A picture is worth a thousand words, and now, so is a t-shirt.
Litographs, a company known for putting entire books on posters, has just launched the same feature for t-shirts on Kickstarter.
It lets artists create t-shirts based on novels like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby with the words printed in some creative form on a t-shirt.
Founder Danny Fein came up the idea while learning to code in Python. After taking a job as a data analyst for a software company in DC, Danny almost immediately realized he wanted to learn to code. Python was the first step, and that meant reading Python the Hard Way and Dive into Python and watching Google University and MIT OCW videos.
Automating stuff fascinated him.
We spoke to Fein about the evolution of the product, and he had this to say:
Litographs started as a programming exercise. I’d seen similar products, thought they were cool, and wanted to challenge myself. I wrote the prototype python script in one night.
I left my job in August to focus on Litographs full-time. Today, I use PIL, reportlab, and numpy to create each new design. I used Scrapy to grab the text from your blog to make the custom Litograph I attached. And I’ve been working with picloud and Flask to spin up a customization tool that I’ll be adding to the website next year.
Enough has been automated and optimized that I now consider the code I’ve written to be a significant competitive advantage.
There are four designs available right now, with votes being tallied for the fifth design. If you’re in the mood to care, go vote, or even pick one up.
One shirt from Kickstarter costs $30 ($25 for earlybirds) and a single poster costs $40.