[Steve] Thanks for your reactions to the first round of our look back at Threadless Past. We would've published round two sooner, but my real life got in the way. I've been busy over on Matt's side of the world this past week, in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, speaking at TechEd Southeast Asia (you can find my picture under "featured speakers" if you need a good scare). I've found that there's no worse time to write about tee shirts than when I'm in the midst of heavy geeking: my brain goes all boorish on me. But now the conference is over, I've got an afternoon and an internet connection: 11-20, here I come.

Of the shirts we talked about last week, I found in retrospect that I liked two or three of them well enough that I might think about buying them if they were reprinted: Evil Mother Fucking Web Design without the text, maybe Destroy Nifkin, and definitely Red 365. In the ten designs we talk about here, I'm also in that 3-for-10 place: I'd buy Jake's My Elephant Loves Me and Nike Stumpo's She Shoot and He Shoot.

[Bananaphone] This week we are looking at 11 - 20 of the threadless design archives. We can see by now they are starting to spread their wings a bit, and some more styles and concepts are coming into play. However for me, there are no must haves this week and no real classics. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ramble on about them and post nice pictures though. And here it is, more of the old days that people keep blindly wishing for.

My Elephant Loves Me [Retired]

[Steve] See there? Jake's been printed! If you compare this print with his most recent contest submission, you'll see that the art lessons he's been buying with his part of the Threadless millions have really paid off. But that's OK: this design is interesting, too. After all, looking back like this at the early work of a now-famous artist is always fun: knowing where they've come from can be as interesting as seeing where they've gotten to.

In addition to the sheer art-historic interest of My Elephant Loves Me, I also admire how Jake was pimping the Threadless project with all his heart back in the day: this is the first Threadless branded tee shirt. The scrawny rough-drawn elephant to the left shows early signs of the technique that Jake perfects in his more recent work. I particularly like the way the thread works with the text, both graphically and thematically (threadless.com, thread lost from the threadless elephant: get the thread here?). The three horizontal elements (two lines of text, and then the thread) get thinner and longer as you move down, which creates a nice right-flowing dynamic just energetic enough to lean against the greater mass of the elephant.

I have to think that Threadless wouldn't have any problem negotiating reprint rights for this shirt from Jake, so, I guess the status of this shirt shows us that "[Retired]" isn't so much about not being able to reprint a shirt contractually as it is about wanting to be sure they're beyond the temptation to reprint, even if the thought occasionally occurs to them. Which is too bad in this case. I have to admit I'd buy this for sedimental reasons if I could, just to experience the joy of wearing a Threadless-brand shirt designed by Jake. Oh, what a feeling....

[Bananaphone] The first threadless self promotional tee comes from the one most people will know as Skaw. It isn't a bad tee for the time but it also isn't that good either, the sketchyness of the elephant drawing is somewhat contradicted by the text, which I assume is Arial or something similar, and it's harsh edges.

I know that Steve seems to be pretty enthused with this design, but I think if they were going to redo it what they need is a mix of bananaphone and buster brown with an elephant head. That's just me though... but I would rather see threadless use all it's learnt to create something new than to bring back a design antique that I don't think would share the same popularity.

Skaw is actually sending me a payment over paypal to conclude this review of his design, and thus that is all I have to write about it.

Trueistrue (Print) [Retired]

[Steve] Mike Cina puts out a lot of interesting web sites: check out the company he co-founded, his personal site, this online design bookstore, and then the web playpen that's advertised on this shirt. He's lived a noteworthy life. Back in the old days, he did the house music deejay thing. When he burned out on that, he turned to design. He developed a significant reputation as a font designer, he worked for K-Tel and Billy Graham, and he created a print design for Threadless.

I have to admit, my eye has a hard time getting into the Trueistrue print. The harsh contrast between the horizontal lines in the background and the angled elements in front is accentuated by the dots to the right. The effect is of strong movement to the left and then disintegration. Maybe it's a plane breaking up in the sky, or maybe it's more abstract: whatever it is, it feels rather chaotic and off-putting to me, not nearly as engaging as most of the stuff of Mike's I found when I explored on into his sites. Maybe the problem is that I have a hard time putting aside my tee shirt aesthetic here and thinking about posters. So it goes.

