We hope you enjoyed our series of locally-themed t-shirts available for the holiday season.
In case you missed them, check out our Clarendon Cheesecake Riot shirt, Gondola Now! shirt, South Arlington 4 Life shirt, Definitely Not an ARLnow Commenter shirt and Local Is Everything shirt.
Today, we’re going to show you some of the rejected shirt designs — and let you pick one to send to production. Here are the shirts that didn’t make the cut:
ARLnow logo shirt: It seems like kind of a no-brainer to produce a shirt with our logo on it. So we sent the logo to the designer with a note to “make this look cool… be creative!” The resulting design seemed, well, a bit like a t-shirt design from the early aughts. Maybe we’re wrong and it’s actually cool? We could potentially ditch the purple design elements on either side of the logo, if desired.
The Cheesecake Incident 2018: Continuing the theme of designing shirts that reference last year’s Cheesecake Factory incident in Clarendon and niche 1990s bands, we asked our designer to come up with a psychedelic design reminiscent of a String Cheese Incident tour shirt. It’s appropriately weird, but we weren’t sure it was distinctive enough to make the band reference clear.
Keep 23rd St. Weird shirt: We “borrowed” the rallying cry of businesses along the 23rd Street S. Restaurant Row in Crystal City and turned it into a shirt that looks kind of like those “Keep Austin Weird” shirts from Texas. It looks good, but it gave us pause to appear to be supporting any particular policy — in this case, preserving parking spaces for the businesses on a lot not owned by those businesses. Consider this shirt an expression of general support for local businesses on 23rd Street and for retaining some of Arlington’s unique and quirky places.
King of the North (Arlington): We really wanted to make this shirt design work to accompany the South Arlington 4 Life shirt. But after three rounds of revisions with our designers that came back disappointing and not sufficiently Game of Thrones-eque, we gave up. If you select this shirt, we’ll send it back for one last revision to add some color and maybe change the font. We might also make a “Queen of the North (Arlington)” variant.
Which of these designs should we revive and turn into a t-shirt for sale?