So this is really a two parter, wrapped up into one design. The first is that the Nazis had a working flying disc craft in WWII, the second is that they had (and possibly still have) a secret base in Antarctica. It seems the Nazis did grab a chunk of Antarctica between 1939 and 1945 and named it New Swabia. Some UFO researchers will say there is evidence to support the creation of an Antarctic base, others say no there isn’t. According to Wired, that’s all garbage and the myth was finally put to rest here. We each sort of pick and choose what we want to believe, so believe what you want.
As for whether the Nazis had built a working UFO, it’s just like everything else. If some old guy emphatically says I saw a German UFO while I was flying on a mission, or I worked for the NAZIs building experimental models and prototypes, you can either say, ok I’m willing to go with you on this, or say no, that can’t be true because I know that those events could not have happened. I say honestly what difference does it make? I’m just making shirts that I think are interesting, it doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not. I’m having trouble keeping myself on track at the moment so I’m just gonna leave it at that.
Moving on to the design, I wanted to make a shirt sort of resembling those old postcards I’m sure everybody has seen on the racks on any store in just about any tourist town. They often say “Greetings from Charleston” or San Diego or Branson or wherever. In my mind I saw “Greetings from Antarctica!” right away with german ufos flying around.
A typical old timey post card.
So I found an image of Antarctica and I used the trace option in Illustrator to convert it to a vector object. I suppose this wasn’t a good move because it produced an image with more resolution in the coastline than I or Spreadshirt needed. I should have just printed the image and traced it by hand, but I was lazy. So I have a vector Antarctica, that’s the first step. The second step is the titles. Usually the “Greetings” is in a handwritten script type of font so that was pretty easy to figure out. The big 3d letters were pretty easy too, because you can just use the 3d filter in Illustrator to extrude the letters out and tilt them to the side.
The finished design.
The weird part was the text for Antarctica. I struggled with that for a long time and I’m still not sure I got it right. My original idea was to use one color flex printing for the design. So I offset the stroke to all the letters and used pathfinder to cut out the outline from the background shape, using the t shirt as the other color to separate the elements from each other. Anyway the design was rejected for flex printing by Spreadshirt because it didn’t meet the minimum requirements. So now I’m using digital direct. As an afterthought I put a gradient on the background shape to help the text stand out, but I don’t know if it’s working or not. I still think it’s a really good idea, and I’ll continue to tweak it and probably modify this post if there are significant changes. If you like the shirt as it is and would like to purchase one, I wont stop you.
