Human Story Tee

A human story tee that borrows the language of thermal imaging

Three figures walking down a receding grid corridor, each body mapped in thermal colour from blue at the extremities to white at the core, A_HUMANS_STORY_ marked above and a block of small text set into the lower panel. The human story tee is the most conceptual print in the collection.

Thermal imaging shows temperature rather than light, which means it shows something a camera cannot: not what a body looks like, but what it is doing. Blue at the fingertips, white at the chest. It was developed for military use in the fifties, reached medicine in the seventies, and entered popular imagery through film — always as the view of a machine looking at a person, never the other way round.

Placed inside a perspective grid, that reading sharpens. The grid is the oldest shorthand for digital space in graphic design, borrowed from early wireframe rendering, and it turns the corridor into somewhere no physical room could be. Three figures walking through it at different distances, each reduced to a heat signature, makes the point the title only hints at: this is a story about people told entirely in machine vision.

It comes in black, slate and piggy pink. Black is the only base where thermal colour behaves correctly, since the effect depends on hot colours emerging from darkness. Slate keeps the grid cold and technical. Piggy pink is the deliberate contradiction — the machine's view of a body, printed on the softest base available.

The tee runs 240 gsm cotton. Thermal palettes move through six or seven saturated colours in a very short distance, and each step needs its own space on the surface — on lighter fabric they collapse into a single orange blur and the anatomy disappears. Oversized cut, dropped shoulder, crew neck. Take your usual size, or size down for a closer fit.

• Type: Oversized graphic tee
• Material: Heavyweight cotton, around 240 gsm
• Print: Back print — thermal figures in a grid corridor, 'A_HUMANS_STORY_'
• Fit: Oversized, drop shoulder, crew neck, short sleeves
• Sizing: True to size for an oversized look — size down for a closer fit
• Colours: Black, slate, piggy pink
• Wear it with: Straight trousers, technical outerwear