and brand.

You’ve got your Fulfillment companies like Cafepress, Zazzle, etc that has good designs but their T-Shirts are hidden in a swarm amongst a ton of other products of varying degrees of quality.

You’ve got your stores selling mainly licensed T-Shirts with some interesting designs scattered in.

Lastly, you have the Independent Brands. These for me are where the most unique designs are found but you really need to be looking … most of these stores are lacking in the visibility they deserve.

There are other stuff like Branded T-Shirts from Malls, Designer T-Shirts, etc ..

Anyways, the gist is that theres a big range. A guy/girl wanting to browse shirt designs would either go to their brand of choice or Google it…. and usually getting the same few stores on the first few pages.

With IRateThis, I aim to market the site to get high visibility and to allow users access to the wide range of T-Shirt Designs available.

I’m pretty confident with the visibility bit and we’re already making good progress there.

How we will allow Store owners to showcase their T-Shirts is still to be finalized but its going to be a community thing and of course linked to ratings. One thing I can confirm is that we will be adding Facebook Connect for our users, making it easier for them to access the site.

I’ll keep you guys updated regarding progress here and on Twitter but I would appreciate any comments or suggestions from you guys.
Take Care and have Fun!!!

Matt

Gonna feature a few Tees below that sticks out for me too.

Imma gonna let your finish tee

Skull Mayhem T-shirt from Zazzle

Pretty Girls T-shirt

Hi everyoneIRT was on a pause status and only recently have we had the chance to re-evaluate it.

To be frank, the problem was that we have had too many designs submitted. Some were better than others as was expected due to the nature of the Internet. Some designs were submitted with wrong images, some with no descriptions, some were just poor etc.

Our main mission for IRT at the beginning was to allow independent T-Shirt designers to showcase good designs. We wanted our viewers to have the confidence to return to the site regularly and see great original T-Shirts. We did not want IRT to become another 2000 page catalog of mainly half finished, copied or poorly designed Tees.

Our initial model failed as we spent too much time, rejecting our members designs and questioning ourselves … who are we to judge.

We will spend the next few weeks, reworking our model and upgrading the site. Hopefully, when we are finished we will move closer to achieving our goal.

The comments and emails received from our members have been great and encouraging. Any ideas that you guys and girls may have, please be welcome to share them with us on the forums.

Regards,

Matt

We are hoping to get the new site out before Christmas!

We wanted to increase the impact of having a T-Shirt Design on IRateThis to be more powerful. In order to achieve this, there will be a slight change of direction. The approval criteria will be much stricter and existing designs may be subject to the long overdue cleanse.

If your design was deleted, it does not mean its a bad design, who are we to judge but may be a combination of different reasons such as inappropriate in new categorizations, not unique, etc.

The new IRateThis will be more design focused and designs that are unique, original or just good will be looked favorably upon.

All new designs will be entered into IRateThis as a design entry for review from the IRateThis  community and moderators. Should a design be really special, it will be promoted into the IRateThis catalog which will host the best t-shirt designs the Internet has to offer.

The objective for designers and t-shirt stores will be to get their designs into the IRateThis catalog  where the exposure to clients should be immense.

We remain a website built to serve t-shirt designers and stores to increase their sales and customers and we feel this is the best way to achieve this.

Any questions on our new model can be raised here.

Just a short introduction from me for now to let you know I’m looking forward to the all new IRT site launch, I’ve seen some of the new site designs and I can tell you its gonna be worth the wait.

While I’m waiting for the IRT re-launch I’ve been keeping myself with the launch of my own line of exclusive limited edition t-shirts they’re not available to buy just yet but check them out at Grandblast.com for a sneak preview.

While I was making the site with the help of this coding expert I know I came across other links for limited edition t-shirts… I’ll save my thoughts on those for my next blog post where I’ll also be sharing some of my top t-shirt sites with you and who knows maybe selecting some of the best IRT designs worthy of an extra mention too.

Anthony

We will suspend new design submissions and members as of today or tomorrow so that we can work on the database. I am guessing the suspension will be for about 3 to 4 weeks as we test and break and test and break, etc etc until finally .. a spanking brand new and improved IRT is released to the people.

I will post more on the upcoming changes to IRT in future blog posts here. In the mean time, we will keep people happy by introducing nice T-Shirt designs we’ve found on the net on the blog.

Lets start with this one well themed one from Busted Tees

Viva La Evolución

Also, a big welcome to Anthony to IRateThis and a T-Shirt recommendation for him too whilst I am at it.

