Making x-ray visible t-shirts/stickers; design ideas wanted

September 25, 2012 11:58 PM

I'm looking into making shirts and/or stickers, for either wearing through backscatter strip search machines or for putting into luggage.

There's three types of ink I can use:
a) regular, visible normally
b) glow in the dark, visible in low light or UV
c) barium nitrate, visible to x-ray.

B & C can match the shirt/sticker background color, so effectively you can have up to 3 separate overlaid designs. Or it can be mixed together and just have a single design that's also visible on xray etc.

What would make for good designs?

Requirements:
* no walls of text in xray ink (eg the full 4th amendment) — can't actually be read on scanner displays; it needs to be short & bold so it can be printed large
* shouldn't directly attack the machine operator, though it can snark them
* should have mass appeal; more designs = more cost, since I can't use zazzle type print-on-demand tech

Some extant ideas are on my G+; feel free to upvote here or there as you prefer, I'll aggregate the best ideas and do a final pass later on.

Follow me on G+ if you want to get notified of when this is ready to go; I'll fund it via Kickstarter. (I need to figure out final design candidates and the exact production method/costs/etc — I recently sent a test batch ink samples to a friend to get x-rayed, so it's in process.)

Thanks!

P.S. If you know a screenprinting shop that is willing to do designs using custom ink — i.e. I send them powder to mix in and instructions for amount — please let me know. Most places I've talked to won't do it. :-/

posted by saizai to Law & Government