Interview by Rachel Gottesman

Thanks for letting me pick your brain nose. I hope I can gather many great thought boogers from you!

Ha ha, no problem at all Rachel, I’ll try to give you as much of my mucus mem-brains as I can part with. Interesting way you put the thought process because many people say my ideas/slogans notepad I scribble everything down on looks as messy as a sneeze fit in full hay fever mode.

I'm not sure that I've ever interviewed a "concept guy" rather than an artist before, but certainly we all consider your ideas an art form in and of itself.

Thanks, I’m just a gigantic lover of any artist’s interpretation of how they view this collective delusion we all call “reality” and “the world we all cohabitate,” be it illustrative, written, filmed, musically recorded, kabuki-theatered, filming yourself on Youtube doing a handplant while a monkey is juggling rabbits on top of the skateboard, etc.

We all live physically in the same world, but our minds couldn’t be in further distant galaxies if we tried. Everyone has a different interpretation of our collective lifetime experience, and I think one of the biggest outlets and joys of life is trying your best to describe/interpret for people your individual experience for zillions of others to enjoy and make their life happier, ponder, and possibly learn from….and in turn enjoying and thinking about what others are trying to impart to you through their personal stamp on life.

Whether I succeed collaboratively or with slogans is not something I can answer, but finding new avenues into people’s minds for laughter or conceptual purposes is what brings me the most creative joy, or just plain joy, in life.

I'm sure you've been asked this all the time, but I don't care. I have to ask. Where the heck do you come up with your stuff? Are you just naturally the wittiest guy ever?

I’m hardly the most wittiest guy in the world (cue commercial of me replacing the Dos Equis man for their brand of Wise-Acre Beer, now with a splash of Smarminess!), but I was very flattered by Ben Foot aka B7’s quote about working with me in the blogs: “Evan is like the Phil Spektor to my Ronettes, only without all the hooker killing and with a more conservative haircut.”



The wittiest people whom I’ve learned the most from in my life (besides, you know, my parents and wisened owls who bite into the center of lollipops) are comedians, such as David Cross, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Steven Wright, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Chris Rock, the early writers of the Simpsons, etc. I feel they are the fiercest truth-tellers of the modern world who don’t have to censor what they say like network newscasters or have to have their thoughts approved by a committee vote like in Congress.

Badbasilisk recently told me he feels our artistic relationship is like that of a comic book writer and an illustrator.

I try to reserve a little bit of time every day to kind of stare up into the outer space of my mind, and soon different items and phrases and concepts begin floating about like so much space debris as I try out different combos and sample the elements, pulling them in with my inner tractor beam where new ideas or funny phrases hopefully form.

Sometimes I’m having a conversation with someone where a fun idea for a slogan or a raw slogan comes out in conversation and I scribble it down for later. Basically, I would have sentence tattoos all over my body like a grade-school version of the main character from Memento if I didn’t carry around a pocket notebook and pen at all times, my artistic weapons of choice.

Other times the basic idea for a concept comes to me, and I try to illustrate an eye-bleedingly roughest of the rough scene with stick figures, which usually gets me to start adding more and more jokes and things to add further flavor to the original pun/idea. On average, I’d say I spend two hours a day between thinking of slogans/concepts and talking to and fine-tuning collaborations with as many amazing Threadless artists as I can lasso in to work with me!



Other musings on things that prepared me for life as a Threadless devotee: I remember putting on comedy sketches with action figures for my friends back when I was barely larger than a Sergeant Slaughter GI Joe toy.

I also majored in sociology in college and had a minor in film criticism, which are both really about observing and finding social or visual behavior patterns. It’s like majoring and minoring in being a non-creepy voyeur. I also used to write movie reviews in college, local papers and on the interworld- here’s a sample of a music and movie review I wrote before the wonderful world of Threadless showed me what I really want to do with my wordy life!

Here’s a concert review I did about going to see the bombastic wonderful of Broken Social Scene.

And a review of a film that came out over a half decade ago and you’ve probably seen 101 times!

Take me through a step by step process of your average collaboration.

None of my collaboration experiences with the ludicrously talented and caring artists of Threadless is average, Rachel, but I know what you mean, hehe.

The general gist of it is I go through a list I have compiled of all my concepts (I try my best to add to it a couple times a week) and pick out the best 10-20 ideas I think the artist could really do wonderful things with both illustratively-wise and sensibility-wise. After we settle on an idea, I encourage the artist to ask any questions they have regarding the refinement of the concept, and to send me some rough sketches when they think they’re on the right track. Sometimes what they show me gives me more ideas to put into the design right away or improvements to the scene’s construction, and other times I’ll take a day or two to think about what the artist has sent to me.

Threadless artists are remarkably receptive to healthy criticism and I try to be as open to it as they are, and to not be territorial about a work you are both developing together; it’s all about the better idea winning out, no matter who it comes from. This process repeats as many times as necessary until we are both one hundred percent happy with the collab results. I usually come up with a title and some copy for the first comment as the artist puts a flash presentation together, and voila, a collab baby is finally born!

