I am glad Threadless asked me to do a shirt for their Select collection.
Designing a Select Tee gave me the opportunity to post something that probably would not have made it through the regular competition. I've noticed that people in this community tend to favour motives that have a certain twist to them, or, rather, rely heavily on puns and/or pop cultural references. Having this in mind, i gave them a design that does not qualify for any of these crowd-pleasers. "The Motive" stands for itself, there is no particular reference and no joke to "get" whatsoever.

People tend to get confused by things they cannot judge within seconds. Some of my earlier submissions got rejected because of their lack of things to hold on or cling to.
T-shirt design, it seems, only allows motives to be either purely ornamental (i.e. beautiful, but entirely meaningless) or bear a coded image that can only be read by those who are supposed to. The popular threadless design of Darth Vader cutting a tree to make it look like the Death Star is completely meaningless to anyone who isn't familiar with Star Wars semantics. (The funnier or pleasing it is to someone who is, though).

My approach is to deliver a code that can be decrypted by anyone. Someone posted a blog encouraging people to write down their own interpretation of "The Motive", or the possible story behind it. I liked that very much and it exactly hit the spot i wanted to hit. You do not need an upbringing within the sphere of western civilisation (especially U.S. popular culture) to decode my design. You don't need a sophisticated intellect to understand or be able to enjoy it. I would not go as far as to claim that you could show it to a random indigenous person from the amazon and he shall enjoy it and make up his own story out of it, but my goal is to invite the willing to
discover the picture and create a story in one's mind: to use "mystery" (as in: leaving you completely clueless and wondering) as a means to trigger a glimpse of the sensations of childhood, when everything was new and free to unbiased interpretation.

I hope you enjoy it!