ThinkNerd origin
| Meta: | Origin | Source files |
|---|---|
| T-shirts: | Technology | Retro computing | Nerd culture | Love | Music | Miscellaneous | All |
What is ThinkNerd for? Why was it created and what is it all about? Partially prompted by a useful list of online geek/nerd clothing and accessories stores on Firesnake.net, I fancied buying myself some more t-shirts from these places, as one does. Computer error parodies, circuit board designs, usw.
I still felt, however, that some sectors of nerd interests are under-represented or not represented at all. The largest foci of existing geek and nerd t-shirt designs seem to be on workplace humour, programming, US leet/hacker subculture and hardcore gaming. You won’t, however, find much on the subject of retro computing (Amiga, Acorn, Amstrad CPC, ZX 80/81/Spectrum, Apple etc), Macintosh, or any other areas that are non-mainstream US geek and nerd on the well-known online stores. A circuit board t-shirt is about as close as you will get to Jen’s PIC programming and homebrew electronics, hardware and robotics. Science and mathematics are a touch better represented, but there are subtler and more intriguing and beautiful ways to express a love for mathematics than a bright blue t-shirt with a π on it.
ThinkNerd—originally titled Too Nerdy For My (T)-Shirt—initially represented a way to demonstrate the sorts of things that I might personally wish to see on a t-shirt that I would like to wear; the first design—a BBC Micro start screen—was actually stolen from an MSN buddy icon I had made previously. That said, I was sitting on a mental fence somewhere between “these designs represent me well and are cool” and “ugh these are so terribly sad that even I would never been seen dead wearing one”, hence the amusingly self-deprecating approach to the page to begin with.
Either way, I had a huge amount of fun coming up with and drawing the designs. On moving the page from Firetrack to Telcontar.net, I have revisited all the designs and made a lot of improvements. One notable such improvement is the appearance of the t-shirts used in the designs, but I left them slightly misshapen for posterity.
As time went by, I also made the range of designs more diverse and some of them are by far not as extreme as BBC Micro start-up screen. Even so, I still cannot see myself actually wearing most of these designs!