[Bananaphone] This is actually a pretty nice design, the colours are rather desaturated to soften the edges of the harsh edged abstract elements (try saying that a few times) and it comes across as quite 80s. I can just imagine wearing a pair of dunlop vollies and a headband, and going for a casual game of tennis while wearing this as a tee.

The design fills the composition of a poster well, the breaks between the various elements create visual interest and movement. The trendy halftones and diagonal line overlaps also add to the design and manage to work without the trend of the time feeling tired. If this were a nice little abstract tee, instead of a poster, I imagine it would have done pretty nicely in bortweins design not illustration comp.

Beware The Robots [Retired]

[Steve] It turns out that Milts and MILFs share four of their five letters. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, but it gives poor Milts a bad reputation. Do a quick google search on milts and Threadless to see what I mean. His reputation isn't completely undeserved: he may not be a porn magnate, but Milts is not exactly a go-getter internet entrepreneur, either. All these many years after he got Beware The Robots printed, and both his personal link and the site on the shirt still point to an "in progress" page. There are certainly internet projects that have taken longer to get off the ground, but really, this is some pretty spectacular procrastination here. I salute you, Milts!

Beware The Robots exemplifies the simply joy these early Threadless designers found in ambiguously complex drama, low-resolution technical strategies, and tricky use of negative space (I'm thinking Moltar, Nifkin, and Milts here). There's some interesting cubist energy going on in the way we see several different aspects of the 60s beach-house to the left. There's some drama involved in wondering exactly what that guy is running away from (the pictured monster? bad party conversation?). And of course there's the pleasure of imagining that he's about to run through the bathhouse/Greek temple on the cliff and plunge to his death in the abyss/ocean beyond. Thank goodness it doesn't seem to have been printed in my size: I'm safe from temptation even if it's reprinted.

[Bananaphone] Milt... Mutant I'd like to touch. And with that has anyone noticed that the robot in this design is like a pixel robot version of Quasi Modo? The design itself feels a tiny bit off balanced, the shack and large pixel gathering to the bottom right (forming what seems like a cliff) has alot of weight to offbalance the robot head, but I still get the feeling it hasn't done the job fully. It is also obvious that whilst the robot may weild a big stick and/or arm, the man himself should probably be paying more attention to the stick he is tripping over (check the small pixel outcrop).

Apart from all this, a small part of me does enjoy the message. People, it's about time we stood up in what we believe in and defended our sea shacks from giant robots.

Assume The Position [Retired]

[Steve] Tom Lancaster's web link is stale, and google isn't much help in trying to track him down. Is he the physicist at Oxford's Clarendon Lab? The auto dealer in Levin? The Cisco web consultant? The artsy-fartsy student at Aldridge School? We may never know.

Assume the Position brings home a little bit of airline safety instruction and proposes to display it on our chests. It turns out that, in my humble opinion at least, most airline safety instructions are ludicrous. In the event of a water landing, for instance, the plane will break up and your body will turn into mashed fish-food: you will have no use for the flotation device under the seat in front of you. Just so, whatever has happened to cause the forward forces represented by the red arrows in Assume the Position will shortly drive the cockpit through the plane like a train through a subway tunnel: ducking is just going to insure that your skull goes first.

Granted, the design is drawn simply. It offers a bit of poignancy in the form of the child who will soon die in its mother's lap. It surprises the modern eye with its unnecessary color profligacy (six colors and the background? for this?). I like the way that the reds, blues, and whites all fit into the perspective fading towards the upper right of the shirt. But mostly, I see this as teaching a sad if salutary lesson. It's never useful to duck. Really. Facing forward is the way to live (and die, for that matter).

[Bananaphone] This design has always reminded me of Mythbusters when they conducted various experiments to check the effectiveness on the brace position, to reduce pressure on one's neck. This design doesn't show the hold perfectly correctly but gets the basic elements of it right. It sacrifices some realism for the sake of aesthetics. Unlike some instructional diagrams I have seen however, the woman infront is failing to suffocate her baby underneath her armpit.

Either way it's a nice enough design and instructional bullshit on tshirts is quite popular even today, so I can only imagine that this was a trendy tshirt years ago. Even despite the lack of illustrating polish it looks pretty good on the tee, which is enchanced by its large size and placement which allows the design to flow with the force of the impact.

