BasicShift minded me of something my mother once said — if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. it makes me want to be slightly less negative in this blog, even if i don't like a particular shirt all that much. we'll see if i stick with that. it wasn't hard this week, because there were four "$" shirts for me amongst the prints, and i gave the six shirts an average score of 3.2. which makes this fun. so, let's get at it....

threadless selects

Simon Noynay is a multi-talented designer/cook/musician/skateboarder who graduated from swineburne university in melbourne, australia, and still lives there today. at threadless, as himself and as KID_Z, he's responsible for classic designs like Drum and Bass, Rayguns, Threadless, and The Moops. Now, here's his Psychedelic Creatures, a design that answers the question "what happens when you plant a packet of moops?" what happen is, you get a bunch of moop-stalks. the design just explodes with dynamic energy created by the twisting, growing moops growing up and out of a triangle-shaped set of holes in front of the mountains. the variety of facial expressions and characters is simply astonishing. i have my favorites characters — the stoned critter with the green eyes near the upper left blue cloud, the whole monty python dialog happening in the speech bubbles ("he's dead!" "no, just sleeping"), the lone screaming lady-moop being consumed by that very un-mooplike white worm. simon surely kicks out all the stops in regards to color, yet he sticks with whites and grays for his base structure, and then uses his colors for accents and minor features in a measured way that really works well. the rain cloud, rainbow, and sun create a diagonal "behind" the raising/thrusting moop tree. Psychedelic Creatures seems well worth the "select" designation. very, very nice.

Type Tees

i have to admit, i'm not clever enough to work through to the point in Purple is the new blue and red. it's hard to say without the shirt in hand, but i imagine it goes like this. the shirt is printed in blue ink. but because the blue ink is on a red shirt, the letters look purple from a distance. and so purple is created "new" from blue and red. the problem is, there's not a whole lot of wit in all that. the other day, a guy in a pickup truck at a gas station tried to catch a glimpse of This is in spanish when you are not looking out of the corner of his eye: he wanted to see it change, i guess. i don't think this shirt is going to elicit similarly curious reactions. i don't think there are many people in the world who understand color theory but haven't seen it in action. if you live around a lot of that kind of people, they might be amused by this design, and you might want to wear it.

from the competition

i'm trying to remember which contest label's 1984 Gran Hermano vs. El Liberal was about: the single color contest? the mexican wrestler contest? was he in for the daily double? no matter, he got a print, and it's a lot of fun. kids, if you're not allowed to wear political shirts to school, this is for you! it looks like they replaced label's metal foil print with distressing, which gives it more of an old-poster feel. the lettering is quite nice, the layout feels authentic, and the two wrestlers are perfect: big brother with his all-seeing eye flying down on the steadfast liberal. i like the way the figures sit out in front of the rest of the design, in motion, even though there's only one color being used here: a nice use of energy and motion. and if all this isn't enough, label throws in both a cow-brain taco joke and a toilet/diarrhea joke, free of charge. lotza fun.

Addicted_to_ Colour's Decay was the most popular shirt of the week, for a good reason: it's an excellent design in several different ways. what first strikes you is the color: Eli has chosen a subtle palette that's perfectly appropriate to the somber nature of his design. then you see the drawing and design: the fine line work, the subdued but active flow both locally (the curved leaves and flowers turn into themselves in a nice dynamic way) and globally (i love the arc of the design from lower left to top center of the shirt). when i first saw this back in may, it took my eye several seconds to sort through all the integrated peacefulness and find the stark contrast between the warm autumnal life in the plant work and the dead fish right there in front of my eyes. death challenges the integration in all the other aspects of the design, and provides a thematic depth to the piece that greatly enlivens it. my favorite bit is the way that the autumnal colors eventually resolve the startling existence of the fish: maybe death in the midst of life shouldn't be that startling after all. very nice. when this was submitted i argued it was too far to the left, and i still think it is. but that's a small quibble in the face of my favorite print of the week.

Ray.'s HI is kind of the anti-TypeTee. TypeTees have funny slogans printed with relatively mundane typography; Ray.'s print has as mundane a slogan as you can imagine printed with incredibly interesting hand-drawn lettering. to love this shirt, i think you have to really love all the detailed line work inside the body of the letter, perhaps appreciating that many of the lines are flourishes that were used to separate paragraphs back in the long-ago. or maybe you have to want new friends: people who bought this early have reported in the blogs that they're meeting more new people in one day wearing this shirt than the meet in an average month. still, enquiring minds have suggested that Ray. must have slept with someone at Threadless headquarters to get this printed. his reply was, "Considering I live in Canada, far from Chicago, i couldn't sleep with anyone. I did have phone sex with the entire staff though. It was a lot of work but well worth it." i'm not sure we've ever had such directly useful advice offered for people looking to be printed. i wonder if skinnycorp will have to put in a new phone line.

wow, a month from submission to print! lollabear's Not So Treacherous Waters must have really struck a chord with someone up there in threadless central. i'm glad it did. i like it a lot. it reminds me of a sculpture called The Awakening in East Potomac Park in Washington, DC. the design depicts a bunch of critters that are kind of icebergs but also kind of melty people-ish creatures. icebergs should be scary for the little boat motoring through them, but these icebergs are happy, chubby, laidback souls. therein lies the core fun of this design. the individual creatures are very well drawn (the above-water/below-water divide is captured very nicely), there's a fair bit of humor in the individual icebergs (the winking guy up and to the left, the guy floating on his back and blowing a little fountain out of his mouth, the half-submerged duck, and so on). with the simple expedient of organizing all these beings around a channel stretching from upper left to lower right, and then by having a little small boat going downstream through them all, lollabear unifies the design into an interesting whole and caps off the mellow friendly spirit of the thing. very well done, in both the large and the small.

i hope Rachel Raygun is spry enough on that wounded leg of hers to be able to dance until dawn in celebration of her Here's to Four More being printed. it's a naughty design. in the right foreground, our heroine is flashing her boobies at the giant sea monster. it likes! it likes!, but it wishes there were four more, so it'd have something to do with the rest of its hands. i figure, once it gets going, it'll lose that concern: that's a nice tookas there, for instance, mr squid. the drawing is simple and sufficient: the surface of the water is handled well, the squid is squiddish, and there's a nice balance achieved between the squid and the babe (the main line of the design) and the line of clouds in back and sand in front. just naughty enough without being too naughty: a fine line elegantly walked. good job, rachel. and, get better soon.

etherbrian's Sasquatch Redux Peace Out is another simple, beautiful design: sasquatch giving the peace sign to the surveillance camera as he walks over the dried-up glacial stream-bed outside the national park. the glory is in the simplicity, and in the little details (as did many other people, i really like the tv frame and the "REC" down in the corner of the image). the drawing is an elegant sufficiency: carefully and non-repetitively done, but in a simple way that doesn't draw the eye away from the joke. sasquatch looks a bit like cousin it from the adams family, and less like the guy who works for the sonics. which may be an insight useful to future seekers after the monster. go in peace, squatch.

reprints

Tom Brazelton's Ask Me How I Became A Pirate may have been the print that first set threadless down its path of pirate-love. if so, may it be cursed forever. but seriously, folks: it's an interesting design. you might call the technique 'cardboard cut-out': broad swatches of largely un-outlined color laid one over the other to make the design. the plane boorish life of the worker-drone couldn't be more different from the outrageous life of the pirate: you see it in the clothes, in their posture, and in the expression that's as good as on their faces. our business drone sees it, too, and he asks the question that will eventually send him off on his life path. he'll find he has to relocate — since the business has gone offshore to southeast asia and the indian ocean, it's impossible to find a job pirating off the keys. but no matter: be true to your heart, and everything else will follow. so goes the shirt.

i believe that You Sank My Battleship is both Ron's first submission and his first print, which makes this at least part of the answer to a threadless trivia question, i guess. it's a brilliant design. the planes are accurate enough to make my japanese friends notice, and the ship is perfect too (well, almost perfect: in the same way that the chance card is the wrong color, so the battleship here has one too many holes. but, that's a quibble i'm sure other people have already expressed. the design has a really nice flow to it from the upper right down to the lower left, and the placement suits that flow perfectly. a fine reprint that i urge you to pick up if you don't already have it.

♥ threadless

tomburns' Double You Tee Eff had quite a ride on the submission blog: mostly positive feedback, of course, but then the occasional "lose the background" comment that shows how silly some of the voters are these days, and how much we need the encouragement of the contests. the submission is brilliant in a lot of ways. the drawing has an interesting retro pulp-magazine sort of feel to it: the texturing on the lizard and in the wings of the bird is particularly interesting, and i'm loving the different feelings created by the different drawing styles used for each of the three heads. the background is a particularly interesting idea: it augments the color palette when used on the lizard-lady's skin, it halo's the lady's head (telling us that she might be the real heroine here), its downward angle provides interesting contrast to the upward sloping lines in the characters, and its relatively open pattern and light tones really cause the darker characters to pop out into rich three-dimensional relief. and then you have the fascinating story-line. have these three fleeing after having stolen the relic hand-bones? is the bird chasing the lizard-lady and the chicken-man? hard to say for sure, but overall the vividness of the story just adds to the effect. very nicely done.

(matthijs)'s Hidden Hero is a cute and very simple idea: by printing on the inside of the shirt, the submission creates the illusion that the super-hero logo is actually on the super-costume under our mild-mannered wearer's clothes. it uses the flimsy quality of the white shirts to good effect: just as you can see nipples, moles, and chest hair through the white tee, so you can see a design printed on the other side. i wonder how this would wear against the skin: it seems like it'd scratch, especially if the inks aren't hypoallergenic. but all the practical carping misses the point of the submission. this might not be a great candidate for a print, but it's a brilliant thought-piece that adds another dimension to the space of what might be done with shirts. which is cool, in and of itself.

Gringz's junkyard king is a showcase for what can be done when you develop an interesting, idiosyncratic drawing style and then find thematic material that's perfectly appropriate to it. all the thick lines and rich darkness at the thematic core of the drawing do a perfect job of setting the mood for our brooding, wasted hero. gringz breaks up the darkness with little accent bits created with muted colors and finer line-texturing: they stir up the mood without really disturbing it, and do a great job of moving the eye around and providing secondary interest. the feeling of disheveled motion is increased by the way that the confessional leans against the floor-line, and by the way that the skull-thing makes the floor seem tipsier than it is. all topped by a spider web and a crow: nice! a very nice character piece, perfect for someone ranting from the junkyard of their soul after a breakup or some other setback.

d3d's killigator is a beautifully simple submission that creates a lot of different effects with its few moving parts. the best effect, of course, is the way leon builds up a sense of three dimensions. the contrast between the rounded, scaly back of the alligator and the flat lily pads begins the illusion of depth; it's broadened by the excellent way that all the green things lie on a single, otherwise unrepresented water surface; and then the brooding, barely-seen bits of alligator below the surface finish the effect. the pump-action shotgun fits well with the spirit of the piece, and insures that it'll be banned from public schools around the globe. fun.

how did mrfunkleberry know that i had exactly this fear? i wonder if my parents ever realized that i always wanted to use the bathroom right after dad because i figured all that pee would be a temporary setback for the monsters (he could cover the surface of the water with bubbles, you see). the simplicity of this design is brilliant: i particularly like the mood created by the contrast between the thin, bony hand and the girl in her pony tail and her poufy dress. and then the hammer. i only wish she could have got her hands on a chain saw. the choice of silhouette here is a good one: it accentuates the symbolic nature of the quest against fears, and universalizes the image.

phasma's ...and they called it home deserved far better from the voters than it got. the drawing and design are excellent: i particularly like the wood-grain on the birdhouse created with just two colors and a background, the deep receding foliage and flowers, and then the sparrow-sized flying/stinging insects who have made the bird house their home. the design is very well considered. taken on its own, the birdhouse would seem to be falling back on itself: it's balanced nicely by the plant and the bug in the foreground. creating balance from unbalanced elements adds a lot of interest that wouldn't be there in a more centered design. you get a similar sort of "dynamic" thematic interest from a design like this; when it's not immediately clear why the artist has chosen to show us this particular image, the mind is left to explore and consider before returning to the screen. i guess the low score shows that people are more fond of the thematically centered. too bad for them.

speaking of dynamic thematic interest, ResonantFish's They talked about the weather is truly bizarre and interesting. most submissions here are vector-drawn; the hand-drawn feeling here is really different, and it opens up all sorts of possibilities for shading and texture that ResonantFish uses very well in the artist's shirt, his legs, and in the skeleton. i love that the guy has a hunched back even though his tentacles have some anti-gravity thing or the other going on: brilliant. the design is well constructed. the height of the dark lines of the artist balances well against the horizontal width of the white skeleton, and then it's great the way the two of them are tied together by a fond gaze. there's particular interest, to me, in the way the tentacles curl around the legs and ribs: you can tell the guy really loves his creation. i wonder if this is some sort of pygmalion story slipping in from the greek myth contest?

does kayloyster live in florida? if so, it's pretty clear where he got the idea for Waiting for the Bus. back when i lived down there, the government in St Petersburg used to send a corpse-wagon around to pick up the bodies of old folks who had died in the sun waiting for the bus. the submission is obviously from a drier, cooler climate: the flesh is gone but the clothes remain, and the clothes were obviously worn against weather you don't see in florida very often. kaloyster has handled the shadows well here, both in the folds on the jacket and under the bench. there are lots of fun details: stickers, his signature, the cobwebs, and the little birds. all that plus the creepy overall feeling definitely makes this a design worth watching.