Part 2: Painting the Shirt

Now that you have a stencil, you’d probably like to paint a few threads to wear your artwork.

Materials:

• 1 Stencil
• 1 Pre-washed Shirt
• Fabric Paint
• A paint roller or brush
• 1 Fan
• 1 Iron
• 1 Cloth or spare fabric
• Newspaper

Step 1: Preparing your work area

I like to spread out over an ironing board, but any location works. I have my iron on one end, and a fan pointed on the shirt at the other. The shirt and my painting supplies are all in the middle.

Wedge some newspaper in between your shirt to prevent the paint from bleeding to the back side.

Now tape your stencil down to the position you want on the shirt and you can begin painting.

Step 2: Painting

My best advice for painting a stencil is to paint away from the edges. Paint inwards to prevent your design from bleeding outwards. This preserves the detail of your stencil and gives you a nice crisp design.

Step 3: Filling in your bridges

Remember all of those bridges? Well…if you’d like to get rid of them, you can just paint over them on the shirt.

Step 4: Heat-setting

Now that you have painted your shirt you’re done, right? Wrong…one of the most crucial steps to stenciling a shirt is heat-setting it. Allow your paint to dry and then grab an iron and that extra cloth. Place the cloth on the dried design and iron over the area for 5 minutes. Heat-setting your shirt prevents your design from washing away. It sets the design more permanently onto the shirt.

Step 5: Wash and Wear

Now that you’ve heat set it, you can wear it straight away. But when it comes to washing it for the first time, flip it inside out and wash it in cold water! Wear it with pride and show all of your friends!

Part 1: The Stencil

There are plenty of ways to make your own t-shirt, such as using screen prints, fabric pens, heat transfers, stencils, or vinyl transfers. Of all of them, one of the simplest and most effective way of producing quality shirts is by stenciling your design. And to get you started you will have to find an image.

Now, considering I was overwhelmed by a feeling of narcissism today, it is perfectly reasonable for me to have chosen a photograph of myself to stencil. I will be using photoshop to create this stencil, but I want you all to know that any digital imaging program works. You can also freehand your stencil, which doesn’t involve any editing at all, instead it you just cut out your image by eye based on the shadows and highlights. If this is the case you can skip the initial steps and jump to Step 5 of this tutorial.

Materials:

* 1 Image you want to cut
* 1 Xacto Knife
* Tape
* Stencil material (cardboard, acetate, manilla folder, or paper)

Step 1: Get your image

This is the image I have chosen to stencil.

Step 2: Select what you want to stencil

Now, personally I don’t want to stencil the background of this image. So I will be selecting only my face. This can be done in a number of ways, such as the lasso tool, magic wand, the marquee tool and in photoshop the quick mask. Here I have made the selection with the lasso tool.

Now copy the selection and paste it into a new document. This is what I have come up with:

Step 3: The Cutout Tool

There are a number of ways to simplify the image for cutting. You can either print out the image you have and freehand, like I pointed out earlier. Or you can use one of the many options your imaging program provides you with. In photoshop, you can use the cutout filter.

After applying the filter, I decided to simplify the image even further by raising the levels of the image. In other words, I darkened the image. This can be done with the burn tool, which most imaging programs have.

This is the image I have so far:

Step 4: Islands and Bridges

Now that you have the image you’d like to cut, you must understand how to cut it. Even though the image above is what I want to cut, I must make it cuttable. And this means getting rid of all of the islands I have by making bridges. An island is an area of white that is surrounded on all sides by black detail. If you were to cut out the stencil without bridges… you would end up cutting only the perimeter and all of the detail would be lost.

To create a bridge, simply erase some areas, like I have done below:

Bridges are key in this case, but don’t worry about how it looks… you will be able to get rid of these bridges when it comes to painting your shirt.

Step 5: Cutting the Stencil

Now that you have your image ready, it is time to cut. Go ahead and print out your image.

Gather your stenciling materials. You can use any material to create the stencil. I prefer the more economical methods of recycling old cereal boxes and manila folders. But if you’d like accuracy and smoothness, buy some acetate paper or some transparency sheets.

Now begin cutting away at all of the black areas on your image. When you are done, you will have a perfectly functional stencil to paint a shirt with.

As an update on whats happening with IRateThis, we’re in the process of a major update which will change the design and functionality of the site. We hope that it will make it much better for our users and have some exciting things prepared for you.

As for this blog, we will be posting T-Shirt highlights, maybe some interviews, T-Shirt articles and anything else about t-shirts.

I’ll end the post here for some more work on the site.