Your Dad 2001 [Retired]

[Steve] The evidence seems to argue that Dermot Finnt is Irish. He's got a pretty rich web presence: check out his cafepress store and his freewebs page. It seems like he's come a long way since the days when he was bouncing around between art school and menial jobs; maybe he's decided that no matter how appealing irresponsibility might seem of a night over a pint at the pub, doing art is an infinitely better way to make a living than working at a box factory. So, he started doing the stuff you can see on his web sites, stuff that's very much more interesting to my eye than Your Dad 2001 (which comes from his bouncing-around days).

Your Dad 2001 is not particularly interesting graphically: the combination of the detached thought bubble and the dress on the left side of the picture makes this seem quite unbalanced to my eye. And while the emotional dynamic pictured here might describe the experience of young Dermot Finn as he moved through the world and chatted up people in wide outfits, I bet he'll draw a different picture once he starts meeting folks in whom the breeding jones is running strong. Definitely a shirt for people of a very particular age....

[Bananaphone] Ha! I get it, women think with their heads and men with their penis. This goes doubly when both genders have their legs stuck together in a compressed state.

Either way this design is utterly hilarious and I really think the sentiment is fresh, and it is an enjoyable tshirt for the public to observe. That's what I'd say if I was an idiot, but unfortunately this sort of thing doesn't really do it for me.

Anyhow I doubt this is going to be reprinted any time soon, which is a great tragedy to those that can't be bothered going to any large mall with a joke tshirt shop for something pretty much the same. Since I am a mean bastard, check out the guys site. He hasn't listed this design in his portfolio which probably means he has a bit of sense.

Wearing Your Mobile Phone Number Kit [Retired]

[Steve] Marcus Scheller has what you might call an enigmatic web presence. And, judging just by this design, a relatively limited set of design skills. Take note, those of you who submit designs including space that cries out to be written on (a white board? a "Hello, I'm..." badge? a post-it note?)! It's been done. Years ago. To little effect.

[Bananaphone] Would I want to be called randomly by the sort of people that would appreciate seeing this tshirt on a fellow human being?

No. Lucky for me not only will my home phone not fit in 7 numbers, but my mobile phone number is 3 numbers over too. I guess I'll have to wait for another gimmicky excuse for tshirt "design" which seems to be a trend at the moment. I have gone on a rant about this before but allow me to summarise.

I do not want to write on my tshirt, I do not want to wear a tshirt that I have to write on for it to be interesting, stop being lazy bastards and design stuff that is either interesting or that people want to wear.

Presstube (Print) [Retired]

[Steve] James Paterson has a lot of relatively cool web spaces out there for us to play in. Check out Presstube (the one advertised by the shirt), and insert silence, and showstudio, to point out a few I found. He gets around: born in London, moved early to Canada, then to New York City, and now back to Montreal. He's mostly a flash artist, so, this static design here seems to be a bit of an anomaly relative to his oeuvre.

Of the three posters in designs 11-20, the Presstube print is the one that I think would be most interesting to see on a shirt. I think you'd run the flat part of the design on the left as close to the seam under the arm on that side as you could, and you'd wrap the right side of the design just slightly across the chin line and over a bit to the right. Maybe those four shotgun-shell thingiebobs would be nearly over the heart? The colors are a challenge (how many are there? nine? ten? I have too short an attention span to keep track), but the internal structure of the design is interesting: the numbers and density of the parts of the design that run up and to the right do a good job of balancing the greater design expanse to the bottom (which is coordinated by its own nice downward-slooping elements). Any attention paid to the micro aspects of the design seems to draw the eye down into a kind of locally stuck abyss, but the larger semi-structures tend to pull you back out. It'd make a modern-day select with the same sort of appeal as Let Our Veins Do The Talking, I think: not for everybody, but I bet it's sell through a smaller run as a $25 select.

[Bananaphone] An early foray into wall print by Threadless. Today we have Naked And Angry instead, lucky us. Overall the print isn't too bad, it has alot going on, alot to enthrall the eye. However I think this design suffers alot from it's poor colour choices. The browns and browns and dark cremes don't do anything for me at all. I think it would have benefitted from more interesting colour choices to match the designs vibrant movement, rather than the desaturated colours that prominently feature in the composition.

