On the Internet you can find many people who are totally passionate about certain things. This time we will have a look on t-shirts, they are great Internet products, because you can show the whole print online, they are cheap, everyone needs a few new ones each year and has a pretty good idea of what to expect from a t-shirt, and in contrast with music or films it is impossible to download them. A year ago I got the idea that it would be cool if there was a blog that would keep me updated about the latest t-shirts. Of course after some searching I found out that there where at least 65 of those blogs out there. Nevertheless I thought I could add something extra, so I started with Shirtlog and it hasn’t disappointed me yet.

Besides shops and blogs there are also sites who do something more experimental and innovative on bringing the best t-shirts to the mass. I had an e-mail interview with two interesting sites that mix old and new ideas about blogging, community voting, and user generated content.

Tee vs. Tee

First one is tee vs tee freelance programmer and designer Aaron Baluczynski reshaped the idea of HotorNot to a place where also battle between shirts where possible, and thereby created an interesting way to find out what users like without pushing them tofav or rate shirts. Aaron is at the moment moving between cities, but he found some time to answer a few questions

1. How did you come up with the idea for TeeVSTee?

It just came to me one day out of the blue. Sorry, no interesting story here. I’ll have my PR department work up a touching tale with just the right balance of personal genius and the hand of fate.

2. What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

There haven’t been any big challenges, except some really boring, technical issues with SQL.

3. What are your ideas about the future of online (t-shirt) sales?

The internet offers too many options, whether it is information or t-shirts. It’s great that the web makes it possible for anybody to publish and sell, but it’s also a challenge for us as consumers to find, for example, the best t-shirts. I’m sure we’ll continue to see miniature Diggs and StumbleUpons emerging to tackle this problem in specific niches. A recommendation from a real person is still the best way to find great stuff.

Rumplo

Rumplo is a kind of Digg for t-shirts (but than different) with extra options as sorting on tags, colors, and popularity. The site is build and designed by Ian Van Ness and Sahadeva Hammari. Sahadeva was friendly enough to answer a few questions:

1.How did you come up with the idea for Rumplo?

The idea for Rumplo just sort of appeared when I was looking around the web for cool T-shirts — “Wouldn’t it be convenient if I only had to go to one spot to find all the freshest tees?” Ian and I set out to build that place and it’s a big part of what you see at Rumplo today. Now the idea for Rumplo is growing and we hope to add some great tools for the hundreds of small, independent shops around the world making Brilliant Tees, tools that will make it easier for them to promote their work and find new fans on Rumplo. We’ll also continue to make it easier and easier for people to find their new favorite tees on Rumplo, of course, and browse them in new and interesting ways : )

2. What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

Staying focused on the most important pieces of Rumplo turned out to be the most difficult part of building it. It’s so easy to be distracted by the thousand cool ideas that pop up in our heads. So staying focused turned out out to be the best thing that happened to us, as it pushed us to really build something that people would want to use and that artists and shops find works for them.

3. What are your ideas about the future of online (t-shirt) sales?

I think that people are going to start seeing a lot more international work, T-shirts that are really different from what they’re used to and that veer outside the norms we’ve come to expect in our local geographies.UniQlo is doing some really good stuff with their T-shirt line, and there are also tons of really creative, small shops in Europe and elsewhere that we’ve been really happy to see people submitting Rumplo. It’s fun to see people’s surprised comments when they see some of the cool shirts from far off places. At Rumplo we want to make it easy find and explore the world’s T-shirts in that way.

Top 5 t-shirts sites that count:

That is; according to me, you are allowed to disagree in the comments.

1. Threadless

Threadless is an insanely successful t-shirt shop, It has almost everything that could be seen as necessary to create a successful company; it has a user base who submit designs, other users will rate them and tell their interest in buying, and finally Threadless prints the t-shirts most wanted. Many sites have tried to copy this concept, but only a very few succeeded. WIRED’s Jeff Howe explained during SocialStrategyTalk in Amsterdam last May why.

2. Rumplo

Rumplo already mentioned in the interview is a new way to browse the internet content in a meta view, although tried by many sites, the visual aspect and the standardization among t-shirts make this extremely useful.

3. Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt, one of Europe’s succesful former start-up companies, allowing people to print one shirt at the time, or start their own t-shirt shop by only designing the prints and leaving all the other work to Spreadshirt.

4. Tcritic

T-critic, one of the oldest and most consistently updating blogs, has even more readers than The Next Web (yet).

5. How to fold a shirt

How to fold a shirt, an evergreen among the t-shirt videos, the classic Japanese way of folding a T-shirt. Has more than thousand tributes on Youtube.

17. Shirtlog

Shirtlog.com, no top 5 is ever complete without a 6th item. My own sandbox to keep in track with the latest shirts, and practice a bit with what it takes to run a thematic weblog.

Concluding

What I think is interesting in the t-shirt case is that it shows that any content on the Internet can be reworked and redistributed. Not only blog posts, written text or photos, but also consumer products (or at least the text and photos of them) can be reordered and reworked by a group of people. And although we’ve already seen a lot of work on the area of media, I think there are still enough objects of fascination left: cars, houses, paintings, food, electronics, books, you name it.. also could make a great group driven suggesting community.

Not long after the phrase Web 2.0 emerged, also Web 2.0 design appeared. An unwritten set of guidelines that demanded that a decent webpage should have gradients, round corners, some mirror effects, a badge, and the important stuff should be in a font size of at least 48px came to existence.

I’m still not sure what they were thinking back then. Did the designers really think users where that stupid that they needed big letters screaming at them? Was it all about showing off Photoshop skills, or had it something to do with the idea that Web2.0 should be clearly recognizable as something different, something totally not Web 1.0.

Well let’s no longer talk about the past, and bad examples, let’s search for good ones that are available to us now. Because I have the feeling that we’re slowly moving to a new set of design guide lines. I’ll present you three websites, that – although they are different – have a lot in common too.

First:

Flickr.com probably one of the oldest Web 2.0 companies that didn’t go along with the bling hype. The interface is clear and simple, but still looks shiny cool.

Second:

Cnn.com, got a new fresh design last year, and is one of the finest examples of how to make a site without gradients and without drop-shadows behind each box.

Third:

Hulu.com, only around for a few months now, and a living proof about designing a good site that mainly exist out of white space. (It It is still in beta, but you can get a login within a day, check for some more screenshots here)

three ways to go beyond Web 2.0 design

So what is it that all these site have in common?

1. Grids and white space
Order your site with mathematical precision, create a grid where each column has a certain width, and stick to that format. Another thing is making things stand out not by making them really big, but by adding a lot of white space around it, some things on Hulu just needs to be clicked because there is noting else that catches the eye. Mark Boulton wrote a good tutorial about it, Khoi Vinh wrote a blog post accompanied with a pdf for it.

2. Typography.
There is a lot more into typography than only choosing which font you are going to use. Without even changing the font you can already differ two text blocks from each other in different line-height, different grey scales, and different sizes. Once again Mark Boulton wrote a wonderful series. Another good point to start with is Oliver Reichensteins article about typography.

3. Colors, and shades of grey
I already mentioned the use of different shades of grey to differ texts in importance, and especially sticking to one or two colors and grey can be easy tools to create an attractive yet clean site. Flickr especially manages the grey tones pallet very well. Veerle wrote a good article and ColorLovers and Adobe’s Kuler are worth visiting too

To sum it up: master your grey skills, keep your distance, and get some mathematical madness for order running through your blood. And you will be on your way to go beyond the drop-shadows and big starry things with text in it.