Who's got your back?

This was another shirt from a tech conference.
It's an old one but this was handed out as a promo item from the HP booth. Shirts were a hot ticket item back in the day. In a land of pens, highlighters and stickers a full on tshirt was a swag windfall. HP hasn't used this tagline in a long time so unless you are able to mine up some old shirts I doubt you'll see another one like it again.
Generally, the design is clean and organized. Precisely what I would expect from HP. With strong brands like HP or Apple or IBM they are allowed a little leeway in their inventiveness. Normally I would tear down this shirt for cutting costs and being too simple. But I find myself putting it on a pedestal. The layout is clean, "open", accessible, all things that HP would want to represent. The shirt is too big because they only had one size but I'm satisfied, or at least I was for a while.
Some ad wizard came up with the copy on the front here. It reads, "Who's got your back?" and in the back is the "HP" mark. Clever, right? Well they did have the foresight to come up with a tagline for just this shirt. It may have extended to their helpdesk service marketing mix but it wasn't their whole campaign. If this was put together quickly the I applaud them for not totally botching it at the last minute.
People who know HP likely appreciate the tech reference. Since Hewlett Packard has been around for such a long time their brand definitely has some recognition. The tagline is nice though because it is a call to action. People compulsively read shirts and when they see this one they must find out who in fact "has my back". In general terms HP isn't "cool" per-se but they have a certain quasi-retro corporate cred thing going. No school like the old school.

I got a little creative with this shirt back in middle school. After the unexpected discovery of the OSX "Think Different" shirt with all of the paint on it I was hoping to repeat that success. Instead of using paint I used highlighters to liven it up. It gave me a lot more control on the design and I thought it would be a clever tongue in cheek reference to those insane multi-pointed highlighters that are handed out at conferences -like the one I'm holding in the picture-. Unfortunately the strokes aren't thick enough so you can't see them and any colors other than yellow and green just faded away in the wash. Fun idea, poor execution.