Good Tees for Typographers

With the holiday season around the bend, we’re gleefully hopping on the consumerist bandwagon with our gift suggestions for the type lover in your life. In our first installment (of what is hopefully only a two-part holiday shopping series) we recommend the best t-shirts for typographers.

“Type Specimen Tee” from Typophile

Typophile’s latest fund-rasing tee shirt puts a classic ATF-style type specimen down your torso. The design is handsomely subtle and the print is high-qual. It’s also a great way to support the preeminent type forum on the web. A few of their past contest-winners are still available too.

Update: You can snag a free Typophile tee by winning their Pumpkin Carving Battle.

“Sir Freelancelot” from Chop Shop

Nerd shirt specialist Chop Shop is offering Typographica readers 15% off any purchase until December 25, 2007. Use coupon code: chopographica. Our pick of the shop is Jay Hillyer’s Sir Freelancelot, sure to charm MacBook toting designers everywhere. The typeface is Blackmoor (with something else for the caps).

“Now I Know My ABC’s” from Threadless

“Now I Know My ABC’s” at Threadless features a delightful 4-color line drawing by Joel Cocks. There are only kid’s sizes available right now, but they may print more for uppercase folk if they get requests.

“Down With CAPITALISM” from Threadless

Show your alphabetic activist side the sublimely typographic “Down With CAPITALISM” by Jaco Haasbroek.

“Lorem Ipsum” from Veer

Veer’s ever-growing Merch aisle has become one of their trademarks, and the t-shirt section now offers 26 options. Some of them are duds, but we dig Lorem Ipsum, Typographers Alphabet, Baseline, and Marian Bantjes’ tendriled Creatives Care.

Helvetica T-shirts

On the 50th anniversary of Helvetica’s birth, it seems like everyone and their intern is selling a shirt featuring the reviled and revered Swiss type. In just a few minutes of browsing I found no fewer than 20 Helvetica tees, most of which are utter crap. Let’s save you the pain of perusing them all: the best are at Angry Store (character set), Helvetica, the Shirt (basic, with ironic alternatives), Helvetica Film, (official film tee), and Blanka (two designs, one with classic Apple-rainbow colors), Letterbox (“Death to Helvetica”, set in Bickham Script).

Three good Helvetica tees that aren’t for sale: Experimental Jetset’s much-mimicked Beatles tribute, Khoi Vinh’s sold-out Hel Fucking Vetica, and Ice Cold, an unpublished Threadless submission by Tony Simonetta. Just print your own, Tony! Sans shadow. We’ll send the shoppers.