
Surface Active: Making waves in a sea of sameness
Surface Active art-to-wear: T-shirts in the spirit of fun.
As an illustrative graphic designer, writer, desktop publisher; I was a design pARTner with Chrissie Terpstra in an in-house craft garment screenprinting studio, the medium of the workingman’s artist.
By the mid 1980s T-shirts had become hot promotional items, garments on the outskirts of fashion, and a relatively new medium for the Graphic Designer’s art. What had for a long time been considered a poor medium for Graphic Design grew to an almost essential one. All you have to do is walk down the street anywhere in the world since the early 80s to see what a ubiquitous promotional vehicle they have become. If you mail out 100 potential clients a direct mail brochure perhaps 200 people will see it. But mail out, or better yet, sell 100 T-shirts, and assuming they’re at all decent looking, you launch 100 walking billboards.
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