Every collaboration I have taken part in is a wonderful exercise in compromise, cooperation and synergy, and producing over 150 collaborations and counting has helped me deal with other parts of my life in a healthier way as well. So not only has Threadless forever changed my life creatively, it’s therapeutic too! Screw spending hundreds of dollars on shrink bills and self-help book clubs!

How does someone get to collaborate with you? What are you looking for in an artist?

I already love voting on as many Threadless designs as I can muster and that my schedule and lame wrist/arm problems will let me get away with, and once in a while I come upon an artist that really has an original visual voice, an amazing illustrative talent but sometimes is lacking a bit in the conceptual department and really bringing all their varied elements together in a more direct and fulfilling way.



Sometimes an artist’s ingenuity really draws me into wanting to create something wonderful with them, which is why it’s been an honor to work with so many Threadless legends. Artists even write me up and ask if we can join forces, which is pretty dang cool. I had to do a lot more convincing and tap-dancing showmanship for an artist to want to take a chance on a collab with me a couple years back I’ll tell you that much!

Other times I’ll have a concept pop into my head, and once it’s fully formed and all the pieces have been gently linked together, I picture a specific style to the drawing, even to the point where the idea will grab me by the bowtie, pull me in close and threaten to eat me from the inside on out if I don’t get a specific artist to tackle the image with me.

Examples of ideas I only offered to one person and they luckily took me up either out of excitement or fear of how much I’d digitally bug them if they didn’t accept my offer was a collab I did with Mathiole “Which Is Mightier?”, Buko’s “Honey Moon” and more recently Wanderingbert’s “What Kind Of Shoe Are You?” as well as the upcoming igo2cairo’s collab “Striking Lightning”.

Does the final image usually match the idea you originally had in your head?

It’s pretty amazing how often that actually happens, considering that I sometimes feel like I’m doing the equivalent of taking a sentence in English (aka my original thought), converting it into Spanish (describing the scene as detailed as I can in words) and then an artist re-translates that language back into English (the final submission). If you do that you’ll usually end up with a very silly looking word salad which kind of means the same thing as the original sentence, but in the strangest connection to it as possible.



My scrolling finger gets tired when browsing through all of your slogans. Why don't you just tell me your very best and most favorite one so I can vote on it?

Rachel, I gotta enroll you in my ten-part finger blasting and strengthening seminar. I’ll wave the unnecessarily exorbitant fee in exchange for five more type tee prints, so it’s a win-win situation!

But for those who don’t want to have enough time to record every harmony in “Bohemian Rhapsody” while waiting for my slogan screen to load up, I’m pretty proud of this recent mind chunk:

I Set The Bar High For Myself, Especially During Limbo.

And then there’s the countless number of slogans I thought was some of my best work and somehow scored in the negative percentage points, but that’s a sob story that any number of sloganeers can fill your ears and bore your tears with.



What other mediums would you like to see some slogans on besides tees?

I’ve always been a huge supporter of slogans being tied into a bigger shirt concept as many of the newer type tees have done as well as Brightwood’s recent OSC Slogan Swap Contest show can be an extremely successful mind merger.

Besides that, I love seeing slogans that make use of the object they are on, like a dish towel that says “Maybe I’ll Wipe The Floor With YOU For A Change!”, a graphic you could stick on a wall that would inform you “These Walls Do Talk, We Gossip About You When You’re Not Around.”, a traffic light that says within the red/green lights “What I Really Want To Do With My Life Is Direct.” And on and on. Also, trucker hats, slogans drilled into earthquake fault lines, and my feature-length life’s work, “Slogan: The Movie”. I’ll probably write the book adaption of the movie as well.

If you were only allowed to wear one Threadless tee for the rest of your life, which one would it be? Do you love it enough to wear it under your tuxedo jacket at your wedding? Would you be buried in it?

Man, picking one is tough when I pretty much have an unofficial Threadless Tee Preservation Center in the numerous closets/nooks and crannies of my home in case god forbid your warehouse ever turns into a grenade and blasts itself into oblivion.



I own somewhere in the realm of 350-400 Threadless shirts, not counting all the ones I’ve bought from other places both on and offline as well. And to think I promised myself I’d stop the collection once I got past having a new shirt for every day of the year. But I forgot about leap years and the fact that since dogs convert the regular timeline into dog years, I can make an Evan year really translate into my entire lifetime.

I can probably narrow it down to a top ten for you, and I’d wear all of them at once under my tuxedo; rather than a coffin, just dig a trench and bury me in six feet of Threadless shirty goodness:

Buko- “Kill Monotony”

Draco- “Dangerous”

Fatheed- “Occupational Hazard”

Franx- “Science Fantasy”

Glennz- “The War Against Work”

Gunsho- “Party Goblin”

Laser Bread- “Arcade Expressionism”

Mathiole- “Colorblind”

Olli Rudi- ”Knight Ride”

Tom Burns- “Mama’s Boy"

Thanks for the delicious grey matter tidbits!

Totally my pleasure, I’m glad you found my brain waves so zesty! But just to warn you, my slogans are a little high in saturated fat, so for every one hundred you read, your brain might gain a pound or two.

Interview by Rachel Gottesman

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