Alezunde's Water Tower lives and dies on its theme: the little boy trying to turn the local water tower into a giant robot. the boy is drawn to appear calm, dedicated, busy: his task has a larger-than-life or deeper-than-mid feeling, as if he's making himself a new father, or a hero, or a beacon or something. something that can be seen for miles. the technique here plays perfectly with the theme. the arm trailing along behind the boy serves both to balance and to accentuate the height of the tower. all the drawing detail goes into emphasizing the rattiness of the robot and its parts; the background details are sketched in so as to push our focus away from them. a very wearable submission: good luck, Alezunde.

don't ♥ threadless

DeadPoetic Underoath's submissions are becoming almost a design clinic: Baseball On The Lake is just the latest in the series. his drawing style is both unique and settled, well-suited for this sort of ensemble shots. the dynamic in the drawing is outstanding. it's achieve partly in the details (if you pick almost any of the major or minor characters here, you'll see lines radiating out from them towards some other area of interest: check out the standy-guy on the bat, the bear with the stick, or the other guy with the ball). i like the way the two guys hover over the water, on account of their little flappy monster-packs that keep them in the air. color is used well here: rather than being scattered around, it's organized in its own way: blue towards the bottom, white in the upper center, black as a covering over the blue, and grey as a top and bottom border. i could wish for more of a story, something that my heart could relate to: but as a sort of family snapshot, this design is hard to beat.

magritte's famous surrealist statement has stimulated more than its share of submissions. here are two more, one from radiapathetic2, the other from little g. radiopathetic2's design has a retro, woodcut sort of style topped off by a head of hair reminiscent of peter max's op art; not the most consistent style, but it works here. the design is too tall on the shirt, and too far to the left (the slightly sloped line of the smoker should point at the low point on the collar, i think); none of that matters, though, in the face of the interest in the design's detail. little g's surrealism, on the other hand, is more in line with magritte's original minimalism. this isn't a pipe, either; but it's more obviously not a different sort of pipe than magritte's; and then there's the video game reference complete with the low-res graphic painstakingly recreated in illustrator. who says you can't ever have too much fun?

hogboy's Count Orlof's Weiner is another submission that deserved better from the voters than it got. technically, i like how hogboy built up so much of the design from simple flat regions and negative space. the count's hands are particularly creepy, the jacket is very interestingly done, and the contrast between the weiner itself and the ketchup is excellent. the design is excellent, particularly the way the lines of the wiener and its bun flow down into the loving arms of the count. and then hogboy does a great job with the characterization. the economy of technique involved in creating the tension on the face of the hot dog and in the shoulders of the count is really remarkable. the essential weirdness of the piece just finishes off all the detail. quite brilliant.

SuperPope's Divine Compliment is a very well-rendered joke, leeched of all detail that might obscure the point or lessen it's impact. we've got a simply-rendered cardinal, hands clasped, looking skyward. in the sky, the clouds have formed into a kind of face. my god, it's god! and she's complimenting our cardinal on his hat. the design is placed onto the shirt well, god up by the shoulder, the cardinal walking along the ground. cute.

OnyxAvalution's Feel the air of freedom is a simple, powerful drawing: a simple hand, tense and grasping, raising up out of a pool. other than the universal bar code tattooed onto the inner wrist, the details here are sparse and well-considered, rendered interestingly with black and white lines depending on the region of the hand. the ripples on the water's surface are also well done. ultimately, this is a design that you'd like if you appreciate its simplicity, its ambiguity, and its traces of horror.

Reonat's Poor Achab! (french for ahab, apparently) is an interesting addition to the dozens of submissions that have explored the theme of small people being overwhelmed by monsters from the deep (Kabuki Fish being the most recent one to see print). Reonat handles these materials well. I particularly like the diagonal of the wave leading up to the whale, which causes it to loom even higher over little Ahab. there's enough energy driving up and over that the lower right placement actually works (and feels "optimal"), which is a good judgment. i'm not sure the octopus legs are strictly necessary (maybe overdoing it a bit?), but they fit well with the flow of the design, and certainly increase the perilous feel of the situation. the drawing style here reminds me of something that Bill Watterson would do: the elaborate fine detail in the whale, octopus, and water arrayed against the childlike style of the victim. a good job, all things considered.

Enzoharus's RussianIzba uses a fairly common technique — would you call this peepshow? diorama? someone on the submission thread called it "negative space pumpkin carving looking") — to present the baba yoga myth. my only regret here is that we don't have a larger version of the image to look at: it's hard to see the detail at this resolution. stylistically, what's different here from most similar designs is the very simple foreshortened style of the cutout "drawing", the scattering of "stars" around the border (i'm not sure they work; they jar against the elements in the drawing and don't flow the yellow stylized clouds in the background), and the clouds behind the clearing rendered in the same sort of style as the drawing. i thought the moving "leg" on the building was an extension cord for the television, at first: i would wish for more consistency between the two legs and the ladder. i like the way my attention wanders between the house (the center of attention), and the trees in the forest: this is accomplished by the way that the branches and the foreshortening all point into the center of the drawing. nice, despite it's occasional slipup in the details.

Sigmund's Temptation is beautifully bizarre and ambiguous. the drawing is in a simple "white cut out of black" style, which works perfectly to highlight the elongated bone structure of the monster and the sheen & drool on the dog. the long bones of the monster's upper leg do a good job of pulling the dog into the action by paralleling his line of vision. the consensus on the submission thread was that the "temptation" here is for the dog to leap up and try to eat on tihs monster's bones. i think it's equally likely that the little pooch has been turned from a life of good by this horned devil-god, and is being sent back to his family with orders to devour little sister in bed. anyway you look at, the technique and conception are unique and interesting. thanks.

i just learned that my local (here praised for its beer, but not for its 80+ single-malts) has free wireless. three blocks from home. my kidneys and liver are already complaining...

threadless selects

David Pfluger is a right-handed designer from Chicago. he's the art director for Tribal DDB, a top-ten multi-national digital brand management sort of company. he's responsible for Color and Miss Scarlet in the Hall with a Revolver (and maybe some other printed shirts i don't know about?). faced with the "select tees" opportunity to let off a visual M80, David has opted instead for folk guitar. granola is as interesting a "TextTee" as i remember being published here on threadless. the lettering is excellent. the wood grain is gorgeous. and then you start thinking, hmmm: granola, wood; wood, granola; i like granola, but i've been in that place where the two were as indistinguishable as not. the skulking crow (WMMS!) just leads me further down the path of thinking that the artist has an ironic attitude towards the folksy hippidom that the design seems (on first view) to promote. thinking down that path, the design minds me of how i felt about hippy-dom when skanky deadheads would pull into the campsite at 2am, turn on the hi-beams and the tunes to accompany the setting up of their tent, and then complain bitterly for hours about how i'd harshed their buzz if i had the temerity to note that they were keeping everyone up. i wonder if David is hoping to laugh, someday, at some spaced-out hippy in birkenstocks who he sees wearing his shirt down the street? or maybe it's just me. anyway, i love the subtle comfy look of this, the colors, the flow of the line along the top and bottom of the text, that naughty crow: lovely.

TypeTees

a lot of people on the blogs seem to be grumpy about the TextTees: Death, our nation's number one killer seems to have become a focus for that grumpiness, for no good reason i that i can understand. well, that's not entirely true. some of the complaints against TextTees make sense to me. as compared to Granola, for instance, the TextTees lack a lot: interesting lettering, "typography" (even if it's calligraphy in the hand-drawn case), and subtlety. but even as there's room in the world for both The Seven Samurai and bugs bunny cartoons, so there's room for for rich complex designs and the simple abruptness of the TextTees. i like Death... enough to buy, for two reasons: it makes me laugh, and i'm a sucker for black on black. and there you have it. for those of you who don't like TextTees, i have one thing to say: shut up, all you whinging, small-minded, pretentious, back-of-the-bus followers. the world doesn't care if you like it, and we'll all be happy if you avoid your pain until you can deal with it better.

from the competition

if you're the sort of person who looks forward to being old so you can knock over stacked grocery store displays and then avoid responsibility by claiming senility, you might really like andyg's Fiesta Fiasco. it's well drawn in its cartoonish style (though i wonder about the stylistic contrast between the tree and the characters: what's that all about?). the design has a fairly nice shape on the shirt (though i would have moved the higher of the two balloons up and to the right a bit, above the tree-top, or i would have lost it altogether). i'm not a fan of the color palette (it holds up well on the screen, but these sort of colors fade quickly with distance on a shirt). and then there's the glorious berserker fantasy of the blindfolded boy swinging everywhere but at the horsy (the second and third dull, soft thud of bat on skull didn't alert him to trouble, right?). i suppose it's appropriate that this was printed the same week that ol' Stabby was reprinted. not a theme i can imagine wearing. sorry.

there are things to like about jaimez's Homeless: the sad/angry expression on the face of the owl, the way the design seems to fade into the distance to the upper right, and the snow where the sun can't get into the place where the slope increases. it's to jaimez's credit that the trees are at least all different. but there's not a lot of graphic interest in this design, and unlike people, owls are smart enough to simply fly over to where there's still forest and not sit around scowling at bad things already done. if you look up "can't get over it" in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of this owl. why wear that? i'm not sure...

XELECCEoo's Human Loading has been printed, to the delight of many. it's a single-blob sort of design, looking at first blush like nothing so much as a misshapen fish losing bits of itself as it swims off to the left. if you look closer, you see a history of architecture from the left to the right: a cave, a sort of gothic village, a victorian house, some sky-scrapers, some twisty futuristic buildings, and then the earth dissolving into fragments floating into space (is that decay? spores? i think the design leans towards the latter interpretation). this is just the sort of optimistic view of progress that would please hegel and marx but pissed off S20 in Damn Scientists. i can't understand why this is "loading" (someone? bueller? bueller?), and i'm not at all a fan of the color palette (i would have advocated a gentler fade from the left to the right, with more contrast between the whole city and the background). so, not something i'd wear.

but don't think i'm a complete curmudgeon: i like graphicairlines' Illusion of Rabbit Optical quite a bit. the beauty here is the juxtoposition of the precise mind-bending mathematical surrealism of the gödel building and the goofy hauntedness of the bunnies. the dark bunny and the cross-like pointy things on the domes against the moon are a crowning touch thematically as well as graphically, but the variety of moods on and sizes of the bunnies is just a complete hoot. i hope the bunny on the ground is only sleeping. anyway, while i gave this a middlin' score and no "$" when it came by in the vote, i love it now that it's a real option to purchase. sorry, graphicairlines. and thanks for the print, threadless.

i was less than completely positive about sonmi's Fahrenheit 451; it's nice for her to get another print here with Monday!!!, a design i can get behind completely. sonmi's range (as manifest in these two prints) is astonishing: Fahrenheit 451 all flowing colors and softness, and now Monday!!! made from rich lines and interesting textures done in a single color. again, here's a text design that stands in stark contrast to the TextTee's: interesting hand-drawn letters, lots of motion and interest in the calligraphy, and then fun play with the surrounding graphic. the two different textures on the lettering are a neat idea, and then the coffee dude is just brilliant in all its details (i particularly like the little feat, the tie, and then the pre-shave shadow). the best part is the spirit of the design, mr coffee trying to rip apart monday with all his anger and hectic, chaotic energy. compared to Fiesta Fiasco!, which embodied immature recklessness, you see here a violence that is both more understandable and less other-directed. both of these qualities attract me to Monday!!!. i'll wear it happily. mostly on mondays, no doubt.

i have come to rail at what i take to be streetteam clichés in some of my recent comments. well, here's another one, twniehaus's More At Eleven, standing in for all the facile cartoons justified by a pretension to social commentary. there are lots of design flaws here: a wimpy color palette, smarmy people, barely decipherable blabber-balloons. the balloons offer an opportunity for some interest in the shape of the design as a whole, but the submission flattens all that out into a nearly rectangular blob. a fan of this design would justify all these qualities as part of the overall irony. think of the story you tell as you wear this shirt: "the world is full of boring people saying boring things, and look, i'm wearing the shirt because i know they're boring, and we're friends if you know they're boring too so you can appreciate the irony we share in knowing they're all boring." in my experience, the great problem of life is building up an interesting life in the midst of all the boorishness. someone reminding me of the shared boorish context is just being a downer: it's not something i'd want to do to others trying to create a vibrant life of their own. making a joke out of the central sadness of our existence (that this is "news") somehow misses the depth of the tragedy. not my cup of tea, i guess.

