Back in June, we sold the first-ever Scriptnotes t-shirts. We took pre-orders, printed them, and sent them out all in a batch.
In that process, we learned a lot about the making and shipping of physical goods — how online shopping carts work, how to calculate sales tax, optimizing postage. We’re geeks. We like that stuff. Plus it’s been fun seeing Scriptnotes t-shirts out in the wild.
So we’re doing it again.
Through Friday, November 15th, we’ll be taking orders for a new batch of shirts. They’ll ship starting December 2nd, in time for the holidays.
Like last time, we’ll only print what people order, so if you want a shirt, you need to order now.
The first batch of Scriptnotes shirts were available in umbrage orange and rational blue. The new Scriptnotes t-shirt is available in any color you want so long as it’s black.1 For this shirt, we offer both unisex and women’s cuts.
I’m really happy with how the logo turned out. It’s faint, and seems to be gently glowing from inside the shirt.
Scriptnotes is not our only labor of love, so we decided to make some more shirts while we were at it.
First up is Fountain. How do you show a revolutionary plain text screenplay markup syntax on a t-shirt? Ryan Nelson and I went through a bunch of variations with document icons and street maps, but none of them felt right.
Ultimately, it was the color that set the tone. Olive green felt appropriately basic. Paired with white type (Highway Gothic) and a Fountain flag, this shirt feels like what you’d wear at boot camp. We’re recruiting a Fountain army, and this is the uniform.
Courier Prime is a beautiful font designed by Alan Dague-Greene. Since it’s a text face, you aren’t supposed to notice the individual glyphs — it’s for reading, not showing off — but I wanted to highlight just how smart the whole character set is. What makes Courier Prime special — apart from its bolder bolds and crisper serifs — are the true italics, modeled after the “informal” script of old typewriters. Here you get to see the full alphabet at once.2
Right after Courier Prime came out, we made a few shirts with a similar design, but printed them on a heather gray. If you’re not familiar t-shirt lingo (I wasn’t), “heather” means that the fabric has a speckled quality, woven of threads in a range of colors to give it depth. For Courier Prime, that made it far too hard to see the details.
This time, we’re printing white on solid midnight navy, so you can see everything.
Our fourth shirt is actually the very first shirt we printed: Classic Karateka.
We made one hundred of these shirts to celebrate the launch of Jordan Mechner’s game on iOS. Only friends and team members got the first batch, but when we put up the few remaining shirts last month, they sold out in minutes. So we’re doing one last run.
Our final shirt isn’t about a product, but rather an idea. Longtime readers and listeners know I’m not just a fan of technology and gadgets, but the underlying science behind them. We live in a culture that has been completely transformed scientific innovation, yet at the same rejects scientific realities.
I vented some of my frustration through the frustrated science teacher (Mr. Rzykruski) in Frankenweenie. For this last shirt, I’m paraphrasing myself and his answer to the question of why no one likes scientists.
The adult shirts are silver (very light gray):
For the kids shirts, we went black:
All the t-shirts were designed in-house by Ryan Nelson, and printed locally in LA.
Once again, we’re only printing what people order, so if you want a shirt, visit the store before next Friday.
- I always assumed this Henry Ford quote was apocryphal, but apparently it’s real. The original wording was, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” ↩
- If you’re ever in doubt which Courier you’re seeing, check the lowercase y. In Courier Prime, the tail of the y never flattens out to a line. ↩