I’ve been wanting to a ‘best of’ category for site designs, I just haven’t gotten around to it. When I do, The Affair is hitting the top of the list. I give a lot of ‘passes’ to mediorce t-shirt site designs, I love to see the entrepreneurial spirit in action and sometimes that means a so-so site with great shirts. But every once in a while a shop get’s it all right.

The Affair’s site is nothing short of beautiful. Simple, clean, usable and intuitive. Go ahead an grab onto a t-shirt model and spin him around for a 360 degree view of the tee. Sweet. And you know what, they design shirts as good as they do web sites.

The Affiar is made up of two Aussies who’ve set up shop in London’s east end. Shirts are American Apparel and limited to editions of 200. The only down side is that they only have two tees available right now - Miniluv and Muslim Jesus. Hopefully this is just ths start of things to come. Nice work guys.
www.the-affair.com

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October is here and that means Halloween. I’m drifting a bit off topic today, but hey, a good link is always worth passing on. As much as I’d like to say you can get away with just throwing on a t-shirt as a Halloween costume - you can’t. This is one time of year you can dress up like a complete nut and get away with it. So seize the day. Which brings us to Halloween Express.

If you can’t find a costume idea there you shouldn’t even bother to dress up. They’ve got just about everything under the sun - and an easy to use site as well. I actually did manage to find a couple t-shirt related costumes - how about this wet t-shirt winner costume. Or maybe a tye dyed hippe look? Perhaps half a shirt tied up - a la the sexy police woman outfit? No?

One thing that I liked was that there were a lot of themed costumes where you could get different characters from one particular movie or genre. Those are great for those work place halloween contests. Tons of stuff for kids, props, racey stuff, plus size - hey, even costumes for pets! Can’t go wrong, check em out. Couple picts after the jump.

www.halloweenexpress.com

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Stumbled upon a good resource for t-shirt shop owners running on CafePress. Cafe Templates is a blog style site with a selection of tips and tricks to customize your store and maximize sales on CP. Although the name ‘Cafe Templates’ would imply they have CafePress store templates, I could only find one - and it wasn’t anything to write home about. But the tips are useful and worth browsing.

The concept of subscription based t-shirts is becoming more and more popular. For those unfamiliar, basically you ’subscribe’, pay a monthly fee and receive a new t-shirt every month or so. Typically you don’t have a choice in design, but that’s really the fun of it.

Social-T is perfect example. Each month features a particular theme. The shirt has the artist statment printed at the bottom near the hem (see below). Our Does it Rule You shirt was nicely printed with some cool metallic ink no less.

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Hanna Montana star Selena Gomez was spotted at the recent Teen Vogue party sporting a global warming tee. Selena pulled of the environmental play on words “Hotter Than I Should Be” just fine. Political activism isn’t just for Hollywood’s older A-List anymore.
Photo: PrPhotos.com