reprints

stickymike's little zooming Rocketbird is kind of cute. i like the simplicity of the design: the tiny legs, the tiny controls, and the well-considered use of pale blue in the rocket and exhaust firmly separating the bird from its propulsion. with those wings and that flabby lack of muscles, it's clear that this bird can't fly: given that, it's a blessing that the bird's race was smart enough to invent the jetpack. and why haven't we? i wonder. but (and this is a tragic but for me), when i look at this design i think of the william shatner music video of his cover of elton john's rocketman. "and i think it's going to be a long, long time...". that association is unjust, and it's unfounded, but there it is in my head. thank goodness i can blame the natural shirt color when i don't buy it as it comes around this time. anyone for forest green with a light green rocket and exhaust?

when springfish first submitted his vectorization of Kevin Cornell's Stabby McKnife (why do we accept vectorizations of other people's drawings when we can't stand filters of other people's photos?), many of the comments noted its sick twisted nature, and wondered whether they'd wear it even as they recognized they had some sick twisted friends who probably would. those sick twisted people are common enough around here that this design sells well despite it's unfortunate message. it's a beautiful drawing. the black in the knife and legs balances the blade just as a handle should, and the text works great as a balance against the up thrust blade (the third interesting example this week of a non-TextTee use of text that works better graphically than the TextTees). my problem with this shirt is purely thematic. i don't want to spend a day walking around wearing a shirt that advocates sticking a knife into people. even in fun. maybe youall spend different sorts of days than i do!

as this was my first time scoring on the "new threadless", it's time for more praise for skaw. the new scoring system is an incredible usability improvement. it's much easier to vote with the new page (the buttons are a big improvement over the flash gizmo). it's easier to cut out the fancy banners and retain them in my notes while scoring. and, of course, the new blog thread area has a lot going for it: better use of space (including the wider text column that makes it easier to read), fun formatting options, and of course the thumbnails. this is a microcosm of the improvements to the site as a whole: the unique look is maintained, but usability and readability are greatly improved. nice.

i got behind here a bit after the 34-shirt effort: i'm going to catch up this week, though: you just wait and see!.

♥ threadless

Ray.'s Magical Powers! stands in very interesting contrast to what's happened with the TypeTees line the past few weeks. as compared to OMG, the TypeTees have moved towards a streamlined, font-only sort of look. Ray offers an alternative: flowing handwritten lettering; color variation; a more subtle, whimsical humor; graphic accents that aren't as central as the old OMG designs but still provide interesting contrast to the text; and an undulating feel "in the large" that leans against the blockier feel of a wodge of text. if i have a concern, it's that some of the text will be too small to read without invasions of personal space. but the shirt looks so nice from a distance, with the yellow accents working nicely "against" the wave of blue/white moving in the opposite direction, that i don't think this is a worry.

hifashn's The Midnight Armada is one of my favorite shirts of the week. it works ok on the light grey shirt, but so much better on the dark grey where the lower contrast creates a moody feel that goes well with the design. there's a lot done very well graphically here. it's interesting how the design presents as a bunch of slightly surreal ships, because when you pay attention to the detail those things barely look like real ships at all. that's a nice effect. by economizing on colors in the ships, the design is left with a lot of room to do interesting things with the planet and then the water reflecting planet-light in the nighttime (an excellent effect). it's nice the way the moon is set against the largely perpendicular line of the tops of the ships, and then the way the single short ship on the right pulls out a second line moving up to that moon. my only question here is size: that's a damn big design, there. i think it would work better if you shrunk the whole thing by ten or twenty percent and then moved it up a bit on the shirt. but that can be worked out later: this is an excellent design that deserves printing.

Mikko Terva's My Green Forest is a well-considered submission. i particularly admire the way all the local design elements cohere when you step back and look at it as a whole: the wavy thick lines, the nice wood-cut texturing, the consistent flow of lines on the ground and in the area under the largest tree, and the flowing shape of all the plants. the "color-outside-the-tree" technique works well against the semi-hallucinatory feel created by the line work. and then an example of text being used very well: the nicely-written label turns our little green guy from a forest imp into the person whose fantasies are creating the world as we see it. nice.

once every few months, a submission comes along that changes everything you thought about threadless. skaw's My Little Helper is that sort of submission. we tend to think of ourselves and our little circle as "insider"; then here comes this sort of outsider art to blow away our preconceptions. the jagged lines, the harsh color palette, the ears and joints and belly: the artist tells us with every technique at their disposal that we're dealing with an "outsider", someone other than us, someone jagged and twisted and broken by social norms. the artist uses loves of verticals, broken only by the horizontal "poops" held like barbells in each of our outsiders hands. the artist intrudes into the submission by making our outsider claim that the poops he's carrying are from the artist's world. and therein lies the real magic. poop is a symbol of the fecund, of the life-giver that is also discarded and adds to new life. our outsider is actually very "inside"; he's the artist's projection of that inner spirit that carries discarded energies back into the community (bad shirts?) where they can fertilize new creativity. this artist has achieved a circularity with other designers and the voting public unheard of on threadless. like only Old No. 2 before it, this shirt is truly excretory, in the best sense of the word.

tomburn's NINETEEN SEVENTY FIVE violates my central rule. i don't want to wear a shirt featuring a chick hidden in some emotional-looking matrix. granted, this emotional-looking matrix is better than most: i like the two line colors, the way lines fade into rich color, and all the nice detail in the leaves and flowers and curly-cues. there's a lot of interest here in the details. and then the layout is nice: the chick is well-hidden, and the design flows off in a sort of moon shape (which emphasizes the chickiness). what ultimately puts this under the bar for me is the theme. not for me. sorry. perhaps for you?

don't ♥ threadless

smpthngslly's Big man belly flop is kind of a rich man's "Captain Bellyflop Strikes Again. i like the drawing of this belly-flopping guy a lot more than the guy in the printed design: more flab, nipples, naked, fat digits, glasses, and then the hair: wow! and then it actually works a whole lot better (IMHO of course) that the bellyflop is happening onto a tiny little glass of water: how can it be fun being the guy in Captain Bellyflop? it's astonishing that this design scored a full point lower than the printed one. what's up with that? fear of bodies? sigh....

shannyty's blows. runs into a threadless prejudice beyond all comprehension: using photoshop and its effects is somehow "easier" than using illustrator and its splines, so this sort of submission is dismissed by the voters who are without a second though. i say, look at the design: criticize how it looks, not how it's made, folks! i like the way this looks. because everyone is so line-happy, the pure regions in this design are refreshing and different in a submission. the color palette is really nice. the face is placed perfectly off-centered relative to the fish. and, the expression on that sucker's face is truly outstanding. the text passes neutral and is actually detrimental (could a woman wear this without advertising a tendency better discovered after a period of more conventional intimacy?), but other than that, the design on the dark background is truly excellent. too bad the community isn't willing to spend the hours with the filters and paint tools necessary to build this!

mattnz's Bonsai Gardener is a stunt design that succeeds for three reasons. first, the majority of the design is in a single color, and it's used really well: up in the leaves, along the trunk, down in the roots, and then setting the tub off from the dirt. second, the darker red is used beautifully to "under" emphasize the gardener (he stands out because of his difference, not his brightness), and then also to make the shadow of the ladder and the pot: nice palette! and then third, of course, is the wonderful joke of the dude maintaining a bonzai tree which has to be over twenty feet high and nearly sixty feet wide. neither the perspective-joke nor the design would work without the other: together, they're beautiful. a shirt i definitely long to wear.

if you've been following wullagaru's growth here on the site, catchin' fairies represents an interesting progression. wullagaru first latched onto an attenuated figure style. now, it seems like he's trying to regain some "normalcy" in his submissions while holding onto his core individuality. this design has many of his trademarks: the big nose of course, large hands and legs relative to the torso, and then the funny nearly-real if kind of skinny torso thing. the drawing is great, the colors and shading in the body are really well done, and yet the core wacky wullagaruness is maintained. what’s best is, our nearly-realistic figure is making a standard bit of magic seem like child’s play: he's captured a faery by looking at it through nearly closed fingers. and that faery is kind of a babe: good job, big nose dude! it's incredible how wullagaru is staying as weird as ever while bringing all his design bits back into the mainstream. a must-buy if it were ever printed, in my book.

(matthijs) is one of the most active and successful designers currently submitting to threadless. with Mr. Tee, he's captured a human face that reaches a level of attractiveness seldom seen here. it's very difficult to figure out exactly what it is about the design that makes it so extraordinary. the technique is interesting, capturing the disheveled magnetism of its subject exquisitely: the varied hair textures are particularly interesting, the solution of the problem of representing the dazzling smile in a single color is excellent, and the characteristic "i'm not stoned, i've been working hard" expression in the eyes has been just nailed. resonances between the equally manly Mr T and this character on ones own Tee are thematically rich; the font does a good job of mirroring the professionalism of the face. all in all, this is a design in a million. i love it when a plan comes together.

huebucket's Put Me Down! plays into an ongoing battle at my house. my mother-in-law has a passionate and very broad notion that all the living creatures in the world capable of killing us should be eliminated. she includes the bald eagle in this camp, convinced that they regularly carry off babies. i've found stories of mature eagles in american carrying away little yapping dogs, which is hardly something to complain about. i found a single story of dubious accuracy about a sea eagle in scandanavia carrying away a newborn. but this picture is wildly inaccurate: supposing that the bird is mythical, it would still have to be considerably larger than the child to be able to carry its weight while flying. the design is rather well created: i like the simple lines in the wing, the excellent drawing of the eagle's head, and the child's hair. the spirit of it all is just right: the child is in shock, the eagle is determined, and the feeling of flight is strong. but the mistake in the proportions is kind of a show-stopper to me, despite the interesting feeling being created: this is clearly a primal fear, and thus an interesting image.

slaterock's Sire, I'm A Huge Fan wins the goofy-ass shirt of the week award. it's got a lovely informal hung-together feel to it: the lack of straight line and detail is particularly sweet, and it's made sweeter by how well the details that are provided hang together (i particularly like the back-grill on the fan and the tape holding the face onto the fan. most of the weight of the design is over to the right, pulled over even farther by the speech bubbles: but then the shadows and the outlet balance things out in a nice dynamic way. bad text here would be a label saying "fan talking to fan"; the font and dialog here draw out the joke without over-explaining it. a deft touch: should have been part of the loves threadless competition, i think.

Ste7en's Simple Life is another of my favorite designs of the week. it's quite beautifully drawn, it's quite nicely balanced, and its parts are straight-forward and well harmonized. noteworthy here are the elegant flows created by the ripple lines around the lily pad and in the tadpoles swimming underneath it, the weird simplicity of the flowers, and of course the tongue and bug. color is handled extremely well here, both in the interesting use of shades of green and in the brilliant highlights. altogether wearable: good job, ste7en!

keithmore's someday soon captures that haunting nearly-animate but clearly-mechanical feel of trash in the wild that is easy to recognize but nearly impossible to represent. the broken-down derrick hovers over its parts like a mother bird over broken or spoiled eggs, looking out over the plain towards freedom, yet unable by its makeup to escape. the design uses color every well: three for the machine, two for the detailing in the landscape, and then one left over for the setting sun which speaks so well to the mood. the design buys its left-leaning placement well with its receding horizon, which again speaks to the overall mood. this is one of the more excellent sophisticated emotion designs that i can remember: i truly hope for a print.

as if someday soon wasn't enough, keithmore also submitted someone is always watching this week. it's in an entirely different style — it looks like it's all in black lines on white objects on a black background, though i can't tell if there's grey down in the detail. it reminds me a bit of the very first pixar movie, the one with the lamp, the way it catches a sort of human feeling in these very mechanical beings. i like the kind of wood-cut feel in the technique. the balance between the two cameras creates a nice dynamism. this is an example of a design that could have been ruined by an unnecessary title on the shirt: we are aware enough of surveillance in our world to catch the joke, here. nicely done.

at the same time that threadless introduced the new web site software, they also made some significant enhancements to their product lines. they introduced "threadless select", a new line printed on high-quality tees with fancy-pants inks and fancier-pants designers. they've merged the slogan contest into the main threadless website, and introduced a "TypeTees" line for the slogan contest winners. they've started printing a kids line using appropriate designs from the other lines. and there were even a bunch of hoodies printed up, in deference no doubt to those amongst us in the southern hemisphere who are just now needing them. woo-hoo.

the most amazing thing of all was that they printed 34 shirts last week. 34!!! you could have predicted the date the new threadless was going to premier by keeping track of overtime hours over there at the printers. whew. myself, i wish i'd waited until after this week to take on the challenge of writing about all the shirts that were printed every week. big job.

threadless selects

threadless selects is the most interesting new line of shirts introduced this past week. it's a no-holds-barred sort of line: the designer can use as many inks as they like, the designer can use sparkly inks or glow inks if they like, and the shirts are printed on the finest quality shirt stock available. two sorts of people are going to be invited to design threadless selects: four-time winners of the submission contest (designers with four prints to their name include arzie13, flembo, Glennz, graphicairlines, KID_Z, label, (matthijs), Moss, and ronlewis), and popular/famous non-shirt designers from around the industry. these shirts are going to be sold for $25, a price point a lot closer to some of threadless's competition than to the prices we've grown to love. it's a very intriguing idea: we'll have to see how it plays out.

threadless chose four well-known designers to kick off the line. i'll talk about each shirt in turn below; i want to consider them as a whole, here. taken purely as designs, all four of the initial shirts are really interesting. taken historically, they are more like the sort of shirts threadless was printing several years ago than like the shirts being printed today. compared to the shirts being printed these days, the select designs make less of an effort at establishing a connection with the viewer: they don't offer a mood, a joke, an allusion, a symbol, an illustration; they just "are". it's interesting to think about how these select designs work "as shirts" in comparison to the contest winners: do we like wearing something better if it's part of a connection between us and viewing passersby, or do we like wearing something better if it stands on its own apart from us and people looking at our shirt? it's an interesting question. i hope sales are enough to justify the experiment, and/or that threadless has some patience with the line. there's a lot to like about the selects idea; i look forward to seeing it play out.

according to their web site, Rinzen are a collective of australian digital designers who apply their magical visions to print, web, illustration, animation and music. maybe as an answer to Ververka's request, Rinzen have offered a rainbow design here that would be a perfect gift for the straight person who's looking for clothes that might support the gay community. Rainbow Worrier is probably the most accessible of the new selects designs: a six-colored rainbow running with the tears of the disconsolate activist. the design has a nice simplicity to it, and the drip technique is very nicely done. best, the design brings along the rainbow's ambiguity: the weepy rainbow works if you see it a comment on hope, the path to heaven, diversity accepted, or something else. the only problem i have with the design is, well, it's not all that special. other than the six colors, this could easily have been a contest-winner. i guess i'm hoping for something more.

