"Cool shirt!"

28 December 2025

A couple years ago I was looking for t-shirts with interesting designs. Plain shirts in block colors are easy to find, but if you want any sort of graphics and you have particular tastes, that’s a nontrivial search problem which hours of online scrolling could not solve.

So I decided to just make my own.

I’m really into art, so that was an easy place to start. I’d find artworks I loved and print them onto shirts. Most frequently these end up being art exhibition posters, but sometimes album covers or photographs. Services like printful.com make this trivially easy: find and prepare your design, choose your shirt, and pay. A week later, a one-of-one arrives at your door.

There’s a special kind of pleasure from wearing something you know you’ll never see anyone else walking around in and that you shaped.

When you make your own shirts, you start looking for things that will fit nicely onto fabric. James Somers wrote this essay “More people should write” where he says that when you write, you live more curiously, you pay more attention to the world because you’re always asking questions, looking for material. Making shirts is another vector through which to create, and when you consume to create, you pay more attention, and I think that’s a good thing.

People will often compliment you. Of course they haven’t seen anything like this before — not too many 1963 Frank Lloyd Wright Illinois exhibition poster tshirts going around! Most of my shirts are art-themed, so I typically get compliments from people who are also into art. It’s a bat signal of sorts. Henrik Karlsson wrote that “a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people” — custom shirts work similarly. They’re a signal, and you can signal what you’re into.

If you’re really into math, make a shirt with a fun geometry problem so someone can discreetly solve it. If you’re into obscure music, print an album cover. You can signal what you’re interested in, and the people who recognize the signal are often the people worth talking to.

Find an image, prepare it, upload to printful.com, choose your shirt, pay. Enjoy.

Voila