After what feels like a lifetime of anxiously waiting—we are thrilled to announce that All Over and Oversized prints have returned to DesignByHumans.

For those of you who are new to the family and not familiar with our All Overs, here’s a two minute history lesson on DesignByHumans.

2007 - DBH runs a daily t-shirt competition, the winner’s design is purchased by DBH and screen-printed for sale online.

2012 - After amassing a huge number of designs, and a warehouse full of inventory DBH embraces Direct To Garment (DTG) printing and opens the DBH Collective. Artists now retain 100% of the rights to their designs, and DBH switches to the on demand system you now see on the site.

The benefit to switching to DTG was that it allowed us to offer production and fulfillment for thousands of artists, instead of just one shirt a day. The downside with this was that the huge screen printed designs were no longer possible with the new DTG process.

While the switch to DTG has been a success, the community and the DBH staff lamented the loss of the iconic All Overs. Which is why we’ve been searching for the last 4 years for a way to offer them again as a high quality on demand product. We tested and scrapped more print samples and test prints than you would believe. It seemed for a while that if we wanted to offer the designs, we’d have to settle for something less than the best.

cue dramatic music Then, when all hope seemed lost, we found the solution.

The perfect print technique. An on demand, cut and sew sublimated tee.

But what in the world does that mean? Sublimation is the act of using heat to press ink or dye into the fabric of a shirt, instead of layering ink on top of the shirt as is done in screen printing. We had tested sublimation printing several times in our quest for the perfect all over, but most sublimation techniques leave unfortunate breaks in the design wherever there is a fold in the shirt. (The red arrows mark where there are breaks in the design caused by other sublimation techniques)

By sublimating the design onto the cloth of the shirt BEFORE the shirt is made and then cutting and sewing the shirt together you end up with a perfect, seam to seam print that is lightweight and wonderfully soft.

(Look Ma, no breaks! the print here is seam to seam)

Which is what you will now find available in our Legacy Collection. We’ve taken 15 of our Iconic All Over and Oversized prints and converted them to the new printing process. Don’t see one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments below! We’re working on transferring more of the old designs to the new process as we move forward.