Justin Kay is a graphic designer responsible for layout, typography, and illustration at Complex Magazine in New York City. his Angels and Demons is probably going to be lost on people who don't know anything about Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Sun Ra was a sort of prankster jazz player who worked from the 30s to the 80s doing everything from swing to bop to free jazz to a sort of ed sullivan kind of variety thing. his Arkestra was a bop big band playing in chicago in the 50s: it was exemplary in its experimentation with electric music and free jazz out of a swing/bop background. Angels and Demons at Play is an EP-length album that captures his band right at the bop/free cusp, a must-hear if you consider yourself a jazz/fusion hipster. the shirt itself blows away the rest of the text-only submissions we had in the "TypeTees" lines this week: it's typographically excellent, it's perfect for its subject, and i bet the sparkly gold ink looks great on the grey background. living with the design a week, i've come to think it's kind of cool that threadless printed up this sort of obscure band t-shirt. getting more people to listen to 50s-era Sun Ra is not a bad thing at all. this is my favorite amongst the selects....

Aiko is a designer from amsterdam. he/she seems to do t-shirts as well as other things (though it's not at all clear where you'd go to buy them). king is a great ambiguous design that would have been killer threadless old-school. all the technical stops are out here, so you have half-toning, distressing, and dripping: the works. i particularly like the 3-d effect created by the apparent "layers" of ink that have been laid seemingly haphazardly on top of one another: the effect is of a screened print carelessly thrown together, which is nice. thematically, i like the crown/laurel/label sort of adulation thing surrounding the boxer as he kind of glares out of the shirt. the fighter energy doesn't appeal that strongly to me (i would have preferred one of aiko's lighter, more colorful designs). but i'm not sure popularity is the goal of the select line: this is definitely an excellent design, which is what matters.

NoPattern is the freelance work of Chuck Anderson, a chicago designer. he has an online shop where he sells some of his stuff. Let Our Veins Do The Talking is definitely the strangest and most outrageous of the four selects designs printed this week (and i mean that in the best of ways). what is it, you ask? i think it's jogging in sandals during an acid trip (always a bad idea), but it might also be the terrible anxiety that comes upon a reasonably hip person when they get wrapped up in the corporate power game, or it might be fleeing an indian restaurant after a very very hot meal. it's kind of hard to tell. what's interesting in the design is the way that black establishes the backbone of the design (well, it's head and limbs, to be more precise), and then how the colors variously echo (check out the hands), accent (the diamonds along the hairline), and subvert (the flames and daemons around the eye to our right). the oversized, brightly-colored mouth at the head/limb join is an excellent idea for bringing together parts of the design that wouldn't fit otherwise. heck, the whole design is just bursting with excellent ideas that could serve as the starting point for months of submissions here in the contest. i suppose the sweated-out heart that's crushed the little stick dude down there at the bottom right of the design is Chuck's homage to threadless cliché? or did his foot melt off? my only complaint: why white????

TypeTees

since the whole point of the slogan competition is to create seeds that bloom into threadless shirts outside the normal design competition, i think it's a very good idea that it was completely integrated into threadless v2. to my taste, What Would MacGyver Do? stands as the greatest achievement in this genre: a slogan and design in perfect harmony. the innovation (and self-challenge) this week is to print up ten slogans as text on shirts with no other graphics at all. it would be interesting to see how this idea would play out in the hands of a world-class typographer. given the relatively workmanlike typography on the shirts at hand, i found that i mostly reacted to the slogans and ignored the type when making my purchase decisions. bad fonts weren't enough to destroy my interest in what i took to be a funny slogan; good fonts weren't nearly enough to get me interested in what i took to be a middling slogan. in future, i think this line will work better with good designs or in the hands of an excellent typographer (if you're looking for one, folks, let me know). meanwhile, the shirts....

this is my least favorite amongst the week's TypeTees. i don't like the font very much, and i particularly don't like it when it's only filled with thin lines. i don't like the white shirt, and i don't like the low contrast between the ink color and the shirt. i realize you needed to use the light fill in order to make the font big and justify the slogan, but the whole effect just doesn't work for me. this is a slogan that needed some graphics, i'm thinking.

it isn't just the brilliant product photo that attracts me to this shirt, though the product photo helps. (as an aside, why didn't you use tivoli as the text font in the picture? it works well in text, unlike many of the other fonts you're pitching here). procrastination is in the eye of the beholder. at work, when we're arguing against this diagnosis of our own timeliness, we call what we've done "a disagreement about priorities" or something similarly high-minded. this is a funny slogan presented well: it will be fun to wear to meetings of all sorts. nice.

escapism. avoidance. are we not men? we are devo....

the only time i ever saw david letterman really lose it was one night when jon lovitz came on as a guest. after jon sat down, and before dave could ask a question, jon said "underneath my clothes, dave, i'm as naked as a bee". i guess you had to be there. anyway, this slogan kind of works that same way. there's the "of course" or "duh" reaction, then the "why did you say that?" reaction, and then the collapse of the shared referential framework, and then.... unfortunately, i really really dislike this font. so i guess you could say i have a mixed reaction to the design, much the same mixed reaction as i have to This is in spanish when you are not looking.

this slogan is true. so very true. and tivoli is a very nice font. but you know, your average vegetarian doesn't have a very good sense of humor around these issues. i'm kind of past the stage where i want to wear shirts just to piss people off, and i'm not passionately anti-vegetarian (some of my best friends are vegetarians...). so, this is a slogan that i appreciate but can't see buying.

we have battles in my house over the basic flavors. my wife loves sour. she can't imagine a dish that isn't enhanced by sour. she likes savory, she tolerates salty, she's not a big fan of sweet, and like the rest of us she's trying to figure out exactly how that fifth flavor manifests when you're not using MSG. but, she loves sour. myself, i am not a big fan of sour when it's sprinkled on random things (like salad, or protein slabs), but i absolutely love it when things are soaked in sour 'til they get preserved: cucumbers, herring, those wonderful rye crackers in the snack mix. yum. the point being, i think this slogan is quite confused. have you had a half sour pickle in a new york deli? if not, then hold your slogan tongue until you get wiser, TrippleZero!

these days, microsoft directs a lot of energy at the problem of obsessives: they want us putting in a balanced and sustainable workweek, so we'll get a life, and think of work as more of a long-term commitment. back in the day, when obsession was more required than not, moms would bring kids into the office in shirts that said "my daddy works for microsoft" on the front, and "are you my daddy?" on the back. just so, this slogan works on a kid t-shirt (especially in toddler sizes). i really wouldn't want to be friends with the adult who chooses to wear it. they'd probably be the sort who asks to crash on your couch "for just a few days", too.

here's the slogan shirt for the threadless cliché lover. the rest of you should avoid it like the plague. please. i don't want to see this on a plane! seriously!

yet another shirt using tivoli (did youall get a bonus for pimping that font? does tesco love it?). i like the layout here: the upwards slant works to create a kind of hopeful feeling as you're reading. we all want to bring hope to the thought that we're always already older, eh? and of course, the gödel loop in the slogan is wonderful. if you think of the person reading the shirt, they're going to like the layout, they're going to be engaged for a moment with their own thoughts about age, and then they're going to return to the thought that you're wearing this. that's a good dynamic. and then the color is great, too. it's my favorite amongst this week's TypeTees. woo-hoo!

this is my favorite from amongst the shirts done in ugly fonts. (sorry, ben jones. you seem a fine fellow. i like your cale and travis a lot. do you know our travis? but anyway, please stop designing these sorts of nonsense fonts! fonts are mostly for deploying in very serious ways! you obviously have the skill to make serious fonts. don't waste yourself adding to the effluvia, ok?). my positive reaction to this design (despite the horrid font) shows how much i love the gödel loop, the slogan that destroys the perspective you need to understand it during the course of the reading. i'm a sucker for that effect. i want to wear shirts like that frequently. anything to cause a reboot in the surrounding minds.... ;)

from the competition

neither the voters nor i liked this week's ten prints all that much a priori. the voters gave these shirts an average score of 2.58; only three scored higher than 2.75, and one scored below 2.25. what that says is, the folks in chicago are moving every farther away from the "contest" part of the site, in order to assert their own taste independent of the voters'. if you're a designer, there's obviously at least some hope for a print for pretty much anyone who gets their submission through the seven days. meanwhile, i gave these shirts an average score of 1.5; i only gave one of them a "$", i gave five scores of 1 or lower (three 0's). my taste had been tracking the print choices better than that: i wonder what's going on there? maybe i'm getting old.

cutting right to the chase, yeohgh's Love*Rain is not the sort of submission i like. there's very little technique here: the cloud is oafish, the repeated heart pattern is tedious, the lady/bird/heart thing is not well rendered, and while the red/blue rain is kind of interesting, it's ruined by the bad splashes down there on the floor. the slight diagonal is a good composition idea: it provides the only dynamic element the design has (i can't follow the girl's eyes up to the heart cloud, sorry). what's incredibly tedious about this is the gushy clichéd love message: our chick was obviously guarding herself from love with that umbrella, she's stopped being afraid, she's got love in her chest and it's in the air, but even so it doesn't rain on her. i want to scream "it's because you're into pink and birds on your shoulder, and you have a little empty heart in your chest. grow up!". it's kind of like wanting to smash the strawberry shortcake coffee cup on my coworker's desk: an impulse better resisted than indulged in, i guess.

grayehound's Help From the Deep End is my favorite from amongst this week's new prints. the technique is fascinating: i love the way that the clothes work against the figure, and then the way the bubbles work against the clothes. i liked the design a bit more in the submission color palette, with more contrast between the background and the drawing, but this works, too. i love the sharp feeling of descent created by the figure, it's clothes, and the bubbles: this is not someone who's hit bottem yet, i'm afraid. this all worked very well in its original context as an american red cross themed design, and it works fine here as a symbol of self-help. very nice. looking forward to wearing it.

bright neon payphone's Selfless reaches for extreems of irony. we've got a bright neon light worn smack in the center of the chest, announcing our selflessness to the world for all to see. of course, the wires are showing, maybe impling that the proclaimed selflessness is a bit hobbled together. and then there's fine print, but when you check it, it supports the message. i'm left with a great confusion as to why anyone would want to wear this? the moment you wear Selfless across your chest in big red letters, you aren't, of course. the shirt exaggerates the artificiality of the declaration, i'll give you that, but it doesn't offer any sort of relief in terms of alternative interpretations or hints to the viewer that we're winking. for me, it ends up being a lot like If you can read this...: a joke so subtle that it casts weird light on its wearer. i'm not used to having my irony threshhold reached so often.

the odd thing about Max F's Death submission (and about the illustration on the product page) is, you never get to see the whole design. you get to see a lot of the detail up close, but, there's no big picture. that probably plays into the design's strength, since what works here is the doodle-energy. there's no end of interest walking your eyes around the design and checking out the bits of life and love and luck here in the midst of death. while admiring the design's quality in the particulars, the design suffers from two significant flaws in my book. first, it doesn't hold up very well if you step back and squint at it: just another rectangle of lines across a dark background. it seems like there are just oodles of more interesting shapes that it could have been. and then if you drill into the detail, you run into an even more significant problem: as a 22 year old, Max F's graphic summary of the incidents around and preceeding death kind of leave out a huge part of the life i hope he leads. it's kind of like what you might expect a teenager would say about the mid-life crisis. but that's just me: you, the designer's peers, might not be similarly bothered. but there are topics it's best to wait to take on.

