Thanks for all the feedback on the T-Shirt designs for my forthcoming walk from Parliament House to Mt Kosciuszko. I must admit I was a bit surprised by how many people were opposed to the distorted text, but I take the point (of course, there were some who were strongly in favour of it).

And I do also want to have some fun–it isn’t all sour grapes! As someone who has done graphic design at various stages in my life, I like the look of the “fit text to curve” text–it’s the T-shirt I’d like to have in my collection. So what I’ve decided to do is to produce at least 4 of the 5 T-shirts shown below, two of which have text fitted to the curves, and three of which do not.

In one of the text-to-curve cases, the text is easily legible–unlike the earlier design with US, Japanese and Australian house prices where the text overlapped; in the second, it’s an effort to read, partly because of the coloured text–but I want at least one shirt with a full range of colours.

I’ll alternate wearing the T-shirts on different days and stages of The Walk, and I will suggest to the (so far) three people who are going to do the whole route with me that we each wear one of them at the start at Parliament House.

I have also changed to the modern and linguistically accurate spelling of Kosciuszko, and I’ve added the references to the two blogs on the front of the shirt as well as the back, following suggestions from the blog.

Each of the shirts has a graphic to tell part of the story about why we’ve had a house price bubble–debt, government manipulation with the FHVG, and time. There were one or two suggestions about doing the T-shirt with just words (and adding an answer to the question).

I’d prefer to keep some information content in them that may be relevant in a future when the bet itself is no longer remembered.

All that makes the T-shirts rather busy–which detracts from the aesthetics–but in the balance between information and appearance, I’ll bias in favour of the former.

The only shirt I’m unsure of is the last, showing mortgage debt to both household disposable incomes and GDP (the reason I have both there is that the fall in the ratio to disposable income at the end was because the impact of the government’s stimulus package and RBA rate cuts on household disposable income was actually larger than the increase in mortgage debt caused by the FHVB; that’s why that ratio fell while the mortgage debt to GDP ratio rose).

So the five designs are:

Design No. 1

Design No. 2

Design No. 3

Design No. 4

Design No. 5