Jim Moore walks around his shop in New Paltz. Inside it smells a bit like an elementary school art room on finger-painting day; the scent of acrylic is everywhere. Big presses loom wide open, like mouths, ready to stamp down another reproduction onto waiting cloth.
“This is where all the jobs that need to get done go,” says Moore, pointing at the T-shirt screen-printing presses. His business partner Ryan Williams — the primary graphic designer at the shop — is struck by a sudden wave of humility.
“It’s like super bare-bones,” Williams says quickly about the shop.
Antilogy Design, the two men’s T-shirt printing business, has a back room stocked almost floor to ceiling with a neon rainbow of inks. An industrial drier with a chain-link conveyor belt whirs nonstop next to a guy folding tie-dye shirts.
The “darkroom” holds what looks like a garden-gnome-sized tanning bed. It’s actually the machine that makes the screen-printing films — the T-shirt version of film negatives. Moore holds up a few films: one pattern will print shirts for P&G’s Restaurant here in New Paltz; another, whose shirts will shortly end up on a merch table outside a gig, displays a band’s logo.
A small front section of Antilogy, dubbed “the office” by Moore and Williams, is wallpapered with pictures, designs and odd reference photographs. A Triumph motorcycle, Moore’s ride, sits parked in front.
“I don’t have a garage. So that’s where it goes in the wintertime,” he jokes.
Williams, 29, has a hand-drawn looking art style inspired, in part, by tattoos. His work is in reaction to what he sees as a design trend endemic with other graphic artists today.
“I’ve been keeping it kind of dirty lately,” he says. “A lot of design is really clean now — like hard edges, straight lines — and it looks kind of generic. I want my stuff to look personalized, so it’s recognizable that I’m doing it.”
Antilogy’s two partners in crime both grew up together in Vermont. When Moore, now 31, moved away to finish high school in New Paltz during the late 1990s, his friend wasn’t too far away.
“I moved here when I was 15 and went to the last two years in New Paltz High School. I went to school in Oneonta, then moved out to California and then came back. I’d always really liked the area. My parents have moved away since then,” Moore explains. He flashes a quick smile. “I’ll probably be here forever. For some reason, I got sucked back. I really like being here. I think it’s a cool place to live.”
Williams went to design school in Florida after high school. When the hopeful glimmer of trade school had ended, he found himself living back with his parents and trying to figure out his next step. “He called me, and he just said, ‘Come down for the weekend and check it out.’ I brought like a duffle bag and stayed. I slept on his floor for the first three months I stayed here.”
Reunited, the two friends started looking for ways to combine talents — one was a graphic designer looking for steady pay from freelance work, the other had been screen-printing shirts as an amateur and then at other people’s shops for more than a decade.
Antilogy Design used to be next door to the Postage Inn in Tillson. They’ve since come to occupy 101 Main Street in New Paltz — which formerly housed Off-Track Betting. Gamblers in town might be shocked at how different the space now looks.
“We had to take all the forest green carpets and forest green paints out, and redo the floors and everything,” Moore says.
The store will take custom orders and does just about any shirt-printing job you can imagine. Contact them at 255-2200 or visit them at antilogydesign.com.
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