Wite Rabbit's Cheese is just that: cheesy. and because it admits it right up front, it's easy to fall into an acceptance of the cheeseness and meet it on its own terms. on its own terms, this design is a lot of fun. the drawing is very economical: i like the nice attention paid to the shadows, and then the minimalist approach taken with the camera, screen, and cheese. the design is particularly nice as a whole: the spidery camera and its shadow lead your attention towards the cheese; the firm plane behind the cheese holds your attention; the the screens shadow points back out towards the camera. and then the joke is fun, and handled well. the cheese is neither too big to over-emphasize the joke, nor too small to hide it. i like the way the joke rises from the brown/yellow bits of the design, which in their smallness tosses attention back to the camera and screen which, in turn, focus attention on the cheese. lots of nice dynamic energy.

josh's Clouds Are People Too is another design that i can't warm up to. i'm not a big fan of the silhouette design style that we got so often this time 'round. i can't find any coherence in the design: it seems kind of tippy or over-weighted down and to the left — you'd want the plane a bit farther to the right, i think, or something else in the design to balance the weight of the cloud. and then it's hard to make sense of the design from it's central clues: why, for instance, do you find a brown target when you cut that cute little thing apart? is there something being said here about our inner emotional space (we're all targets for the world's swooping people?), or is it just kind of random? if clouds were poeple, what would motivate a pilot to fly through them? a great love of chocolate rain? sorry. ik begrijp niet.

sveninho's Impossible Love is a very simple design, and it's saying a very straightforward thing: the moment a love seems impossible, run screaming, as you're undoubtedly right. or maybe the shirt is a caustic statement made by a guy who always watches his beloved little red fall in love with big prickly green things. little red always gets popped, always come back to the guy to get her punctures fixed, but then off she goes after another big prickly green thing. and does she ever notice that the guy is the one she should love? she absolutely does not! as there's very little graphic interest here (i like how the two images sit on the "ground"), it's only people who want to make a statement (or a joke?) about a certain sort of love who will be attracted to this. if you're one of them, enjoy.

bortwein's Classic Grills is an example of how quality will out, on every level. the design was part of the blog-initiated ¡pinche uno! competition, an exploration of single-color designs. bort took the challenge one step further, and made an etch-a-sketch one-line design for us. purely technically, this is an incredible achievement: look at all the textures achieved, the shading created by the line, the ideas needed to pull this off. the cost of bort's intention is that this is a kind of formal design, and it's not giving us any pleasure more than "grill". but it's cool, there's enough here just on account of the accomplishment and the details. i'm very happy to see this printed.

plastikaa's Blueprint turns out to be my biggest mistake amongst the shirts printed this week. i originally gave it a 1 (good art; unapproachable idea) when it passed by as a submission. looking at it again as a print, i like it a lot. sorry, plastikaa! the technique here is completely given over to the larger demands of the design, so, while we have some shading and some texture (as appropriate to a blueprint drawing), the majority of the detailing is text naughtily labeling aspects of the block letters making up the blueprint of the blueprint. one of several ways the design works is as a global thing: i like the way the high point is over there a bit to the left, balancing the white density to the right. thematically, you have to drill to see the point of the shirt: the notion of a "design" is criticized everywhere the design works as a shirt design. i like the nice rich union of wit and implementation. well done.

timrb's Geology is an example of how persistance will out. when he first submitted the idea, it was relatively unfinished: we had a plate, some crumbs, and a pile of geological layers with no detail other than a little house there on the grassy top. he got a 1.9. encouraged by some of the feedback, maybe, or knowing he had a good idea, he resubmitted this winning design with a lot of really necessary detail: trees and a river there on the surface, a little smokestack on the factory, varied geological detail at each layer on the way down, an increasingly chocolaty texture as we get closer to the plate, and then a very well-drawn silver fork waiting to cut out bites. the added detail made this into a winner. as spencekarl notes in a comment, when this was originally posted as a winner, the shirt was linked to the original (less good) submission, which was confusing. but all that aside, tim did a great job, it's quite fun in his revised version: a definate buy for me.

reprints

while there are still a few old shirts that i want but haven't been able to buy, i'm increasingly uninterested in the reprints. i wish they'd go farther back to the more radical designs we don't see anymore. the parade of greatest hits becomes somewhat tedious. why is it that we have to see these shirts come back? just because the greatest hits sell...? jeez....

Rayguns works pretty much the same way that Classic Grills works. the pleasure here is in the intricate line drawings of each raygun, and then in the way the design moves the eye around the shirt (Grills does it with the single thread out of which the entire design is made; Rayguns does it with a kind of barrel-to-butt trick). this is a kind of limited pleasure, and as i'm generally not all that interested in wearing guns around (even rayguns), i've never been all that interested in the design. but it is kind of cool.

back in the day when i was naughty, one of my friends observed that the problem with affairs wasn't getting into them so much as getting out of them. just so, the little kid up there on the zombie's shoulders is probably loving this little joy-ride, but, how is he going to get down? does anyone around here think about consequences anymore? but i digress. this is a design that lives and dies by its prank. it's not badly drawn, the design has an interesting motion to it, but still: if you're not a zombie dude, there's not much here.

this is a fun shirt to wear around. it's very nicely drawn (i think the thick outlining works very well, and the variety of characters created is quite outstanding), and the layout is well considered. throwing in the little collection checklist in the corner of the shirt is a brilliant idea: it demolishes the viewer's last defense against sorting out who is what. and while there's a lot of wit in the drawing itself, the character names provide a nice finishing touch. if you have a tolerance (or love) for camp, you should seriously think about picking this one up.

Heart Destroy is definitely an moldy oldie: a blood-stained robot speaking a sort of mangled typewritten/madison-avenue litany of destruction. with a little boutonnière, no less. the pleasure here lies in the kind of over-the-top, low-skill, cutesy, juvenile mood of the design: there's little interesting about the design, or the layout, or the concept other than that mood. this is a hard one for me to get into.

Teddybear loves Teddyboy is another moldy oldie: a real live bear in love with a stuffed toy person. with nipples! woo-hoo!. the pleasure here lies in exactly the same kind of over-the-top, low-skill, cutesy, juvenile mood created by Heart Destroy. the two designs were printed a few weeks apart from one another in late 2004/early 2005. i guess this mood was the heart of threadless, once upon a time.

Cookie Loves Milk is another moldy oldy: a cartoon of milk and a chocolate chip cookie, hand in hand, symbolizing their affinity in the land of afternoon snacks. inter-racial love! how avant-guarde! the pleasure here lies in exactly the same kind of over-the-top, low-skill, cutsey, juvenile mood created by Heart Destroy and Teddybear loves Teddyboy, though this scored nearly .5 higher than either of the other two, and is clearly beloved by threadless to this day (judging from knockoff submissions and the frequency of reprints). there's no acocunting for taste.

Loch Ness Imposter is one of my favorite threadless shirts ever. it's a study in elegantly sufficient simplicity: the monster's head with its little teeth, the creation of the water's surface with a few bits of white and a reduction of contrast, and then the whimsically scary giant squid hiding itself by pretending to be some other monster. there's a nice sense of motion created by the lean of the octopus and the forward facing monster head, too. it's a shirt that never fails to amuse and please when people come upon you wearing it. and, you know, if you get into a contemplative mood some evening, isn't this just like life? monsters masquerading as monsters that you mistake as other monsters? in all directions? nice job, ross.

operation needed is a window onto d3d's naked lower torso. what else can you ask of a t-shirt? i mean, really.

Strangers With Candy captures the Roald Dahl feeling of not-so-innocent-children horribly menaced by evil adults better than any other threadless shirt i can think of. some of these rube goldberg sorts of shirts are imbued with a feeling of innocence, or stonedness, or whatever: this is edgy amphetamine doing harm. there are so many wonderful details in the drawing: the monsters jammed into cages of all sorts, the platform sneakers, the black rainbow, the skulls everywhere. the sun and moon balance out the line from the "clown" driver to the little girl perfectly. the balloons over her shoulder, a kind of frightened angle/devil sort of image, complement her sweetness perfectly. of course she'll take the offered sweet, and loose her innocence. danger, danger! or maybe this is the way of things: as in genesis, so now. a great shirt!

Alphabet Zoo makes an interesting contrast to Rayguns. both rely for their interest on a set of drawings laid out in a more or less rectangular pattern on the shirt. but Rayguns is more interesting than Alphabet Zoo in a couple of ways. first, the drawings in Rayguns are a lot more interesting than these animal cutouts. Alphabet Zoo wants to compensate with its alphabet joke, but purely in terms of graphical interest, these drawings are not very interesting. second, the drawings in Rayguns point to one another in a way that creates some dynamic action in the design. the animals in Alphabet Zoo are kind of milling about in a crowd, without a lot of energy connecting them to one another. it's these kinds of considerations that leave me relatively uninterested in Alphabet Zoo. maybe if i had a kid for a friend, it would work better...

ah, time.... what with figuring out the new threadless site and pre-vacation busy-ness at work, i haven't been able to write these up as quickly as i wanted. but i'm on holiday, now, driving from seattle to salt lake city to go to a good friend's 50th birthday party. i'm spending the night tonight in a restored victorian hotel in downtown baker city, oregon (baker city is an old gold-rush city founded in the 1870s). since i can't imagine anything better to do than write about shirts, i'll just have at it...

The Biggest Pirate Ship Of The World is one of DeadPoetic_Underoath's more "normal" submissions in terms of layout, positioning, and overall "coherence". at the same time, of course, it holds to the core of DPU's essential bentness. the result is very interesting. as usual, the drawing style is fairly simple, with a nice command of line texturing technique (the eyebrows, the inside of the boat). there are some really fun bits (i particularly like the scratch-marks there on the side of the pirate ship, which plays well with the pirate/zombie boat/coffin joke being pursued here). the overall design is handled well: i like all the diagonals sloping slightly down from the right, pointing towards the larger mass of the zombie pirate, who is in turn balanced against the white accent of the skull. and then, of course, there's all the rich characterization: the parrot, the zombie-pirate, the skull masthead, and a pirate skull & crossbones flag with the skull mirroring our monster friend's head. i suppose if you were a fan of the wilder DPU you might think this was almost a sell-out. i like how this design brings some conventional qualities and some great characterization to DPU's style: to me, this is one of his more printable efforts.

briteshine's Chameleon walkies is a lovely little bit of wackiness. it's a nice simple drawing that uses color particularly well (i like the effect created by laying the off-centered circles in the eyes on top of the v-shaped bit of color; i also like how the background is used for bits of grass and the chameleon's spots and stripes). i get the feeling that the shirt color we're seeing in the main part of the submission would actually be one of my least favorites (bright green or yellow seem like they might work better in the design). my favorite aspect of this design is the happy, wacky spirit that briteshine has created: the thumb-dude is so jaunty, the chameleon is so wacked. the simplicity of this is what attracts: i hope it sees print.

Johnny Cupcakes' first design, Gentlemen Prefer Bling, is wickedly weird. as befits the instruments and facial hair involved, the entire design has a nice pseudo-woodcut feel to it. i find it particularly interesting the way that the design is not exactly like a woodcut; the details that aren't "right" resonate bizarrely against the old-timey technique in much the same way that the bright red lips and gold teeth resonate bizarrely against the old-timey design. the two "colorless" but large hands sit in an interesting and effective balance against the brighter mouth, "pointing" towards the colored center of the drawing. it's a nice dynamic. my eye, anyway, can't stay on the mouth too long; everything else provides a nice respite but also draws you back to the gold teeth. steely dan, anyone?

until i saw Hug, i would have assumed that that no one JOHN2 submission could be "particularly weird" in the context of the larger body of his submissions. but here it is: an octopus having sex with a bony, misshapen geisha girl. since a male octopus would be detaching its penis/arm and sliding it towards one or another erogenous destination, i imagine this is a girl octopus, that we're seeing a bit of cross-species lesbianism here, and that all the "he" references on the submission page are (in fact) just heterosexist projections that don't fit the image. Hug is sure disturbingly drawn: the strange angle of the woman's right leg, and then the misshapen qualities of her other limbs, argue to me that she's either a corpse or some unreal spirit: JOHN2 has removed the humanity that was present in his original inspiration. anyway, we're seeing something that speaks from and to some pretty deep places. this works for me, which surprises me (i'm not usually drawn to the more "erotic" designs). the reason why, i think, is precisely because the design leads me down through different layers of understanding, and ends in a disturbingly unreal, mythic place that deepens and justifies some of the grotesqueness for me. this is one that i'll probably have to wear on the weekends, but, that's cool.

as a conscientious objector to the site's more common clichés, i am astonished to realize that Cubfan's Into the Sea is the second pirate submission i liked this week. i must be in some kind of weird mood, or maybe the two designs are just both very good. it's hard to dislike this one, mostly on account of the incredibly cool things being done with the single color. the technique here is marvelous, moving back and forth between line and area work, grey and blue "foreground", color expanse and shading. and then the story is great: our hero is already dead, but he's choosing to fight to the last (which, i think, is a very cool thing to do). his sweet desperate heroicism sits nicely in the dark, desperate design: the total works very, very well. nice.

my favorite thing about the submission page of arzie13's In a Comic... Issue #2 is when hellodisko says "loose the txt", and then FourtyFour explains how important the text is to the basic concept. irony is lost on us here. there's really not much to say about this design as a design. i mention it only because it's interesting me to think about the way that when a design is made this specific and unambiguous, it's appeal is limited to people who resonate with its specific, unambiguous meaning. you might imagine lots of comic books, but still, the experience of being in one (lotza squares, broad strokes, episodes) is pretty different from the experience of being out here in reality. psychologists probably have a name for the sort of people who suffer from not being able to distinguish this world from the comic one. it's not clear how often those of us who can keep the two worlds straight would want to wear this text? maybe hellodisko wanted to loose the text so we could pencil in our own? maybe that's not a bad idea after all....

wullagaru's the jamals is a family portrait: mom and dad were off on a caribbean vacation when greeny there graduated from the 6th grade. his other brothers were all delighted to show up at the graduation ceremony. this is them having their picture taken. or something: as travis says in the submission blog, the fun here is the lack of the story, and what that causes each viewer to see. a very nice room for playful projection. the drawing is fun, spare, and rich with character. everybody's different. i particularly like the birdies. the only thing i'm not sure i get is the color palette: it sure seems like more contrast would help a bit. but, it's great as it is, one that would be fun to wear (just so other people could play the "what does it mean?" game, too).

