Designing wearable tech history

The best ideas hit me seemingly at random — when I’m showering, running, or reading a book about Chinese computing history. Combining these ideas with just the right amount of constraints can make for a satisfying design challenge.

I’ve been doing just that recently with T-shirts. The T-shirt, with its unique constraints like size, colors, and printing process, is proving to be the perfect vehicle for visual ideas that I can’t seem to get out of my mind.

Graffiti

The idea for this T-shirt came to me when I was reading the book The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney. This is worth the read as an example of the circuitous process of human innovation.

In it, he introduces a word — hypography — meaning writing whose only job is to represent other writing. In the world of Chinese, people often use the Pinyin method, where they type Roman letters, which bring up Chinese characters.

Palm Pilot Graffiti is one such system. As a child, I remember feeling awestruck watching adults produce words on their PDAs (personal digital assistants) with mere scribbles of a stylus.

Though Graffiti ended up a technological dead end, it remains a fun artifact of history. I based this T-shirt design on one of the Graffiti cheat sheets from back in the day.

I knew that the scribbles would speak for themselves, so the challenge was to decide which ones to show and how to arrange them. I played around with various grid arrangements, feeling that a grid would subtly reference the theme of input systems. Ultimately, I arranged all 26 letters of the alphabet and 10 numerals on a 6×6 grid.

Nintendate

The packaging for the original Super Famicom (called the SNES in the US) stands as my absolute favorite game console packaging. I’m a sucker for all types of line drawings and diagrams. They have a timeless quality that photographs and photorealistic illustrations don’t. The Super Famicom box goes even further with the multicolor illustration.

One day I was considering buying a Super Famicom Classic for the nth time when the idea of drawing another game console in that same visual language came up. My favorite modern console by far is the Playdate, given how quirky, fun, and simple it is.

So I immediately began drawing and iterating on the idea. The tricky part with this design was first deciding what to represent. Then, the challenge was to decide the colors to use for each part.

The final result uses red, yellow, green, and blue on a gray background. That color scheme is, coincidentally, the same one used on this website as well.

Insanely great!

The original Macintosh team aimed to make products that were, as they described, insanely great. Since then, that term has become a key part of Apple lore.

Another theme in Apple history is cursive script. The most famous example is the hello that appeared in the introduction of the Macintosh. Since then, it has become an icon in Apple’s marketing, appearing on everything from T-shirts to, most recently, a screensaver released with the colorful 24-inch M1 iMac.

I recently spotted insanely great set in the same cursive script. First, it was on a T-shirt from the collection of an early Apple employee sold at auction.

The second was from an early Macintosh demo.

This one was trickier than the other T-shirts because I am a novice at hand lettering. There are numerous differences between the script in the vintage shirt and the Macintosh demo as well — the biggest being the style of the g in great. I maintained the 5° tilt of the two examples, but eventually followed the script from modern examples of Apple’s script.

After starting with a rough cut, I tweaked the kerning and curves to get it looking visually correct. I’m sure I’ll find something wrong with in the future. But for now, I’m happy with the result.

The first of many

I’m hoping that these T-shirts will be the first of many going forward. The strict constraints posed by the T-shirt are just enough that I find the process energizing.

You can find these shirts and other creative projects available for purchase or free download in the new Goods section of my site.

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Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.

Palm Pilot image courtesy the Powerhouse Collection. Insanely great Macintosh Intro image courtesy Macintosh Respository.