Sign in
ExploreTee Hunter recently spoke with Matthew Johnson of Seventh.Ink for two reasons! First: he is one of the nicest guys making tshirts right now! Second: Matthew has used the latter half of 2009 to make Seventh.Ink the most improved independent tshirt brand of the year! It was cool before and headed up by a passionate dude, but now the shirts coming out of this brand are totally sick! Tee Hunter wanted to find out just what happened!
Seventh.Ink
TH: Your brand has come a long way in 2009! What led to such a profound increase in design quality not only aesthetically but creatively too?
MJ: Thanks, I appreciate that comment! 2009 was a great year for the Seventh.Ink brand because I took it a step or two further with more involved designs. This led to a strong response from a lot of people, and it only fueled the fire and pushed me further along.
The shirt that really helped my brand break through was the Night of the Living Bread design, which came out at the end of September. I really loved the idea, and I put it up as a pre-sale on my site. Within a week the pre-sale had already sold out and I had to reorder! I realized then that a strong combination of wit and tasty illustration was what really made this shirt stand out from the rest of my catalog. I then took that combination and applied it to my Tyrannosaurus Rockstar and Last One Standing designs, which have done really well.
Night Of The Living Bread
TH: What inspired the latest run of tshirt designs?
MJ: The Night of the Living Bread design was something I actually thought of just after Halloween in 2008, so it was tough to wait the entire year for Halloween to come around again. After that shirt was so successful, I starting thinking outside the box a bit more and came up with Tyrannosaurus Rockstar as a fun play on words. I’ve always loved dinosaurs (who doesn’t?), so I had spent a bit of time trying to come up with a nifty design to pay tribute to our fossilized friends. It seemed that music and dinosaurs should mix, and the design “evolved” from that. Get it?
The Last One Standing actually came about from a dream I had one night about snowman having an epic snowball fight atop a mountain. I woke up the next day, left the computer off for about 4 hours, and put my dream into the illustration that eventually became the final design. The best thing about The Last One Standing is all of the fan photos that I’ve been getting in the Seventh.Ink Flickr group. It’s fun to see how people are enjoying the design, that’s what it’s all about for me.
Last Man Standing
TH: Have you begun to use different techniques and tools to create your designs?
MJ: I’ve been playing with digital inking lately, but I still find that I prefer penciling and inking my designs by hand. I’m toying with the idea of printing with different types of inks (metallic, perhaps), so that could be an addition to my design/technique arsenal.
TH: What are your greatest sources of inspiration – other designers? Artists or something else?
MJ: I’m inspired by just about everything out there. I spend a great deal of time following a variety of clothing and illustration artists, but I can’t say that they alone influence my designs. I’m constantly jotting down mental notes of ideas that I think would make great shirt designs. I have more ideas than time, so right now I’m focusing on choosing the very best to push to print. The biggest question I’m constantly asking myself is would other people wear this design? It’s a bit tricky sometimes to guess which types of designs will sell, so I really have to get feedback from friends and family before printing anything. Otherwise, I could end up with a closet full of the same shirts, similar to Nickelodeon’s Doug! In this respect, you could say that my friends and family provide some inspiration as well.
Tyrannosaurus Rockstar
TH: Where do you see your brand going in 2010 – do you have any specific goals/hopes or plans?
MJ: I’m very happy with the success that my brand had in 2009, and I’m hoping that 2010 will be even more successful. With this week’s launch of the Seventh.Ink Blog, I feel that I’m already starting the year off on the right foot. The blog will be a great way for fans of the brand to read up on news and upcoming products, as well as contests and sales. Beyond that, I’m hoping that by the end of 2010 I will have successfully launched Version 3 of the Seventh.Ink website, launched at least two solid lines of great designs, and will also have more than just t-shirts in my catalog. I have quite a few ideas in the works, so I’m really looking forward to a lot of great possibilities with the Seventh.Ink brand.
Here’s to another great year, cheers!
Big thank you to Matthew for his time and be sure to check out the continued awesomeness of Seventh.Ink
