Caio's Graduate Diploma

As the deadline for the project was drawing closer, before heat pressing the T-shirts I decided to place an order for the prints online as well, as there was a high chance that the heat-pressing wouldn’t work too well for the cotton fabrics I had purchased (I’m very glad it did, though). This is what the T-shirts I ordered look like:

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When I placed the order, I send in PNG files with 80% opacity to preserve the faded look, but apparently their system ignored it and just printed the solid graphics. In retrospect maybe this is a good thing, now I have different ranges of colour concentration to compare. The print quality is pretty good on those, but the maximum size they allow is a bit too small for my taste, and I prefer the freedom that manually heat pressing the T-shirts allows.

With my designs selected and prepared, it was time to actually get them into the T-shirts. The first step was printing them on the dye sublimation printer:

Then, I individually cut each of the different images so I could apply them to the blank T-shirts I had bought. i started out cutting up pieces of one of the prints to test different settings of temperature and time on the heat press, and then moving on to printing the actual designs:

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This is what the first round of T-shirt prints looks like:

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I aimed for a faded colour, which I think looks quite nice, because I feel like it conveys a retro look that ties in nicely with the odd, surreal atmosphere I want the products to have, and evokes a feeling of T-shirts that had been sitting in a shop for a long time.

To test out the dye sublimation printing and heat pressing process I decided to pick my 5 favourite designs that I had made. I wasn’t too satisfied with the other 5, so I only went for these:

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Aditionally, I decided to change the registered symbol (®) to a copyright symbol (©) as I think the concept of copyright better evokes some of the themes that I’m dealing with throughout the work. I’ve decided to use the copyright symbol as an unifying element throughout the different T-shirts and in that way as a sort of logo for the brand, subverting both of these elements which are strongly associated with consumerist culture and deconstructing their meaning.

Another great reference for my product that I found a little later than the rest that I had been inspired by is an artist know by the guise of Obvious Plant. He creates fake, hilarious products that he posts on his Instagram page, where he has accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers, or on his website, in which he sells some of them.

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While I do find his products very funny, what inspired me the most about them is how he often makes them circulate: Instead of selling the products, he often leaves them in random shops to be found by passers-by, which I think is a great idea as it can create a sense of wonder and amusement for the people that interact with the product and he often manages to trick them into believing they are real products sharing pictures of them online.

I struggled a bit to get the reason why I was working with this concept in a concise manner on paper, so in order to do that I did quite a bit of research on bootleg culture and piracy in the design field. Some of the texts I researched are:

• The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman.

• Fake It Till You Make It: The Good News About China’s Knockoff Economy.

• Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods: The True Story of the World’s Fastest Growing Crimewave by Tim Phillips.

• The Trouble With T-Shirts: Merchandise Bootlegging in the Music Industry by Andrew E. Clark.

• Would You Ever Buy Fake Designer Clothes? How Some Labels Are Changing the Bootleg Stigma by Liana Satenstein.

• It’s a rip-off: now bootleg logos are a fashion must-have by Lauren Cochrane.

• How Bootleg Grateful Dead Tees Became a Legitimate Style Flex by Isaac Wingold.

• The Untold Truth Behind Bootleg Merch by Andrew Lindsay-Diaz.

These include both academic texts and articles on websites and news outlets, among others that I forgot to write down.

Having set that my project V outcome would be a parody T-shirt store, I decided that its first collection should have some sort of visual unity. With that in mind I picked these 3 prints I had previously created to further develop into a full collection:

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I created these inspired by a popular marketplace in my city that sells pirated merchandise under the guise of imports. When I went there I often had fun trying to find these design “mistakes” on the products for sale. Some of the most common ones being poor typeface choice, such as the excessive use of Comic Sans, miscoloured elements, gaudy effects and weird image distortions through compression or stretching. With my products, I had the general idea of exaggerating these characteristics to create blatant knock-offs that in a way celebrate these “mistakes”.

When finding the mentioned products in the marketplace with wrong colours, for instance, or elements that don’t really belong to the character being portrayed, I can’t help but wonder what led the designer to make these mistakes. Were they blatant to avoid facing legal consequences or simply the consequence of the maker’s with the images being portrayed, or just lack of care?

