Winning Threadless – A buffoon’s guide. By tonteau.

It must have been early 2007 when I happened upon a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offer on graph paper at Wilkinson’s, the UK’s answer to a store that sells everything. Being half Scottish and in need of paper, it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down, so I broke out the wallet and gave the good people at Wilkos 99 English pence.

Now, the idea of a simple, directly proportional, diagonally plotted graph t-shirt had been meandering about the upper regions of my face for a good while without actually producing much fruit. But with graph paper now in my possession, I was well on my way.

The first idea was to plot a relationship between Poison and Death. But I realised that given an infinite amount of poison a point will arise when there is no one left to poison because everyone has died, giving death a sharp downturn and spoiling the comical diagonality of the graph. I decided to play about with different words in place of ‘poison’ and at around 3 am on a date I can’t remember, I stumbled upon ‘money’.

One thing lead to another and before I knew it I was slap bang in the middle of a pop culture reference. Money/Problems, excellent. I drew the type up quickly and covered the mistakes I made by inking in the offending letters. Rock ‘n’ Roll!

I blogged it the very next day under the title “Notorious B.I.G was right” and received some positive feedback. Thenceforth followed a period of lengthy procrastination which I like to call ‘designing’.

I put the design up for critique and received helpful advice from one and all. Most notably Quag and Tiphaine to whom I give “Big ups” for their help. After some revision, I was ready to submit. I did this at work as I had decided to give up the internet at home for lent. The design went up on a Friday, and without home access to the worldwide web, I was helpless to bump and pimp it. Thankfully it avoided the first day drop and on returning to work I found lots of positive comments. If you left one, I thank you. After seven healthy days “Biggie was right” finished with a 2.14 my highest score at that point.

Six or so days later I was checking my junk mail and found an email from ‘threadless art’ which contained the word ‘congratulations’ I panicked, opened it and got the kind of feeling you get when you smoke your very first cigarette (possibly because I was smoking my first cigarette at the time) or stand up too quickly; all kinda woozy and full-on. I read it twice and phoned a mate who was distinctly underwhelmed, but offered me his congratulations.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they printed it and I was happy. Now all I need is for threadless to send me one on guys small AA grey and this story will be complete.

May I take this opporchancity to thank threadless and you kind people for getting my design printed. Thanks.