Resurrecting an old T-shirt design

We get a little sensitive from time to time, but then again, we are spiritual folks for the most part. As you may or may not know, we have a Christian clothing line we call Christian Edge Apparel. A number of design examples used here in our monthly column over the years have been of outreach programs for churches, schools, missions, youth activities, and other organizations. That is all part of the Christian Edge brand and directive.

A timeless design

Over the years, many of our outreach customers and wholesalers have purchased a good number of our “The Good News” T-shirts. The design is a play on a newspaper graphic on ice-gray and black garments. This graphic is No. 3 on our top sales list.

Because of the success of that image, and some prodding by our “fans,” we decided to roll out a new play on an old favorite. We wanted to mix it up a bit with some careful thought. We sure didn’t want to undermine our own sales and just trade for a new design, but instead create something similar but far enough away from the old standby that potential customers would want or need both garments.

Early in the 2000s, one of Christian Edge Apparel’s founders was volunteering at a church bookstore on Sundays. Yes, they have a bookstore for obvious products like the Bible and, you guessed it, wearables and decorated apparel. At that time, the church was also recording the weekly sermons and making them available on CDs for purchase. A four-part CD study titled “The Good News” was released on one of those Sundays way back then. The associate pastor quickly put together art for the CD covers.

After the first weekend, people fell in love with this newspaper design declaring “the good news that Jesus loves you.” Believe it or not, physical newspapers were still a thing at that time. We were chatting with the pastor when the conversation of the cover came up. It was determined that this would make a great shirt. We burned a CD at church with the original Photoshop doc to work our magic back at the shop. This was never meant to be anything more than a limited run for a few churchgoing folks.

The original file was nothing more than a photo of a newspaper that had been blurred in the background and a few pieces of type placed appropriately. This obviously served the purpose for the tiny CD cover. For the first go around for the shirts, we opened the file in Photoshop and tried to give it a little bit more clarity and defined edges. A composite of the light and a composite of the dark became our separations. We printed a neutral newspaper gray and a vintage news print black. Custom colors, of course.

It was a hit and the church loved them. They sold pretty quickly, and we did a second run. With the pastor’s permission, we released it as Christian Edge design. They sold for several years before we retired the design some time ago. We did get comments in which people wished they could read the verbiage on the rest of the newspaper. A premonition, perhaps?

The Good News design had been out of circlation for over 10 years. People would now and again email us asking if we had any available. Recently, we decided to bring the design out of retirement. But this time, we decided, if we were going to do it, we were going to do it all the way.

So, we went to the original file, broke it down and re-created it one step at a time. We used the foundation of the original file and newspaper, but we finished out the edges giving a little texture to look even more like a traditional newspaper. We reset every image, text, and detail. We made some adjustments to our type and vector components in Illustrator by using the warp options under the effect menu. More importantly, we were able to get testimonies from friends, family and coworkers to add as the articles.

After the art was complete, we went on to separations. After seps, output on CTS (computer to screen) 55 LPI (lines per inch) at 22.5 degrees. We went with a white printer or base first to control some of the levels of the background grays for highs and lows. Then we flashed and smoothed with a heated iron through a Teflon screen for a beautiful surface to print on. We printed a dark charcoal, a light gray, and, finally, the newsprint black all wet-on-wet allowed them to dither and blend.

All meshes were high tension N-272 tpi (threads per inch) at 45 N/cm² with 12-14% EOM (emulsion over mesh). We used harder 75/90/75 triple-ply dual durometer squeegees. All this for an ultra-smooth clean finish to the inks. We even rounded up an old newspaper to match the colors. This was harder than it sounds.

We released the new version of The Good News tees for Easter. How apropos. It is, once again, part of the Christian Edge line. If you’re going to wear a T-shirt that proclaims The Good News, you’re going to want to talk about it. What an interesting conversation piece. When you look at it closely, you can actually read the articles and all of the type under the headlines this time.