MECedventure

My mom brought home this shirt from a conference in 2004.
Some shows and conventions give out a goodie bag when you register. The registration fees can be several hundred dollars for a few days so they'll typically provide a nice laptop style bag and maybe a tshirt along with all of the programs and brochures. If there is a shirt it is usually specially designed for that one event. Because of this the designs become very rare and somewhat collectible. Though I would hope that someone isn't really making a museum of educational conference promo shirts. You can't get it anymore but who would want it anyway.
I like the quality of the shirt overall. It's well printed in 4 color and shows no signs of wearing out. I am however nervous of the amount of white and empty space on it -a combination of lack of content and worrying about stains-. I already have a ton of these shirts but they all very a little bit in the educational message they portray. This one in particular tugs on the heartstrings more than others because of the cute kids and wildlife that appear in full color on the front. Normally the convention chooses to have a few logos and sponsors rather than meaningful images. This design would be something that an art director might want where as the other style might be what the supporters want to see.
I like the look of the shirt, but in a way I feel like it could be so much better. This sort of layout with a graphic in the middle and specific text all around is a design that looks good on paper but doesn't quite fit the message. It feels as if someone had a checklist of copy to put on there and they crammed it all around their initial good idea. The front of the shirt is a big brick of image and text. At the top it says "MECEDVENTURE", as in "Microcopmputers in Education Conference" plus adventure. Just above the graphic, in an almost illegible script font, it reads "Learning to explore. Exploring to learn". Below the title of the conference it says the dates, location and website: "March 15 - 17 > Arizona State University > http://mec.asu.edu". The pictures in the center are basically stock images of kids & technology photoshopped with stock images of animals. On the back are a whole bunch of logos and sponsors. Designing a tshirt in this way seems to be a good balance of creativity and corporate sponsorship; the companies get their fair share of room without compromising the integrity of the flow/hierarchy. It repeats all the location, titles and website information from the front but also adds the MEC2004 logo. The whole array of sponsors are as follows: Apple, aea, Arizona State, ASU Alumni, Aspin, Aztea, and CCS Preservation Systems. The very last thing is a whole parade of wild animals marching in silhouette -rhino, giraffe, elephant, bear, etc.-.
This shirt is fun for the graphic on the front, that's about it. I think that if you were at the conference you wouldn't want to wear it because everyone else has one. It may be a good shirt to wear around town so that if you met anyone they would think that you're a teacher or at the very least good with kids. I like shirts with major brands on them. With every Apple or IBM it increases the value of whatever else is on the shirt. You might see a logo you recognize and investigate further or see it after browsing and it may change your mind.

To get all the little brands on the back I had to put the shirt on backwards and read them off as I was typing them out here. This shirt is huge and detailed which makes it easy to blend into the background. I have never had a comment on this shirt other than my mom telling me where she got it from. Microcomputers and education seem like a really old subject now but someday this shirt could be a relic of "forward thinking from the past".