With these considerations in mind, I found that I was emulating the “bad design” often found in knock-off merchandise by trying to channel the feeling of someone who has little experience or formal training with design tools and theory and creates graphics for commerce by using unlicensed images of foreign popular characters off the internet that they might only really have seen once or twice.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with some aspects in the 3 original prints so I tweaked them a bit and went on to develop others:

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Even though they are all meant to look like they were very quickly and crudely designed, deliberately leaving some unpainted white bits and sloppy details in, some of them took quite a while to get the feeling right, like the hello-kitty for instance, for which I did different tests to get a face I was satisfied with. Here are some of my previous tries:

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In order to get feedback on our statement of intent, we were instructed to create a visual representation of it on an A1 sheet that we would quickly present to our tutors and classmates and get feedback on. I first created a digital visualization for its layout:

I forgot to take a picture of its printed version, but my poster basically displays the speculative work I created on project IV with some of my inspirations and my plans for where I want to take the work.

I got generally positive feedback which I was very happy about and some interesting artist recommendations that deal with similar themes. This is what the poster looked like after all the feedback via sticky notes:

• What is the concept/idea? What is unique about your project?

My idea is creating a store that sells satirical “bootleg” merchandise, probably T-shirts but with other possible applications, in which I appropriate popular mass media characters and distort them through exaggerated use of elements often associated with “bad design”. The concept is challenging traditional systems of creative ownership and questioning their place and the sustainability of their application amidst the internet age of digital reproducibility, along with exalting possible positive aspects of the infamous “knock-off shop” model in regards to cultural accessibility and aesthetic influence.

• What are the aims & objectives of your project?

Create a cohesive satirical “brand” with its appropriate identity and a number of different merchandise it offers, have the commentary be the focus.

• How will your experimentation from the previous project become a resolved body of work? How will you develop the project? How will you achieve your aims?

I will develop the design models that I saw more potential in into larger, more cohesive series, heat press them to blank T-shirts and possibly create prints as well, create an Instagram page and ideally a pop up shop, along with appropriate advertising for them.

• What research will you undertake? How does this research relate to your developing practice?

I will undertake further research into artwork that engages with the idea of falsification and imitation, as well as real shops that sell actual knock-offs, research the intricacies of copyright and fair use law and further research artists that explore the “shop” concept.

• Site-specific/ID work: how will your site inform your project?

I have yet to evaluate the possible sites where I might be able to open my pop-up shop.

• What materials & processes will you use? Do you need to learn any new skills?

I will probably use mostly Photoshop and Illustrator for the artwork, I’ll need to learn how to properly operate the heat press as well as engage with the print facilities. I’ll also have to figure out the transactions, how do they work, and if I’m going to explore forms of making statements through the pricing and commercial aspects of the shop.

• What will the final outcome/s be?

A cohesive collection of merchandise including T-shirts and possibly prints, an Instagram page for the “brand” with its own visual identity and a pop-up shop.

I booked the capture studio to take pictures of the sculpture I had made and the ashtrays that I had photographed quite poorly last time. I think it worked better this time around.

Here are some pictures of the finished, fully assembled sculpture that I liked:

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I had a box from when I ordered the ashtrays from the last project and found some cute children’s boots for 2 pounds on a charity shop. I wanted to attach the boot to the box and had some tape with me. Since I was already working with the concept of creating art through a sloppy style, I decided to go with it with this piece as well and just taped the two together not caring too much about how it looks:

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I wanted to make them seem like they’re just one object, though, so I covered them in paster bandage. I decided to leave some elements of the box that I enjoyed, such as the “fragile” and arrow signs (which I was intending to paint on the box up to this point) and the social media icons exposed, and drawing from my original illustrations and work with mass media icons I had been doing for this project, I drew a Nike logo on one of the boots with the plaster:

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I quite liked the makeshift look of the brown tape binding the objects together, so I decided to have these exposed pieces show a bit of it as well. From this point on I realized this work was a lot about elevating sloppy/amateurish materials and processes and trying to take them to their utmost consequences, which I thought was very fitting for my first sculpture project with no prior experience.

I didn’t like how obvious the bandages were and wanted the piece to have a more solid, concrete look, so I slathered plaster over it. The piece was meant to have a third, non-attached part which would be an object on top of it, so I found a vase for a pound on a charity shop and covered it in plaster as well.

I liked how it looked at this point, and liked the white with exposed bits of cardboard, rubber boots and tape underneath, and didn’t want to lose the evidence of the everyday materials I used (even though covering them completely would create different narrative possibilities that I’d also enjoy exploring) so I decided against covering them (which I was considering) and against painting the piece overall. It was essentially done, now I just needed to assemble it properly and take pictures.