Auro, there is a lot to like about Maybe Someday. the drawing is simple; the spirit is profound. unfortunately, all the jumping back and forth between the different views that your submission does makes it really hard to see what's going on: you should learn how to use the template! i have a pretty fundamental problem with this design. in normal situations (like sitting at a table in a bar, or walking down the street with the shirt below your belly/waist all crumpled from walking), the penguin will be invisible, and so the shirt won't have much impact at all (without the penguin, it's quite drab — the design lives and dies as a whole). i think what you need to do is to shrink the entire design (maintaining its proportions) so that the penguin's iceberg sits at maybe belt-height. without being able to just look at the design for a minute, it's hard to know whether you'd need to adjust the horizontal placement, too: probably a bit. but with the top and bottom parts of the design so essential to the viewing experience, you need to get them up into the part of the shirt that folks can easily see when you're wearing it. without those sorts of changes, this is the sort of shirt that i think will look killer in the submission but won't wear very well at all.

catdogpigduck put on a tremendous bit of performance art on the submission blog of Not Happy. it's a shirt about being angry; CDPD decided to be angry throughout the run of this shirt. so he treated virtually every bit of negative feedback as assholery, and reacted "in kind" (it's funny that we call meanness on top of meanness "in kind", huh?). i decided it was all part of the show when his first victim was robsoul. but, what do i know? well, i can talk about the design. it's amusing, a standard sign warning of electric shock, repurposed to warn the viewer about a foul mood on the part of the wearer. CDPD has taken this design to the extreme, complete with little labels on the elements ("me", "you"), and a serial number in the lower right. overall, it's handled well technically (good choice of colors; nice electrical monster angry thing, nice 3D edge to the sign). and, you know, i almost always choose shirts in the morning to illustrate some part of my mood or another: this would just be more explicit than the way i use some of the other shirts. all in all, i think this is buyable (if not as graphically interesting as the typically CDPD design). we'll see how things go for it. would it count as a "TextTee"?

James_SH's Note to Self is a spiritual sibling of CatDogPigDuck's Not Happy: a graphically straightforward design relying on text to convey a very good idea. Note to Self is simpler graphically: had the idea occurred to me, with enough work even i could have caught this in illustrator. the idea is a big more subtle: instead of warning us directly that the wearer is in such a spacey place today that they're likely to forget you're there during conversations, we see instead a note to the wearer themselves that implies the same thing in a more self-absorbed way: in warning themselves, the wearer warns us. this got a mixed review on the submission blog, mostly because people hate it when someone gets a great idea that's easy to implement. but ideas are 90% of art (technique is the other 90%).

well, i'm delighted for shk that nuit etoilée was purchased and will be printed. (did you know that "strawberries" used to be the name of the largest new england record chain, back when everyone listened to records and stored them in wooden fruit crates?). i'm sad that it's being printed by an expensive european site: i'd like to own it, but i'm not sure i'll want to pay $30+ for it (or any other shirt). but i like it's sense of whimsy: it appeals for many of the same reasons that Chameleon walkies appeals: it's a simple design that manages to pack in a great deal of character, whimsy, and sweet wackiness. i like the moon, and how all this mood-setting is done in negative space.

Dimkas's O My Star excels in all the ways i hope for shirts to excel: it is a good drawing, it is a good design, and it has a very interesting meaning. as a drawing, i particularly like the way dimkas has chosen to represent the fragmented earth, the star, and the person with rough detail, bright glow, and inversion. each technique works for its part of the design: the way that we get this much texture and difference with one color is quite noteworthy. as a design, i really like the way the stones frame the star; they let the viewer appear to approach the light from below even though he is in fact "above" it. what's most appealing to me is the depth of insight in the design. the star tarot card depicts a naked women on the bank of a pond, filling it with water; the star acting through/on the feminine is a symbol of renewal, balance, mutual substance, and connectedness. this shirt, in contrast, illustrates the same symbol acting through/on the young masculine. so the star doesn't balance things, it's earth-shattering, and the young viewer stands amidst the rubble, blinded and shaken by the light, but still looking on. it's an excellent image.

tomburns' showdown is very nice, a little moment out of a western flick captured in layers of color. the thing i like best about the design is how it gets the feel/mood/meaning of the story just right: our point of view back and behind the protagonist, the tunnel focusing the action and our attention, the "shadow" of our adversary coming back at us, and the "sun" in our eyes. all these things work well both at the story level and at the level of symbolism, if you think of showdowns in the abstract. technically, i'm impressed by the way that colors work as background in one part of the design and as detailing in others. i also like the way the whole design is focused around the light that seems to spill in from the street, as if a door was just opened into a story we didn't expect. very nice.

Gringz's snake charmer wins with character: the surly old jazz/blues musician, lost in his headphones, attracting a snake herd to his street-corner. the title seems to imply that the guy tours with these snakes, and bringing them out of the basket is part of the point of his playing. looking at the design on my own, i think the snakes are more a symbol of the crowd our pianist draws wherever he plays, the dangerous folk on the street who become charmed and attentive when he plays. the whole design serves this point very nicely. it's largely drawn in a loose broad cartoonish style, with the exception of the head, hands, and instrument of the musician (which fits: they're the realest part of this story). in addition to an ept choice around detail, Gringz does some veyr nice things with the blue "shading" (unshading, really, as it's the background color): i like the way he handles the musician's arms and the snakes' baskets. but these technical details aren't as interesting as the ambiguity around what the snakes represent: it's that bit that makes the design printable, in my humble wish.

mikemills' triskaidekaphobia is wacky as sin. thirteen has killed before; now, it's coming after eight. what has eight done? and, since when does the black cat or the mirror take bad luck into its own hands? the design is interestingly messy: the smudges on some of the lines, the inability to color to the lines, even the use of pseudo-halftone shading: the roughness of the implementation of this design parallels the roughness of its thematic concept. what is going on here? no one who walks buy you when you're wearing this will know, either....

treebeans' Wai-Tea-ng Rain is a kind of whacked update of the old saw "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. here, life is raining on our hero, but they have built themselves a wonderful machine that gathers up the rain and turns it into tea (not coffee? treebeans doesn't seem to live in seattle ;) ). treebeans has an airy "folk art" style that was quite honored by prints in threadless past. she uses it well: she gives us lots of graphical interest, she tells a good story, the pieces all seem to fit (why gears? i'm not sure, but it's obvious they're needed), and she handles the balance within the design particularly well (as your technique becomes less "perfect", your handling of design becomes more and more important). the design seems to work in several colors, though i like the blues because they feel most rainy. good luck with this.

travis76's watching, learning, waiting is another great example of a design packed with detail to project on, yet ambiguous enough to let us have a creative engagement (and to delight passersby as they look at our shirts in admiration). the character detail here is astonishing, the rat all sullen and ready to fight, scratching out its dreams on a paper, yet it's equipped with odds and ends that don't seem to back up its serious agenda. hey, it's even chewed on its weapon! the contrast between the rough-textured line drawing of the rat (set off only by a few red detail bits) and the bright sharp drawing of all the equipment only highlights this dichotomy. this design was very well received in the submission page — i hope it gets a similar reaction from the larger voting republic, and then the powers who are at threadless central. (for what it's worth, i think this design wants to be left of center ("K" centered), and centered on the chest (not too high or too low -- there's no vertical "movement" in the design to justify that placement, the way the fellow looks and works from left to right).

anyway, i like all four of this week's new shirts. they're all solid designs with working class sorts of scores (2.53, 2.56, 2.65, 2.89). you've got your hipster shirt, your emo shirt, your bloody shirt, and your pomo shirt: who can't find something in that list to love? it's a good life.

new shirts

i've had two of the haircuts pictured on label's Exotica. when i was in college, my haircut place told me i was their 10,000th customer, and gave me a "free" perm. since i didn't want to grow it out, i had to keep getting perms all through school (at $30 a throw). my afro wasn't so tight as that blonde guy's on the old tv show "room 222", but it wasn't so loose as, say, dylan's hair. then later, when i still wore my hair real long, i spent some time with a mullet because i got tired of bangs. i didn't even know what a mullet was, actually, until someone told me. the next day, i shaved my head.but i digress. we were talking about label's design. i think the green was a brilliant choice for the shirt/background: it sets the rest of the birds' feathers off in much higher contrast than on the red shirt. you've got to love the drawing: quite natural, and yet, each of the birds is copping an attitude appropriate to their haircut. it does bugger the imagination to see these four extremely different characters all on the same branch. maybe it's a zoo or something: who knows. but it's a great shirt that i'm really looking forward to wearing. thanks, label.

i don't know a lot about emo, but i think that somni's Fahrenheit 451 has to qualify for the club, right? the design is very nicely done. the thick lines, the confusion between the lines and colors that make up flames and hair, the sad detached eyes: this has to be trash paradise forced to study when she could be out in a cool drizzle being miserable. the perfect irony is the emo inversion highlighted by the title. back in the day, hipsters worried about the burning of books. in emo-land, the slightest emotion sets the soul on fire. i figure our little heroine has encountered some triviality in her reading, and now burns as if she was reading the end of king lear. thus emo is the solution to punk, replacing detachment with headlong over-emphasizing, all depicted so beautifully by somni. whew.

tomburns is treading on biblically sensitive territory with his Unicorns eat children, which is of course why it's a must-buy for me. you don't have to search very hard on the internet to learn that the unicorn was one of the great christ-symbols of medieval times. just one of the ways that worked out is, when the story says "the unicorn can only be captured by a virgin", what it means is that you can only capture the spirit of christ in your own soul if you become without sin. (we're all clear that we're talking catholic symbolism in the same spirit that we'd be talking greek mythology, right? the symbols of our culture? etc...). the point being, you've got to approach this design in that context to truly understand its intent. it's well-drawn. tomburns is good at regions and textures and the like. this design is a study in using regions rather than lines to create a drawing, and then using lines and spots to make economical textures. the balance here is near perfect: think about how the bike is in exactly the right place below and towards the back of the unicorn, and the way the whole has such a nice balance. and then, evil. christ is licking his lips, the devil in his eye, having just overturned the little tot on the bicycle and demolished poor little freddie, the 3-year-old who happened by when christ was hungry. if only the born-again were more aware of their religious heritage, they would have objected more strongly to this design. small-mindedness in objectionable others is a blessing, isn't it?

yoshi's I Hate Stripes is the one design amongst the bunch of this week's prints that i have the hardest time getting into. it's well drawn, the stripes are definitely stripy, the roller is well rendered, and the whole design has a nice balance. but, i'm not sure how to understand what the design means. the white line and texture on the roller implies that the painter might be making the stripes. the thick intrusions on the stripes imply that the painter might be covering them over. so are we advocating painting right over wall-paper as opposed to pulling it off first? and is a bright red wall somehow better? those of you who track my appreciation of shirts will realize that i love ambiguity as much as the next person, but, the ambiguity i love is around some center created by and then elaborated on by the design. here, we're just doing some lame-ass landlord thing because some weird witch-goth will rent the place if only the stripes (insisted on by the previous tenant, a mass-murdered) are turned into fire-engine red expanses. why?

