Hand crafted design!
I was never a punk (always a metalhead), but I still appreciate the aesthetic and the music. The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Talking Head, Killing Joke – all good. There is a case for the punk ideal being the springboard for the new wave of British heavy metal, from which Iron Maiden sprang and made the world whole. But that’s for another blog post.
When punk first started to take hold in London, a fanzine called Sideburn needed to fill a page in its first edition, so the co-founder (and fan of The Stranglers) Tony Moon drew the illustration below. It captures what I see as the punk attitude – anyone can have a go. Whether you will be good or successful or happy is another matter, but at least you tried.
It’s a wonderful mindset to have and one I wish I had embraced earlier in life. Ah well.
With the need to start a business to bring in money since there isn’t a lot of suitable work around, I started Heath Way Prints in January 2025. Inspiration for designs isn’t a problem; finding how to transfer the idea onto a physical thing was the issue. Thank goodness for the University of YouTube.
Taking inspiration from Tony Moon and my love of puns and maths, I realised that there are other definitions of ‘chord’. A chord is a line that crosses a circle’s circumference twice. Any triangle can be enclosed within a circle, so the three sides of such a triangle are chords. So, three chords form a triangle.
I drew out a version of Moon’s original with this in mind.
I tried to keep the lettering consistent with the original, but also had to bear in mind that the shape of the printing space on a t-shirt is squarer than the fanzine pages.
All I had to do now was transfer this to a t-shirt and use a print-on-demand service to sell the t-shirts. Easy.
Well, not so easy. I used the photo (photo because I don’t have access to a scanner) of my original to try out a t-shirt design using Gelato (the Print on Demand partner I had decided to use). The image was less than good. The white of the photo background was included in the image and it looked bad.
I used Inkscape to remove the background. I followed a video by Daisy Multifacetica, and was able to change the colour of the text as well. So I had the option of black, white or any other colour. Really depends on the t-shirt colour.
The black-on-white colour option is fine, as is the white on black. But there is a colour scheme that is synonymous with punk – black and pink on yellow.
Designed by Jamie Reid, the cover of the Sex Pistols’ debut is a striking graphic and a popular colour choice in punk and punk-adjacent work. So I’ll do the same.
I used the website schemecolor.com to get the correct pink – French Fuscia – and the hex code so I can get the right shade. The yellow isn’t really something I can control, since I am limited by what Gelato offer. Luckily, the yellow of their t-shirts is close to the yellow on the original album.
Once I had a selection of colours I could then go to Gelato and design the t-shirt.
In order to have a chance of selling, I need good pictures of the design in place. Luckily, Canva (another online design site) has the facility to add a design to images of models so shoppers can see how the t-shirt looks when it’s being worn. I did a few, because Etsy allows you to add 10 images and a video to the listing.
The featured image at the top of the blog is one photo. They have a range of ages, ethnicities and genders to choose from.
I made a montage video of the prepared images, which you can see on the listing on Etsy.
Grim up North Heath 