Force 18’s Funny T-shirt Blog

We’ve recently launched our “I’d Do Me” T-shirt, amongst a flurry of other funny t-shirt designs.  It is the first T-shirt that we’ve decided to offer in purple and to celebrate we’re giving one of them away to three of our Twitter followers.

I'd Do Me T-shirt

 To enter all you have to do is follow Force18 on Twitter and retweet the relevant message about the draw.  The draw will take place on 16th July 2010 and is open to UK residents only.  We will be notifying the winners within a couple of days of the draw taking place.  Good luck!

We recommend following us on Twitter as we intend to regularly post discount codes and competitions, plus it’s a great way to find out about the latest and greatest T-shirts on our site.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads.  Tonight, a new word may start its journey into the English language.  In this evening’s episode of The IT Crowd we will be introduced to the word Tnetennba.  What is a Tnetennba?  Mos uses the sentence “Good morning, that’s a nice Tnetennba.”, but we don’t find out what it is (at least, not in the trailers that have been showing).

To welcome the new word (potentially) to the dictionary, Force 18 have crafted a new T-shirt (there, now that surprised you didn’t it?), presented like the Countdown letter selection where we first see the word.  If you would like to see it, click through to admire the awesome Tnetennba T-shirt.

 

Force 18's Tnetennba T-shirt

England have just crashed out of the World Cup with a very performance, losing 4-1 to Germany.  All eyes must now turn to Fabio Capello, the latest in a long line of poor England Managers.  To celebrate his (hopefully forthcoming) departure from the England camp, we have produced this Crapello Must Go T-shirt.

Wear it, and maybe the message will get through!

Do you like using one word answers?  If the answer is Yes, perhaps you could use one of our Yes or No T-shirts (or even both!).  With a simple design on each, you can choose between the No T-shirt and the Yes T-shirt.  If you don’t like being asked questions, then the No T-shirt is going to make you really unapproachable!

After a couple of rather dismal performances, England actually made it through the Group stage of the World Cup to the Knockout stage.  Who knows where this could go now?

Depending on your point of view on how England will perform, you might like to check out our England – Believe T-shirt or the somewhat pessemistic Not penalties again T-shirt.

Every so often we would like to talk about one of our classic T-shirt designs.  This month’s featured design is our exclusive Spot the Ninja T-shirt.

Sometime in 2008 the boss came in, looking all angry, and yelled at the design team “Give me a T-shirt with a damn Ninja on it!”  Then he went to the pub for the rest of the afternoon, probably.  Soon afterwards, the majority of the designers had fallen asleep again, but one trainee, still in his probationary period, stayed awake and began to formulate what would eventually become our Spot the Ninja design.

Spot the Ninja

The poor trainee spent much of the afternoon on Google and other search engines (although not Bing, because that didn’t exist back then), meticulously researching the rich history of the Ninja, the covert mercenaries from Japan.  He came to realise that if you were to spot a Ninja, then you would most likely be very nearly dead.  Taking out his standard-issue Force 18 crayons and safety scissors, the trainee set to work, creating rough stickmen figures and aligning them on a grid.  Across the top of the design he scrawled “Spot the Ninja”.  He sat back and admired his work, knowing that any one of the stickmen could be the Ninja and slowly realised that he had created an unsolvable puzzle.

Then the trainee hit upon his masterstroke.  He removed one of the stickmen from the design.  With that one simple move he had created the ultimate trap.  He knew that anyone who looked at the design would instinctively think that the Ninja was in the gap left by the missing figure.

Force 18's Spot the Ninja T-shirt

When the senior designers awoke from their slumber they were truly envious of the deceptively simple design that the trainee had created.  The Spot the Ninja T-shirt was put into production immediately and everyone in the design team was allowed to go home early for the day.  And they all lived happily ever after…

So there it is, the story of how our Spot the Ninja T-shirt was created, and it remains one of our most original and funniest T-shirt designs.

An update to our recent post about the It’s England Time T-shirts.  Despite creating the design and having prior approval to sell these designs for the benefit of the charity,  we’ve been asked to remove the ‘It’s England Time’ T-shirts from sale.  We are sorry to announce that as of today they are no longer available to buy from Force 18.

You can however still buy our England 2010 T-shirt featuring the same flag design which we borrowed for Chico’s T-shirts, to show your support for England in the 2010 World Cup.

Almost everyone in the UK has probably seen some form of Keep Calm and Carry On media in recent years.  The media has reported on it widely and many outlets produce posters, fridge magnets and many other products bearing the slogan.  Being well over 50 years old, the design is widely believed to be free of copyright.

Or so we thought…

One day last week, we were lazing around at the Force 18 offices when we were hit with a letter from Her Majesty’s Government, pointing out that the crown design on all Keep Calm and Carry On products, in fact remains the copyright of the Crown and reproduction of the crown design could result in a holiday, at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, at the Tower.

Being rather attached to our heads, and not wanting to lose them any time soon, we have redesigned the Crown on all of our Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt designs, including Get Drunk and Fall Over and the STFU variant, to include a new crown, entirely designed by Force 18.  We like it and we’re sure you will too! 

As the new design has been officially approved by a Government office as not infringing on Crown copyright, we can now officially sell Keep Calm and Carry On products again!

A few days ago we had a very special visitor in the Force 18 offices.  Chico (of X-factor fame) came here in person to pick up some specially commissioned T-shirts for his “It’s England Time” campaign for his World Cup 2010 song.  He is overjoyed at the growing support for his single, which is raising money for the Rainbow Child Foundation.

Chico has kindly allowed us to put the T-shirt up for sale on our site and we are donating the profits from the sale of these shirts to the Rainbow Child Foundation, which is raising money to help underprivileged children all over the world.

We’re very proud to have one of our T-shirts featured on the cover of this month’s Sky Movies Magazine.  To promote Sky Movies premiere of Ghost Town, Ricky Gervais is pictured on the cover wearing one of our Skeleton Chest T-shirts.  And very nice he looks in it too.

Ricky Gervais in a Skeleton Chest T-shirt on Sky Movies Magazine