Language Designer Shirt

If you attended the 8th Language Creation Conference in Cambridge (UK) in June 2019, you may remember me wearing a bright green t-shirt with a print of a pyramid of domino blocks with IPA symbols, along with the slogan I am a language designer. Ask me anything.

Some people asked me about the design, and I've decided to make it public so you can have your own version of this t-shirt if you want. Here it is:

I'm a language designer. Ask me anything.

I originally created the design back in 2015 in two color variants, one in blue (intended to be printed on a bright green shirt, like the one in the photo) and one in red (intended to be printed on a yellow shirt).

shirt concept (blue on green) shirt concept (red on yellow)

Here are the actual graphics that you can use in order to print your own language designer t-shirt. Just right-click and save to your own computer. Note that these are pixel graphics, not vectors:

printable design (blue on green)    printable design (red on yellow)

You could easily create your own custom color variant of this conlanging t-shirt. All you have to do is the following:

  1. Open one of the above PNG files (I'll use the blue-on-green one as an example) in Photoshop, GIMP, or any similar software.
  2. Use the magic wand tool to select all blue pixels.
  3. Flood fill the selection with the color you want as the foreground color for your shirt.
  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 with the two different types of greenish pixels, replacing them with a color that's appropriate as a shadow color for the shirt you want to print on. Note that these two colors are intended to be basically the same hue as the fabric of the shirt itself, only slightly darker and slightly less saturated. (Have a look at the photo of my actual t-shirt to see how it looks. The brighter shadow color actually turned out a bit too bright, but I still like it as it is...)
  5. Save with transparent background, and send it to the shirt printing shop of your choice to get your own Language Designer shirt.

Jan Strasser, 2019


Creative Commons License
This Language Designer Shirt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.