Because we live in a world where what your t-shirt says is an important personal statement about yourself we thought “Hey lets make some Tame the Board Game T-shirts”, so that’s exactly what we did. Also we’re going to the UK board games Expo (which we are very excited about) on the 31st of this month (May) and we thought they’d be good to wear there. So this is the finished product:

Development:

So I first had the idea of a Ringmaster taming a wild board game ages ago when we first thought of making videos. My plan was to make it a really short opening animation to all of our videos (that’s still the plan, when we finally start rolling videos out). I had a picture in my head of a generic board game box with teeth, eyes and fur. It was semi inspired by The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter. But then my sisters friend suggested doing separate monster items, like a monster card, a monster dice etc. But, not being naturally artistic, I need something to work from, as I have no concept of proportion and perspective, so I asked my Dad (who is quite artistic) to sketch me up some basic ideas and this is what he came up with:

So with the help of a graphics tablet and some MAD tracing skills I made those into this:

Added some text and put it into a T-Shirt design website so it looked like this:

Added out moto and web address to the back like this:

And then sent them to print and we received the wonderful finished articles you see at the top of the post.

Future Plans:

Now, as I already said, I’m planning to use the design as an animated opening to our videos, which should be cool and as I already have the beginning articles drawn up in Flash it shouldn’t even be hard. Additionally, if we ever manage to make this blog into a “brand” like quite a lot of other people have achieved we will sell the T-shirts. But I get the feeling that that day is a long way off, if it exists at all. Lastly I was thinking (thanks to a helpful suggestion by my sister) of making the Ringmaster into our logo by blacking it out and turning all the edges into gold, but I’ll have to test what that looks like.

Anyway, let us know what you think of the T-shirts, are you impressed? Or do you think they came out badly?