Top 5 ways to ruin a T-shirt

When bands get it right, their T-shirts have the ability to reach iconic status (the Rolling Stones, Motorhead, the Ramones). But more often than not, bands mess it up and their bad designs become a waste of ink and cotton. Here, Ezra Morris, half of the duo behind Wearwolf Press, a local screen-printing company, recommends avoiding the following when designing a band shirt.

1) Low resolution: “Al Gore gave us the Web for arranging casual encounters, costuming cats, and destroying the music industry, and while Jagged Little Pixel might be the best name ever for a synth-dominated performance troupe, it is a bad recipe for a shirt.”

2) Reversing images: “Dark becomes light, light becomes dark — it didn’t pan out for C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man, either.”

3) Small images: “The Little Prince stimulates the imagination; little prints demonstrate a lack of one.”

4) Unrecognizable text: “In our experience, having some combination of the letters C-A-R-T-E-L-B-L-A-C-K-L-I-P-S-D-E-E-R-H-U-N-T-E-R helps move units, but I guess Creative Loafing already knows about that phenomenon.”

5) Amateurs: “Not having Wearwolf Press print your shirts is a mistake. Other local printers carelessly include the clap, bacon rinds, and aging Soviet-era munitions in their printing process.”