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My own custom Twitter T-shirt, from Pringoo

Custom Twitter t-shirt from Pringoo.com
My mom finds the Twitter bird graphic extremely adorable

Twitter is the buzzword on the blogosphere these days. Social media is considered almost synonymous with Twitter these days if you go by the number of posts tech blogs are doing on it these days.

Twitter’s rapidly growing right now and you can quickly make a lot of friends over there. Pringoo.com has launched a new product line which allows you to make custom T-shirts from your Twitter friend / follower list. Not only T-shirts, but mugs, laptops stickers etc too. Creating one is easy – enter your Twitter handle and decide whether you want to fetch 176 images of those you follow (‘friends’) or those who follow you (‘followers’). You can choose between fetching user pictures randomly or by most active. I would suggest you to go for the former because I found it gave better results. A hit-and-miss affair, yes, because you can’t choose which people to include on the T-shirt; although you can remove people from from the pictures fetched you can replace them with someone else nor does it fill it up with those of others. If you’re unsatisfied with the results then you’ve to enter your username and cross your fingers to hope you get a better selection this time. But otherwise, it’s quite good. Pringoo does have other varieties of Twitshirts in its inventory.

I received my order within two days, sent via courier. You won’t be able to discern faces when inspected closely, nevertheless it looks good from a distance. Seems to be printed using heat transfer so you’ll need to be careful not to wash it by scrubbing. Useful addition to your wardrobe for tweetups / blogger meets. (You’ll be a walking-talking advertisment for yourself. Wear some tattoos and you’re ready to roll.)

My rating of the Pringoo custom Twitter t-shirt: 7.1 / 10 (The score would have been higher if not for the agonizing moments I had getting a reasonable selection of friends when creating it.)

PS (to people who aren’t there in the photo lineup) – Sorry! I tried to generate the T-shirt many times so that I could get as many unique followers as possible. This is the best I could get even after multiple tries. Shouldn’t be an issue for those with follower / friend numbers less or around 176 though.

Update 1: Pringoo team got in touch with me and informed that you’ll no longer see duplicate images during the creation process. While this is true, the number of images you get are also reduced manifold. This is because of some issues with the Twitter API appararently where it’s not sending unique sets of friends / follower on multiple requests. Will keep you posted on any developments.

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Gyaan.in logo

A few weeks ago I had announced that I’m starting work on a new project called Gyaan.in (the domain is currently redirecting to a parking page while we work on it). To give a quick recap, Gyaan.in will be launched soon as an initiative to promote quizzing in Delhi and provide a platform to quizzers to carry forth discussions on a far more versatile platform than Google Groups or Yahoo! Groups (this is what most quizzing societies in India use these days).

We seek feedback from the community. There are a few logos which we have come up with and would like have your feedback on which would be the best to go forward with.

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1. Gyaan.in logo with ¿

The first logo here was made by me. The idea behind the Indic script is to give that ‘Indian’ touch. The Spanish inverted question mark is used to replace an ‘i’. There were loads of other suggestions such as pencils, books, lightbulbs, etc which are kinda overused. The inverted question mark though would be quite distinctive. It does look a bit ‘plain’ but the idea behind this was that a two-colour thing would look good even when printed in black & white, or on merchandize such as T-shirts.

I asked from inputs from others who’re active participants (Prateek, Karmanya, Vishesh, Chirag, Rishav) – and Vishesh came up with a few modifications.

2. Gyaan.in logo with flipped question mark
2. Gyaan.in logo with flipped question mark

His first modification uses a mirror image of the inverted question mark and completes the bar on top of the letters. In all other aspects the idea behind the logo is the same. Please note that for both logos (this one and the earlier one) the colour of question mark is open for change.

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3. Gyaan.in logo with gloss (plain background)

Gyaan.in logo with gloss (coloured background)
4. Gyaan.in logo with gloss (coloured background)

Vishesh came up with two other interesting ideas, which keep the logo the same but add a bit of gloss to the logos. The second one of the two even uses a coloured background. While these would be good for using online, it may be a problem to print these in monochrome on paper or on clothing. (We could use these as ‘official’ badges which members can display on their blogs / websites though. These two should definitely look good on-screen.)

Help us out. Which logo do you think we should use? Do you think we should change the colours used in any of the logos you think we should use? What about having different looks for logos and badges? Or do we need to completely rethink the logo. Leave your comments here simply choosing a logo number – and if you feel like it with further feedback on your choice. We’re listening.

Update: LimeIce has given a distinctive redesign to the logo, without using Indic fonts. What do you think?

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5. Logo rethink by @LimeIce

Update 2: Vishesh has sent in some updated logos. I think logo 2 in set 1 would look good with an orangish gradient bar over ‘n’, but not over the inverted question mark. For monochrome printing purposes we’ll just flatten it to one colour. You may need to click through to the full size image to see the gloss properly.

6. Logo Set 1 by Vishesh
6. Logo Set 1 by Vishesh
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7. Logo Set 2 by Vishesh

Update 3: Everyone has been so helpful with the feedback. Thank you to each and everyone! 🙂 Based on the responses I got here, on Twitter, via email / IM / phone I find that most people support the second logo. Vishesh implemented the suggested change to set 1 logo 2, and here we have it. This one’s almost final now…

Almost there...
Almost there...