old shirts

going back to the root of robsoul, you find a couple of beginner shirts that scored in the 2.1 range, a bloody- mouthed panda eerily reminiscent of Unicorns..., and then Doodle Bug, his first print. it took the design a while to find its way to print: it was submitted in january of 2005, but wasn't available until last october. approaching a purchase decision, your keyword has to be "subtle": the joke is subtle (a bug outlining a little picture and then the shirt's name), and then the design is subtle (a little bitty black bug and a thin line drawing). i haven't bought it yet. i saw it once, and it took me a while to see that it was more than a stain up there under the chin (and a longer while to realize it was threadless!). my problem with it is that the "doodle bug" title is down on the hem: the time i saw it worn, the guy who was wearing it was sitting in such a way that i only saw from the middle of the bush up. that's what taught me to hate the hem. anyway, the early sales reveal this as one of those gendered reprints: lots of girly shirts gone early, but the boys' shirts are barely touched. we'll see how that proceeds.

no disrespect meant to niwa brasil, nor to the 3.69 that this design got back in december of 2004, but if i were to pick a threadless cliché that drives me apeshit, this shirt would be it. we've got a moody girl. we've got a drawing of part of her insides, indicating a kind of precise organic depth. we have an abstract outside her, indicating a kind of emotive relation to the wide world. now in my experience, most chicki-poos are all chaos inside their head, but present a carefully constructed exterior that gives away very little of their emotional world. so the cliche'd image is a lie in every possible way. this is the sort of threadless design that i'd throw back if it came up on a hook. i have a pretty ugly chest, so much so that it would be an imposition on my friends if i were to show it to them, but, if i had to wear this shirt or go topless, i'd count on my friends' forgiveness and throw this puppy in the local dumpster. really. yuck.

i had never tracked on the way that so many people wait until the last minute to submit their ♥'s threadless designs, and how that wait lets people suss out the contest and have the clearest notion of what seems to work. i'm still not sure how well the contest panned out. i guess we learned the difference between good wall decals and good shirt designs, and that it seems darned hard to make the two meet in one submission.

blik

letter's 7.00 handles the blik contest in a very interesting way; a little girl blurs reality around her, conflating the cuckoo clock above her head with a woodland scene springing out from the walls. letter creates us a delicious ambiguity: is the story the little girl is reading set in the woods? is the woods how she makes sense of the clock? is this a less specific but very apt illustration of the fact that the girl is lost in her book? the technical work is very interesting: nice use of color, nice detail in the cloth and on the chair legs, and nice thought about how to join the branches to the wall. i'm particularly impressed by how letter handles of the space above the girl: this could be decals on a two-dimensional plane, or it could be limbs springing out of either side of a corner whose edge we don't see. that last ambiguity plays nicely back into the contest theme (if that matters to you). all and all, a very nice drawing/design that attracted a lot of comment and could easily be printed.

rrich76 has come up with something deep and rich with Anti-Amazing. he's got three things going on, all at once: a real maze, ants trying to find their way through the maze, ants at the far end joining seeker to seekee, and then an anteater that is the maze and gives a horrible existential twist to the search. like the danse macabre, the little dudes are following a path clearly not of their own larger-scale doing. this confluence of ideas is at the crux of the submission, and they make it interesting. at the same time, the design is executed very well graphically, which means it works all the way through. the maze is interesting as a maze. the anteater is well drawn and fits the maze nicely (rrich76 has another version that is just the maze: it works, too, but i like the detailing in (say) the tail hair, and so would slightly prefer the one with the "shadow" or backdrop). the little detailed ants make the whole thing into a nice power/victim shirt: you can see it as politics; you can see it as "the system". which leads to another delicious irony: as a marketing idea for threadless, maybe this design could come with a rope attached to the color and to an indelible marker. folks could come up and solve the maze while you were distracted, and then you'd have to buy another copy of the shirt. rrich76 is a genius in that way, too.

i'm not sure i like danrule's Eyeballs as much as some of the other blik submissions. i really really like the eyes. i'm just not sure the design hangs together well as a whole. i don't find enough connection between one eye and the next to keep my attention moving around in the design. instead, i find myself kind of falling away from the design too quickly: i worry that will translate into an uninteresting shirt. dan was working on a different proposal on the blogs where there was just a single eye: i think that would work better. it's also interesting to imagine a few of these eyes in some emotional relationship within a more sparse design, where your attention would move back and forth across the front of the shirt. this goes to show how hard it is to get the decal/design thing working together (because these would be absolutely killer decals).

Mr Walrusface (of this fame and that fame) is back with Friendly Distortion, which is IMHO as good a design as he's shared with us (and when a guy has two prints and a 3.0+ in his three submissions, that's saying something). what's most interesting here, to me, is that the design hangs together incredibly well as a whole, it seems to cohere, yet the moment you start drilling into it and paying attention to the way its details relate, the whole kind of falls apart. that effect is particularly strong over there where a little arm is swapping a cassette tape right next to the trunk thing and the wind-up key. it's great the way that some of the detail "fits" the storyline really nicely (like the mattress peeled back over the brain, or the brick wall being put up to repair the last time our dude did that to itself), whereas other detail is just wacky (the boob-like things in the red place where the sewage flows out into the elephant trunk and on to the little tongue). the drawing, the colors: this may or may not be to your taste (i was never able to buy the ice-cream poop thing), but it's doing incredibly coherently, and incredibly well.

hasn't Natvralism stirred up a little bit of threadless drama with MJET? we've got michael's glove, we've got a kind of gangster outfit that michael could easily wear (i'm told in a comment, below, that this is the moonwalking outfit: does not knowing mean i'm out of it or post-outofit?), we've got a surgical mask, and we've got all this being worn by someone who seems to have appeared in a previous shirt). taken as a blik submission, this interprets "off the wall" in the wacky sense: i might want one of these as a decal, once, but it makes a better shirt. it's well drawn (the thick hatched line style being used in most of the design is very appropriate for the bagginess of ET and the outfit; the glove is done very nicely). it's funny. everyone will get it. if you're a fan of GlennZ, you should check this one out; if you're a fan of watching uninformed laypeople speculate about copyright law, you should check out the submission page ;)

lollabear's Not So Treacherous Waters reminds me of nothing so much as a sculpture of a giant crawling up out of the earth in East Potomac Park in Washington, DC. Here we have a bunch of critters that are kind of icebergs but also kind of melty people-ish creatures. the individual creatures are very well drawn (i think the above-water/below-water divide is captured very nicely), there's a fair bit of humor (the winking guy up and to the left, the guy floating on his back and blowing a little fountain out of his mouth, the half-submerged duck, and so on). with the simple expedient of organizing all these beings around a channel stretching from upper left to lower right, and then by having a little small boat going downstream through them all, lollabear unifies the design into an interesting whole and caps off the mellow friendly spirit of the thing (somehow, the boat does not seem worried about hitting one of these things). my only wish? some background color other than white. we'll see....

Robsoul has done as good a job of nailing the blik contest as anyone with The Ornithologist. in the decal way, we have a fascinating little nineteenth century man in a top hat and red tie, and then a bunch of very interestingly drawn birds (i particularly like the larger ones — the dodo, the stork, and the owl — and the way that the fine hashing line style gives them a sort of woodcut dimensionality appropriate to the era). what works particularly nicely is that the shirt design is a little dramatic tableau you might easily build from these decals on your wall: the ornithologist is tracking the dodo, the only bird missing from the design. just enough is going on in the design to hold it all together: yet we're left with all the creativity of each individual bit. as a person who probably won't buy the decals, my only regret is that i won't have a copy of the dodo. extinction sucks i guess.

with Rocket Sharks, (matthijs) takes the exact other path here from the one that danrule took. he's given us one of his best designs ever. in addition to the excellent drawing style and sense of color, there's also an incredibly interesting flow in the design up from the cement mixer through the smoke trails and on to the sharks. at the same time, it's very hard to imagine how this would work as a set of blik decals? just the rocket sharks would probably be a little too simple, on the one hand, and while the way the cement mixer doesn't work with the sharks is perfect for (matthijs)'s style, not working doesn't keep working when you do it in all sorts of different ways on a wall. it's almost like this design would have done better in any setting other than the blik contest, either as a regular threadless print or somewhere else. we'll see what happens.

trickbag's Roofish is yet another (in a long, frustrating line) of designs that i like most when i drill into the weird detail in the presented world. as a whole, the design is just kind of arverage: it has the white pressed car lined up nicely with the face of the gold-spitter, and it has room for the device to spill (restfully) into the little park in front of us. but, the gold-refining industry in the main diagonal, down from the dude to the pressed car that looks so like a person, well, that's just so money and upper-middle-class that i figure you'd have to be a very rich person to wear this? or some less-rich person who doesn't mind contact with the true upper calass? another conversation... someday...

in Window of Time, telaine's take on "off the wall" is more on the wall or in the wall. again, hard to imagine this turning into decals, but no matter: it's an interesting design. i like the simplicity, especially in the sketchy bricks to give the facing wall some breadth (this kind of sketched out detailing is an idea that more people could pick up to give us a bit of a feel for something that needs to be largely left undrawn). the ivy as framing device is nice, too. but what's very interesting is the simple inner room built in such a straightforward way: you get an interesting feeling of depth that works so much better than all the "see my heart in my chest" designs that are one of our clichés. here it's not so much that we're seeing inside the wearer, as that the 3-D effect is strong enough to play with the solidity of the wearer. it's a nice effect.

not blik

what is it with julbin and his dogs? if he poses his pets for designs like Amateurs, we need to send in the SPCA: a little too much debauchery going on here, i'm thinking. the submission lives and dies for the viewer insofar as we can fall into its story and enjoy all the little details: sleepy sarge with most of the chips in his hands, yappy the wonder dog probably cheating, the team closest to us still in the running even as they've lost most of their members. we have no idea where foo-foo there on the lower right came from: he seems to belong in some other dog universe, one where thin squiggly lines create smiling vapid creatures happy to be bottoms for our heroes. be that as it may, it's a fun design that's sure to amuse if it's printed. and what's next for jublin? what i hear is, he's thinking of doing a set of illustrations of the great moments from the charlton heston biblical drams, using these same dog characters. cool!

based on the fact that laryang is willing to have us think about bad dream without it's very excellent juxtaposition of the little sleepy kid and the big nasty monster, it's almost like he doesn't realize what he's got going here. sure, the kid is cool. the big eyes, the little tuft of hair, the pools of tears, and the tiny teddy bear: it's hard to imagine a more pathetic creature staring out at us from a shirt. taken alone, howsoever well drawn this little dude is, the design is a hallmark moment that few of us (i'm thinking) would want to wear. add in the monster, on the other hand, and you've really got something. there's so many nice contrasts: the monster's pointiness vs. the dude's roundness, the monsters beady eyes vs. the dude's sweet round ones. yet the drawing style and the nice sense of proportion between monster and little guy hold everything together, and we're left with one of those psychologically deep submissions showing us our scared little selves being attacked by our Horrid Shadow in dreamland. dreamland is sagestone colored, by the way — can't get that wrong ;)

Gringz has outdone himself with bonsai fishing. he's always had a great control of line and a good sense of design across the submission. those are here in spades. check out the trunk, the fine detailing on the fishing rod, the little nails on the house, the mushrooms, and then the nice simplicity of the coffee cup; he's picked the right level of detail for each of his elements, and then really put a lot of work into getting everything right. at the same time, the entire design works quite nicely. my eye always starts at the coffee cup (the largest bright object). it's quite nice that that's the least detailed thing on the shirt; this brings your eye constantly up and over following lines built into the design: the pencil, the pot, the trunk, the fishing line. the little sleepy dude is the perfect counter-weight to the coffee, and then the story ties it all together. even more than the shirt (which i want quite a bit), i would love to have this sculpture on my desk at work. wow.

huebucket's BOX is a particularly spooky design. the most interesting technical achievement here is the way that the color, detailing, and even clothing style of the woman just waking up in the box sits in such stark and yet subdued contrast to the dreamy fumy fairy world into which she's just woken. i like how the necklaces and buttons on the woman's clothes and the seams on her jeans are so finely done, in contrast to the thicker lines used in the mushrooms and the venus flytraps looming there behind the box. this could be a fairy that sleeps here every night, or it could be a soccer mom who had just dozed off in the parking lot outside the dance studio. if it's the latter, i'm guessing dad is going to have to pick up suzie and her friends.... the feeling of transportation and sleepy startlement couldn't be more directly captured. nice job.

kaloyster's Brainfreeze sits right on the edge of the comically tacky. a lot of what is going on here is almost too much of a stretch: the brain stealing ideas in a world of brains, the cops and robbers, shouting out "freeze", the strange pencil effect around the thought bullet (which is, interestingly, all sharp and broken and ice-like), and then the weirder connection to brain-freeze (which, like several of the people commenting on the submission, i association with eating something very cold). then, to top it off, the submission finds kaloyster positioning this as a very serious commentary on the stuck with pins and andy weitzel's of our little world (along with their less successful brothers and sisters). the whole thing is just so interestingly wacky that it appeals to me. you know how that can go....

in a world that contains Cactus Hugger, though, i suppose i shouldn't think of Brainfreeze as all that wacky. bluedough has gone so far over the top here that i can't help but follow just long enough to point and giggle. the colors are very nicely done. the style is brilliant. and, if this isn't the most homoerotic design ever submitted to threadless, well, i'll eat that that little fellas hat. hug my big green thing, cowpoke! won't hurt but for a bit....

