Lots of t-shirts have witty sayings or interesting designs on them. They may showcase a favorite band or TV show, but not many t-shirts can demonstrate the effort that goes into the design of a city –and also give directions for any lost and weary travelers.

These functional and fashionable shirts are the product of a small independent business called CityFabric, which is gaining rapid popularity both in the Triangle and nationwide.

CityFabric was started by Matt Tomasulo and Ben Hood, both landscape architecture graduates of the College of Design, when they were bored over the summer. After brainstorming, they came up with idea of printing city maps on t-shirts and selling them.

The whole idea was to take the design elements that go into building a city and put them on a t-shirt.

“It ties into basic surface level understanding about how our environment has come to be,” Tomasulo said.

Hood, who also has a master’s degree in landscape architecture, said, “You can find all of those things [design principles] in the built form of the city. It’s a pretty engaging graphic.”  

The shirts have the “figure-ground” of the city printed on them. A figure-ground shows the buildings and other structures of the city in a grid layout, with relationship to the roads, parking lots and other open spaces—the mass in relationship to the void.

“It was a tool we used before in school,” Hood said.

This tool is also how the business got its name.

“When a highway goes through downtown, they say it cuts through the ‘city fabric,'” Tomasulo said. “It’s kind of a play on words.”

The t-shirts themselves are cotton, organic shirts that come from a company in Burlington that CityFabric has teamed up with. They also digitally print the maps on the shirts, but Tomasulo explained that they do hand printing with the College of Design.

According to Tomasulo, they first took an advertisement out on an urban planning blog and received a favorable response from it, despite it being an academic blog. The idea has grown from there.

Currently there are shirts with maps of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, San Francisco, Chicago and other major U.S. cities. The shirt have been picked up by stores in the Raleigh area but a distant vendor in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard University, sells the t-shirts.

Despite the success and popularity of the shirts, Tomasulo and Hood discovered that a lot of people loved the idea of the figure-grounds but weren’t interested in wearing a t-shirt.

“We’re missing a whole niche of people who love their city and are passionate about their city, but don’t wear t-shirts,” Tomasulo said.

To remedy this, they began printing the figure-grounds on canvases and selling them through an online craft store called Etsy.

“It’s a different way to interact,” Tomasulo said.  ”With the extra building blueprints, people can interact with specific points and places.”

Both graduates say that the College of Design influenced the decision to go with their small business venture, especially the use of the figure-ground to represent the city.

“It’s definitely what drove us in the direction of this venture,” Hood said.

While it simply started as something that utilized their design knowledge, Tomasulo and Hood have watched their small business grow into something much more for its patrons.

“We started talking about ideas about how we could engage people with the city,” Tomasulo said.

They explained that when people look at the shirts, they recognize different buildings and relate their experiences with them. The viewers connect with it and begin conversations with others about their city.

“It’s a dialogue piece. If people take the step to ask, it begins a discourse on what it is and if you live there,” Tomasulo said.

They also explained that the other point of the project is to educate and inform people about their city and other cities.

“It’s information about your city,” Tomasulo said. “It’s taking pride in the place you live.”

Meredith Owens, a sophomore in first year college, said she thought the shirts were a great idea and that she would buy one.

“It gives you a little bit of civilian pride of being from such a well-designed city,” Owens said.

Tomasulo and Hood have aspiring plans for the future of their business. Right now, they are trying to create a more organized Internet presence and work on the branding for the business. They are also looking into screen printing on better quality paper and possibly printing on other materials beside t-shirts.

“There’s a lot of different directions that we could go in and we’re really trying to figure out how to craft in the simplest form,” Tomasulo said.

“We’re just seeing what other directions we can take it in,” Hood said.

Overall, they both hope that people will use the shirts or canvases to engage their city in a way they have not had the opportunity to do before.

“We’ve had a lot of people who have seen something on the shirt that they’ve never seen before,” Tomasulo said. “There’s the element of discovery. There’s the element of the unknown.”