Scriptnotes is a proudly money-losing podcast, with no ads or sponsors to defray the cost of editing, hosting and transcripts. So once a year we offer t-shirts to help fill both our coffers and your closets.
In past years, we’ve sold the Scriptnotes t-shirts in various colors. They’re lovely shirts, but three colors is plenty. This year we wanted to do something different.
So we made the [Scriptnotes Tour shirt](http://store.johnaugust.com/products/scriptnotes-tour-shirt).
Illustrated by Simon Estrada, it’s the stadium rock band shirt made for people who listen to weekly podcasts about screenwriting. ((…And things that are interesting to screenwriters.)) For the first time ever, there’s printing on the back: a list of all the live shows, past and near-future.
Although the artwork is hard rock, it’s actually the softest shirt we’ve ever made. Stuart Friedel, our resident t-shirt expert, describes it thusly:
> The softest shirt I ever touched was the American Apparel gray-tag tri-blend from 2007. Nothing has come close until this. It’s like wearing a daydream.
Stuart’s sense of softness led us to an entirely new garment: our [first-ever hoodie](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/brad-hoodie). It’s spun from the downy tri-blend threads.
We were originally going to make it a Scriptnotes hoodie, but the complicated typewriter logo translated poorly to embroidery. A much better choice was this blog’s brad icon: simple, iconic, and specific.
Hoodies are the fundamental outerwear of the modern screenwriter: dressy enough to wear to a water-bottle general meeting, casual enough to wear while walking your dog at Runyon Canyon.
We deliberately picked a lightweight fabric, perfect for an over-air-conditioned coffeeshop when it’s 100 degrees outside.
Our final bit of new schwag came to us from an email by George Gier:
> You may never know how much I appreciate Highland, but it turned reformatting hundreds of pages of garbage into two clicks of perfection. It rules. If you make a Highland T-shirt, I will be the first to buy one and wear it proudly.
George Gier, [this is your shirt](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/highland-t-shirt) (but everyone else can get them too):
For the Highland shirt, we went back the same tee we used for the Karateka shirts: strong and simple, 100% cotton. It’s a deep indigo, reminiscent of [Dark Mode](http://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-of-highlands-dark-mode).
Making the Highland icon work on a t-shirt was an interesting challenge. The “real” icon uses gradients and shadows that wouldn’t translate to screen printing, so Ryan Nelson flattened everything down.
I kind of love it. Mac icons are still supposed to have [depth and shadow](http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/07/inspecting-yosemite-icons/), but don’t be surprised if future versions of Highland move a bit in this flatter direction.
If you’re wearing the Highland t-shirt, you’re not only promoting a great screenwriting app. You’re literally wearing the future.
### Getting the gear
Both the t-shirts and the hoodie are available for pre-order starting today. **Pre-orders end September 30th.** We only make enough to cover orders, so if you want one, *you have to get your order in*.
Note: Hoodies are a special case. Because the embroidery setup costs are higher, we can only make hoodies if we hit a minimum. If we don’t reach the threshold, we’ll give refunds to anyone who ordered one.
All orders ship beginning October 8th. You should have them in time for the Austin Film Festival.