It would also be nice if the whole design had a purpose and visual interest, however much of the outlying work makes the repetition of elements more obvious and only seems to serve to add further context to the chaos in the upper left area.

She Shoot [Retired]
He Shoot [Retired]

[Steve] Born in Norway in 1976, Niko Stumpo moved to Italy as a lad and became a good enough professional skateboarder to tour Europe on somebody else's dime and generally enjoy the life. A broken knee knocked him off the boards and into a computer chair, where he's since become one of Italy's leading Flash designers. Check out his work at ABC, a labor of love he built while he was developing his reputation: it's quite strange and interesting. He's had four designs printed at Threadless: the popular matched pair Death or Glory and Death or Glory 2, and then She Shoot and He Shoot that you see here.

I find He Shoot to be the more approachable of the two designs. I like the cute little guy in the mask (is that freddy kruger? just a skeleton?). The thick-lined style used to draw him works very well. And then I particularly like the balance created by the triangle made up of the star, the antenna, and the black scruffy title-text wondering off to the bottom right: those elements frame our dude quite well, but in a half-unbalanced way. In fact, everything in this design seems almost out of balance (the smiley is almost too far off to the right, and the scruffy text is almost too different graphically from the little guy). That almostness provides a lot of dynamic interest, which makes the whole thing even more interesting to me.

She Shoot is more complicated, and pushes these same boundaries even farther. The thinner lines and larger black design areas create a different kind of feel to the characters, more emotional and active, more vivid but less immediate and personal, and also less "different" from the scruffy title. The star and the scruffy title end up being more of a counterbalance here, instead of a central element: it's good that the shirt sets the red off in a more vivid contrast, because the resulting weight is needed in the design to provide balance against the line between the characters.

After living with them a while, I think both these designs are very cool (He even more than She). They're definately "would-buy" shirts for me.

[Bananaphone: She Shoot] The design features two loosely constructed characters styled in a way that is obviously street inspired. The ink blob type formations that make up the characters work really well on gold, and the colours were chosen well for a gold backdrop.

The design suffers potentially from a little lack of thought as far as its written copy goes, and the way it is presented. Maybe the fonts weren't generic back then but they certainly are now, and it's usually a rule not to go over 2 - 3 fonts on any given piece no matter how chaotic it may be. The design could have benefited from a more thoughtful approach to its type.

Overall the tshirt isn't bad, and it would still find an audience today if it were printed. The style used shows alot of potential if the artist matured it and worked with it a bit more.

[Bananaphone: He Shoot] Another street inspired piece by Niko, this time featuring a potentially psychopathic little fellow. It's a solid design like the last, but it is a pity he decided against reevaluating his written copy and providing something a bit more different this time. Obviously the two were a "set" of sorts, but there was still room to be more different and versatile while having them still identified as being together aesthetically.

Both of Niko's designs are solid, but Niko could probably use a bit more development within his/her style in order to get the written copy more integrated and complimentry to the design.

K10K Project save the LPC Print [Retired]

[Steve] Here's another design that ended up on a poster rather than a shirt. Unlike Presstube, the only thing that's appealing to me about the K10K Project save the LPC print is who it's by. If you don't know about K10K, you should check 'em out: they're one of the oldest and most interesting design portals on the web. I could write more about the folks behind the site, but why bother when there's so much that's already been said out there? Check out this blog for some links to get your going.

Absent the portal, though, the design has little going for it. If there's anything worse than a whole bunch of low-resolution dogs, it's a whole bunch of low-resolution dogs containing several who are not toilet trained. I mean really.

[Bananaphone] Another poster design, and Steve is right - Kaliber have been around for "donkey's years" and are very well known amongst many internet faring graphic designers. It is pretty cool that they have had something to do with the early times of threadless.

That said as a poster design it is pretty unexciting. It did address an issue at the time (probably when pocket pets and all that tamagotchi crap started coming out) but doesn't do so in a very aesthetically interesting way.

The repetition of the same dog probably says something about how these pixel pets rarely have any real identifying features, yet at the same time it makes it harder for me to connect to the subject or give a damn if someone forgets to feed their virtual pet or pick up its epoop for a day.

In all it's fairly solid but I bet kaliber would take their chance very differently these days, and if they did, I'd be eager to see it too.