complex t-shirt background design

[solon]

I have an idea for a t-shirt.

The background would be a spreadsheet. But not a screen shot of a spreadsheet, more like a stylized graphic that makes you think of a spreadsheet. It needs to be simple and one-color, for printing on a t-shirt.

The problem is I don't know how to design it.

1 - Can a complex background (spreadsheet, blueprint, wiring diagram, etc) be done?
2 - Do you know anyone who could design something like this.

I looked on fiverr and there are 4829 t-shirt designers. None of their samples make me think they could do what I want.

[RyanAtTanagra]

I have a friend that's a great artist that works at a print shop that does mostly band merch, and does all the artwork requests, but you have to do bulk orders of the shirts (50+ for first order I think, maybe 25+)

[Lulee]

Could you take a screenshot of a spreadsheet (sans anything from the menus, etc of the copyrighted program it was created in) and use Corel or even Paint to trick it out to look like what you want?  I banged up something to make simple screenshot to illustrate what I'm thinking you mean.

After getting the graphic together, you'd have to find out from whoever is doing the printing, how to format it for their use.  Some firm that advertises on TV about doing t-shirts for your local charity says you can just upload the graphic to them so I'm guessing they take whatever you have and work it into whatever their system uses as part of the cost of doing the shirts.  Probably call it a set-up fee or some such.

Does that help?

[solon]

Yeah, your sample is kinda what I had in mind. The biggest problem that I can see is that it's still very "foregroundy". I need this graphic to be in the background - the main joke of the t-shirt will go on top of it. But I can't even visualize that in my mind's eye. If it fades into the background, would it even be identifiable as a spreadsheet?

[RyanAtTanagra]

yea with the right color choices, and maybe blur it a bit

[Lulee]

If you include the alphabetic column headers and numeric row titles, it'll make it appear more like a spreadsheet.

Paint used to allow you to spray paint with a selected color.  So you could have "fuzzed" the spreadsheet a bit with white to make it seem like it's in the background and then in a heavily spray painted area in the center, you could have put the text of the joke.  Win7's version of Paint doesn't do this anymore and I don't have access to Win10 so I don't know if that would allow you to do it.  WinXP's version was the last one I did anything like this with.  If you run Linux of some persuasion, I believe there are some decent free graphics programs.

[deborah]

You need to change the black to a grey.

[shelivesthedream]

I do some graphic design. I don't really understand what you want, though. You want a spreadsheet background so you can put some kind of joke image on top of it?

[Raenia]

What color t-shirt will it go on?  I think you could easily make it fade to the background by having the lines be similar to the background (t-shirt) color, i.e. if the t-shirt is black, the spreadsheet lines go on in a mid-to-dark grey, and the foreground joke in a lighter color so it stands out more.

[partgypsy]

What color t-shirt will it go on?  I think you could easily make it fade to the background by having the lines be similar to the background (t-shirt) color, i.e. if the t-shirt is black, the spreadsheet lines go on in a mid-to-dark grey, and the foreground joke in a lighter color so it stands out more.

This. and only have the lines and content of the "spreadsheet" show, not the "cells" Think of a spiderweb versus a table

[solon]

What color t-shirt will it go on?  I think you could easily make it fade to the background by having the lines be similar to the background (t-shirt) color, i.e. if the t-shirt is black, the spreadsheet lines go on in a mid-to-dark grey, and the foreground joke in a lighter color so it stands out more.

This. and only have the lines and content of the "spreadsheet" show, not the "cells" Think of a spiderweb versus a table

Please say more! I think you might be onto something. I want to evoke a spreadsheet - make the viewer think of it - without necessarily showing a literal spreadsheet. How do you show the lines without showing the cells? Aren't the cells made up of the lines?

[RyanAtTanagra]

This is getting deep

[SquashingDebt]

I think maybe that means only print the lines/text, in a color that's a few shades off from the t-shirt, but don't print the white background of the cells?

What's in the foreground?  Text?  An image?  Knowing that would help the strategizing.

[Moonwaves]

You could just buy a spreadsheet t-shirt and have your joke/image printed onto that t-shirt. Or maybe use that image as a starting point to try and explain to someone what you want?
I have to admit I'm also very amused by the line of t-shirts I found when googling that simply say "Be the spreadsheet" - what can I say? I'm easily amused. :)

[solon]

I never thought to google "spreadsheet t-shirt". There are some pretty good ones! Fortunately I don't see any with my joke on it.

[partgypsy]

I think maybe that means only print the lines/text, in a color that's a few shades off from the t-shirt, but don't print the white background of the cells?

What's in the foreground?  Text?  An image?  Knowing that would help the strategizing.

yes, that's what I mean. printing white for the cells of the spreadsheet would look tacky, while printing the lines and the content of the cells, with the teeshirt color being the background cell would look better. Have the spreadsheet be dark gray and the thing over it a black or somehow contrasting color.