Strip Search Episode 3, Burning That Bridge

March 8th, 2013 [ Tags: , ]

“Design a shirt for Strip Search.”

One hour. Black and three other colors.  Erika, Kiko, and Levin are the judges.  The winner’s shirt will be printed, go up in the PA store, and will receive all the profits from sales.

The premise of this first challenge is that somewhere along the line in every webcartoonist’s career, you will need to design a shirt.  Unlike many of the variable elements that can go into successfully monetizing a webcomic, there’s relatively little mystery to shirt selling.  It’s a revenue stream you can lean on even if you don’t have a significant level of traffic.  And you don’t even have to purchase a thing.  There are so many sites that allow you to upload a design and sell it on any number of items including shirts that you can pull in a significant secondary income with only a few hundred readers.  It all depends on the design.

To the competition.

An hour isn’t a whole lot of time to design anything, but it does force you to spew out ideas quickly.  You can stumble on moments of brilliance when it’s just raw scribbles on a page.  Unfortunately, a number of our strippers fell into the logo trap.  Strip Search already has a logo, kinda, and a lot of our strippers took their cues from the magnifying glass icon.  Even the winning design incorporated the magnifying glass.

I don’t necessarily think designing logo shirts is an exercise in failure.  But I believe that your logo has to be strong enough to justify a shirt design.  The Strip Search logo just doesn’t do that for me.  The magnifying glass icon on its own doesn’t say shit about comics.  Certainly, it communicates the idea of searching.  But searching for what?  The next great food truck?  A place to recharge my smart phone?  Fansubs of Kamen Rider?  The icon depends on the words for context.  And honestly, the text treatment makes it seem like we’re looking for pole dancers.  There’s certainly humor in that, but it’s not strong enough for a shirt.

As for the winning design, while I think it’s certainly one of the strongest of the bunch that clung to the logo, you have to know what the show is about to understand the meaning.  Certainly the Penny Arcade audience will get it.  But random people on the street will have no idea what the it’s for.  And while I think it incorporates the brand very well, I just don’t think it says anything about webcomics.  I guess for branding Strip Search, it’s a success.  But for comics, it’s a fail.

Now for the fucked up twist.  The winner gets to choose two artists for elimination.  Talk about manufactured drama.  I suppose there is something to being judged by your peers.  You have to be able to give and take honest criticism of your work.  Otherwise, you’re no help to anyone and you can’t really grow.  In a non-competitive atmosphere, getting crits from peers is awesome.  Sometimes when your head is in the weeds of your work, you miss things that may be obvious to others.  It’s awesome to get that outside perspective.

In the setting of the competition, I can foresee choosing artists for elimination becoming part of the game.  It’s a bit early in the process to see how our strippers will choose, but it could easily degrade into strategic gamesmanship instead of honest critique.  Which I guess is the point of a goddamn reality show.  Ugh.


  • A.J. Young

    I think the shirt/challenge could have been more successful if it were just a fun design FOR Strip Search rather than ABOUT Strip Search. You make a good point – they already have a logo. Besides, we’re going to want to support the artists, not the Strip Search “brand.”

    Frankly, none of the shirts are anything I’d put on my body. Just imagining the raised eyebrows as I tried to explain it’s from a reality show that I was NOT a part of….*shudder*

    The episode did illustrate one thing very well: how arbitrary design can be. Three professional graphic designers with differing opinions on the best shirt.
    A nit-pick: knocking off points for hasty, Sharpie-driven typography? Wouldn’t the artist get to polish the design if the overall theme was successful? C’mon. C’MON!

  • http://ypcomic.com Jamie Noguchi

    Definitely true about the typography. That’s something that can be enhanced or changed at the last minute in the actual production process.

  • A.J. Young

    Oh yeah, and Amy choosing to get rid of Katie? The person whose design was a top choice of Erika? That’s a strategic move to get competition out of the way.
    Especially if you’ve seen Katie’s comic!

  • http://beesbuzz.biz/ fluffy

    It’s also ridiculous that Amy put Katie up for elimination, with a weaksauce “the design just wasn’t there” justification. Katie’s was by far the best, clearest, and funnest design of the lot. If you feel threatened by her, just say you’re making the decision strategically. At the very least you’ll at least be telling your competition that you respect them.

    Or maybe there was an unspoken assumption that purely strategic choices aren’t allowed for the same reason they aren’t on Hell’s Kitchen.

    Anyway it’s like they did a pick-and-choose of the parts of various reality TV shows that they liked but didn’t really think about how they all worked together.

  • http://beesbuzz.biz/ fluffy

    Yep, I absolutely love Katie’s comics. Skadi is great! She’s a professional cartoonist and obviously a threat to everyone there.

  • A.J. Young

    Oh no! They posted the shirt and it’s *straight up* the LOGO with arms reaching for it.

    Wear it proudly and say “I’m the arm at the bottom, which represents the 988 people who didn’t get onto the show in the first place.” (that may be kind of harsh)

  • Pingback: Strip Search Continues (without my permission) » Tooned In

  • http://twitter.com/DrezzRodriguez Drezz Rodriguez

    You know Amy was scoping out the women in the competition first, so as a strategic maneuver, she tried to eliminate Katie and then went for the easy choice of Alex (who was the weakest in terms of concept and execution).

    It was a smart move that could come back to bite her in the ass, since I’m positive we’ll see Katie surviving the chamber of horror with Gabe and Tycho. Alex will probably be the first to go due to his lack of experience and ability to come up with the goods under pressure.

    I’ll be perfectly honest, I felt Tavis had the best concept – it was different, but in the end, the designers went with the safe choice and ultimately voted brand over creativity. Amy’s was the best out of the branded approach – I expected more from Lexxy since she’s a freelance designer… I guess this shows my age/experience as you should be able to bang out a number of ideas in an hour if you’re a designer with some confidence. I didn’t really see that – perhaps its because of the age/experience of the contestants.