Three lines of capitals that call you a suspect

Three lines of capitals across the chest. Each one swells slightly at its middle and falls away at its ends, the way lettering does when it is photographed off curved glass.

The middle line is green and noticeably wider than the two bone-white lines above and below it. Nothing else is on the shirt.

Why do the lines bow outward?

Because they are being read off a curved surface, and the curve does the job a drawn screen would do badly.

There is no frame here, no set, no appliance, no rectangle of any kind. The distortion alone puts the reader in front of the glass. Draw the screen and the design dates itself to one machine in one decade; draw a box round the type and it reads as a picture stuck on a chest.

The bow is also the only reason three lines of plain capitals are a picture rather than a slogan. Take the curve out and you have a phrase on a shirt. Leave it in and you have a photograph of a room.

Why is the middle line green and the widest?

So that the accusation is read before the permission is.

The eye lands on the largest line first, which is the one about an offence, and only then travels up to the sentence saying what you are allowed to do. The reading order is not the sentence order, and whoever set it out that way understood exactly which of the three lines was doing the work.

The green is weak rather than bright — a colour that has come off a screen rather than out of a tin. Against bone white it separates the accusation from its two flat neighbours without turning the print into a colour design.

Why does the wording sound like nobody wrote it?

Because nobody in particular did.

There is no name attached, no addressee, no punctuation, no attempt at a tone. A sentence like ANY OTHER USE IS AN OFFENCE has no author and no specific reader; it is aimed at every person who could conceivably be in front of it, which in practice was a sofa and whoever was on it.

That register is the thing being printed, more than the words are. The words are ordinary. The voice is not one any person uses, and putting it on a chest — where every other sentence you might print is somebody's opinion — is the whole trick.

How did anybody end up knowing it by heart?

Because it came first, every time, and there was no way through it.

The tape ran the notice whether or not the room was paying attention, at the same reading speed as the last showing and the one before that. You could leave for the length of it, and people did, but the machine took no instruction on the matter. Repetition did the rest.

The same household then went and made the recording unerasable by snapping a piece off the case, which tells you how much of a legal position anybody in that room thought they were taking.

Can I print a real copyright notice instead?

No, and this is the one thing on this page that is not negotiable.

The three lines on this shirt are invented for the design and identify nothing. Real statutory wording, a certification mark or a ratings board notice does something different in kind: it asserts that an authority has said something. That is a claim rather than a style, and there is nobody to ask, because permission is not the mechanism — it is the same reason a certificate card is a different sort of object from a poster.

And the film the notice was attached to?

Titles, artwork and performers belong to somebody, and unlike an official notice they are licensable. If a real one is the point of what you are making, the permission is part of the job and worth having in hand first. Where it is not the point, the invented version is the better shirt anyway. Style has no owner. A work does.

Does it read to somebody who never sat through one of these?

Yes. A stranger reads three flat sentences telling them what they may not do, and that is legible without any of the history behind it.

What changes with the history is the cadence. Somebody who sat through this at the head of a tape recognises the rhythm of it before they finish the first line, and usually recognises what came after: a film that had already been shortened by somebody else to fit an afternoon.

Some people will read the shirt as a statement about the wearer, and it works that way too. The design does not settle which reading you get, and it is more interesting for not settling it.

Does it print well?

Very well. It is text, flat colour, hard edges and two inks.

The bow has to be built into the letterforms themselves rather than applied afterwards as a soft warp, which softens every edge and leaves the type looking underwater. Each line is drawn curved from the start, with the stroke weight staying even across the swell.

The ends stay open. Three bands stacked one above another, with nothing running down the sides to join them — a chest print that closes round on itself reads as a patch rather than a print, and at this size that is the wrong object. Bone white and weak green on washed black or deep charcoal, and no rectangle anywhere near it.

How do I get one made?

Describe the notice at JustOG — the three lines, which of them carries the colour, and how hard the type bows. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Somewhere a machine is still reading it out to an empty room at the same speed as always.