i can't remember a submission that was as technically astonishing to me as hogboy's Danse Macabre. the drawing is very nicely done, and the use of color is really appropriate to the subject. drawing skill here is firmly dedicated to the astonishing overall concept: elegant beauty in front of a stage, death's head, and the dance as puppet show all combined in a single design so thoroughly that less than half the people who responded to the submission with a comment seemed to have seen what was going on. i usually don't like a shirt that is hard to figure out, because i figure most people won't be looking at it all that long. when you have deep complexity like this, though, all prejudices are put on hold. you rarely see something here that's so well crafted: i'd really like to see it printed.

eskimokiss's Fig. 02 needs two reactions: one to the troll/ moron/ lawyer- wannabee's who think this is "copied", and then the other two the design itself. i can speak to the first group in a word: SHITBIRDS! i could speak to them longer, but they don't deserve it. so, the design. what eskimokiss has done here is mixed two things that are related but seldom seen together: an anatomical drawing, and the confusion i'd have to expect an anatomical student would experience if they first looked at the muscles in the neck. add the humor, and the geek appeal of the drawing, and you've surely got a winner. the drawing is lovely: we've obviously started with one of the old anatomical drawings, and then done a huge amount of painstaking work to hold the style but add detail. the fun is in the two jokes: first, the muscles turned into knots, and then the snake hidden there in the back of the throat. if this gets printed on sensible colors (the tan background of the submission is best; other neutral backgrounds would work with a whole bunch of more interesting "ink" colors palettes), i'm buying in a heartbeat.

el chico malo deserves a shout-out for his gloomy kingdom. it's not something i'd buy for several reasons: a very bad choice of color that overemphasizes the top of the design, and then some major drawing flaws (where is the dude's fourth leg?). but there's interesting sick whimsy here, good drawing, and a lovely bent sense of connectedness. not something i've given a "$", but as i want more of these sorts of shirts, i'm inclined to say "YEAH" (in a humble tone). keep working on this sort of thing, please!

there have been some conversations on the blog about what a "$" means if it isn't associated with a "5". i've given stickymike's It Sucks When You're Delicious a "3$", so, i'm in a great position to explain what these sorts of idiots are up to. if you just look at this design, and compare it to almost any of the other designs that are on the list this week, you can see that this is a good but not very excellent drawing. no effort to texture anything. no effort to detail the eyes. no 3-d anywhere. the leg to the left as we look is kind of wrong. even the text-bubble flies in the face of known hyper-criticalness by being ugly in both the babble and font way. but.... (and there's where the less-than-5 drawing thing sneaks into it's "$"), it's a damn appealing design. it's like mr ice cream cone has lost everything, he's melting, ugly as sin, and then he's possessed with this billy crystal moment: he realizes he tastes marvelous delicious, and when he tastes delicious he is delicious. so there we are, squat in the face of stickymike's joke: are we going to love this ugly design because it's overcome it's own ugliness? my own experience says yes, at least i am, in the most passive-aggressive 3$ style i can. so there.

the only thing scary about danrule's JunkYard Life, to me, is that i might have to buy it in that horrible blue color. if you ask me, the dark green in the bit labeled "glow in dark eyes" is the perfect color palette. we'll see. meanwhile, this is a killer submission, lacking only psychological complexity on the road to perfection. two bits are very well done: the drawing of the part of the world we see (i particularly like the boundaries between the objects and the grass (and it's grass! which is why it needs to be green of some sort!)). and then there's the second bit, the eyes, the whole ecosystem that lives in all the hidey places in our worlds. i bet there's not a one of us who realizes how many rats live in their own house, let alone out back: dan shows us otherwise. add in the fine details (the radioator! the dog chain! the left-behind tire! and then the chair we can sit in to watch what's going on), and it's a submission that deserves attention.

you run into a lot of submissions that hearken back to earlier printed shirts: lazyryo does a better job than most, in this genre, with Make a Wish.... i am not the most observant of people, but i am convinced that this panda has been in a threadless shirt before. what's beautiful here is, he's caught before the war-mongering that ross put him through. here we see the moment when ross first got hold of the lamp, right before the panda turned killer. if only it was available on the submission background, it'd be a killer buy. as is, well, hmm....

Nedriod's Meteor Turtles is an underappreciated gem. it sets up a lovely dichotomy between the turtles abandoned to spend their lives on the ground (three colors used very artfully), and then their longing projection that sees themselves up in the sky. this is one of those designs where i am willing to overlook some technical weaknesses (the grass and shells are gorgeous, but the heads and feet are badly drawn on the ground and in the sky). still, i'd buy it because i recognize truth here: it's a beautiful design illustrating the whole turtling/longing/projection/god thing. maybe some of you have been there?

jordanmarx has a good design/ drawing here in his A Most Fashionable Pet, ruined by its lack of color sense. squinting, we see a road twisting away, a sort of hip/oldster dude walking out ahead, and a floating monster/echo behind. insofar as our walking dude thinks he's got the monster on a leash, the drawing's energy tells us that the monster is only floating before its kill. in the meantime, happy-face. if all this were just rendered in colors that provided good contrast to the well-chosen yellow/red thing in the main design, i might have said "yeah". as it is, this is a design that i've given a "1" probably completely because of its color failings. i only hope we get to see more from jordanmarx, and that they do better in some of these fundamental design ways.

do you remember Angler, where the creatures of the sea tempt a little fish to its depth? bonaparte's Stranger Danger works that vein in a much more interesting/trivial way: the little girl has to know that the monster is bad (what have her parents been telling her all these years?!?!), but, she's still tempted by the ice cream cone. that's what makes this space so interesting: we see the emotional balance (has anyone made such a simpler "person" and such a horribly real "monster"?). the dynamic here is so vivid that i think we can't hope for the little girl. it's only about her soul, maybe, and where we fall in the same choices.

as a guy who has tried to avoid "ordering" in my comments, funkie fresh's Who? gives a new meaning to "last but not least". it's brilliant! i still haven't figured out exactly what the words say on the top of the question mark (whooooo.... is to easy: i think funky fresh is out to get us here ;) ). but no matter. this is a lovely design down in the line-work, it's appealing from a distance (asking us "who" from a sort of artistic high road), and it's right to the point as a design. the little dudes looking out are gravy (in the overt sense: if funkie ever comes to dinner here, i'm going to fix gravy from one of these creatures.) so it goes.

did you notice that none of the designers who got printed are bloggers? people get all excited when they get a lot of bloggers giving them good comments on the submission page, but really: even when you get 100 comments, that's less than 5% of the people who voted. insofar as the vote matters at all, the comments probably don't reflect on it very much at all. so....

this is the second week of my experiment writing about the shirts that have been printed. when i write about the week's submissions, i'm largely writing about shirts i like, so it's easy in a way. each week, several of the shirts that are actually printed are not very appealing to me. that makes it harder to write. what i'm hoping is that, if i'm honest about what i don't like, partisans of those designs will chime in and tell me why i'm wrong. honest respectful debate might be fun. rude name-calling might also be fun. we'll see what happens.

new shirts

old shirts

at the same time, more and more interesting shirts are showing up for sale at other sites: LaFraise, Oddica, Split the Atom, and Go Ape are all starting to attract threadless designers and print some interesting shirts. threadless's market size gives them an advantage in both the money they can pay for designs and the price they can charge their customers. still, it will be interesting to see what happens when more and more people start picking up the business model: i think threadless could be vulnerable to a challenge from both the artsy-weird direction (some of the shirts by the designers on the blogs that don't seem to get printed as often as some folks would like) and the cartoon direction (some of the high-scoring schlocky shirts that you have to imagine would sell if they were available). we'll see....

i still don't have a real good feel for the center of the blik ♥ threadless contest. is it supposed to be "off the wall" as in the graphical style of the cutouts? "off the wall" as in weird? some mix? something else? we'll see when the winners are printed, i'm guessing: it's unclear that the design community has sussed it out yet.

blik

mikemill's after the fall is a very tricksy design to get your head around. it's got all sorts of graphic interest: the leaves and flowers/seed-pods are done quite nicely, the extra detail on the closer parts of the plant is particularly interesting, color is used very well (the contrast between the insects and the plant is unusually good), the design as a whole has a nice flow towards the upper right, but then, of course, there's the fact that the viewer has no idea what's going on: why are things (bugs and plants alike) falling apart? us hipsters might know that it's on account of the blik contest, and these natural critters are just stickers on somebody's wall that haven't been put together just right, but the threadless-less passerby has less context. what makes the shirt work, ultimately, is that it kind of almost makes sense, in the same way that problems galore almost makes sense. you get to eating on some stem, you never know what connections will bee lost.

i had to spend a little bit of time with d3d's invertebrate ballet before i could really get into it. i like the decorative thing he's exploring with this design and Nesting Instinct in an abstracted sort of way: what puzzles me is how that sort of thing would work on a shirt. here, d3d has a nice simple graphic that looks great across the shirt: i particularly like the way the design opens up to the face, that's a good effect. invertebrate ballet works better for me than Nesting Instinct on account of the slugs: that little bit of whimsy, done in such a straightforward style, that subverts the design even as it participates in it: i like that a lot. i'm not sure whether the colored slugs to the left in the submission picture are intended to indicate completely different color schemes or just different snails on the background. the brown snail on this background is particularly intriguing: it seems like it would add just a little color interest while remaining faithful to the overall decorative feel (whereas i think you'd need to put the green snails on khaki and the purple snails on a grey shirt). but the overall effect is a nice alternative to the hoards of decorative "dreaming women" designs that are one of threadless's greatest clichés. interesting.

about the only truly good thing i can say about domrod's Protein is, if they fixed up the colors before they printed it, it's so subtly strange that i just might buy it. maybe. it seems a pretty easy shirt to make: vectorize a world map, come up with seven identical little 3D egg yokes, then past it onto each continent. except antarctica, since the map projection wouldn't support it. and then since we've got an extra yoke, and greenland looks a little over-white up there, we'll hit it with our last shot. not very hard. and not even a very interesting background color (a medium- to dark-blue would suit the ocean better, we wouldn't miss the "mountain" detailing in the map, and the contrast with the yokes would give the design more punch). having said all that, it's such an "off-the-wall" and twisted shirt, in its gamine way, that it might be fun to wear.

it's been interesting watching ronlewis evolve sexPanther on the blogs. the design shows him at the top of his game: it's got a lot in it to talk about. the whole design is around projecting the kind of raw visceral energy that will make this shirt quite questionable in the workplace. the placement is perfect, the bit cat climbing down from the shoulder and facing out across the top of the breast. the colors an interesting: even though they're not "bright", ron makes them seem neon to me; and check out the use of the olive lines alongside the dark pink ones on the cat's tail and hindquarters! very well done. the blue along the body is abstract, of course, and yet it does a great job of suggesting muscles rippling immediately below the skin. this shirt should get printed somewhere by someone: if it doesn't get printed here, that's only because it's hotter than most people here can handle.

the last blik shirt that caught my eye this week was danrule's Sounds from an Open Window. if the core of the contest is building a shirt that could be made up of a bunch of vinyl stickers that could also go onto a wall, then this shirt should be a serious contender in the blik ♥ threadless contest. given the design's self-imposed limitations, it has some graphic interest: i particularly like the way the cloud looms in front of a thing that might be a tree or a skeleton hand, and the way the red snake/penis precedes the thief. the best thing about the shirt is imagining these stickers for sale, and imagining parents all over the world buying them for their kids' bedrooms. culture.

not blik

Pee Pee's Air Heads is one of several designs this week that teeters on the edge one or another sort of objectionable- ness. the great question mark here is the similarity between this design and an Alice Cooper poster. it's hard to imagine that Pee Pee never saw emek's design, though it is possible to imagine him reproducing it out of an unremembered experience all George Harrison like (my sweet lord...). the design itself has some strengths: the colors are well-chosen (especially on the tan/khaki shirt), the design is nicely balanced, and the cartoonish style goes well with the willy wonka spirit of children at play in mortal danger. this isn't a "$" for me, though, partly because of the unoriginal core image, but more because it's somehow too easy: if only there was something about the balloon-man that let us understand why he had the heads, and why he was giving them back, then i think the design would have a depth it's lacking now, and i'd be more attracted to it.

whereas some of this week's better submissions suffer in my eyes because they take too easy a path towards grossness, geraud76's a bear for the bear fails in the other direction: it's almost embarrassingly sweet. granted, it's well done technically. i especially like the similarities and differences between the two bears: the ear shape, the eye depth, the nose length, the relative "liveness", the color, and the hairiness (someone complained that the stuffed bear wasn't as hairy as the real bear: of course not, fool, who'd give a shaggy stuffed animal to a bear? it'd choke on the fuzz as it fell off!). i like the way the diagonal through the bears and the tree is offset by the white sun. but this is just too cloyingly sweet for me. granted, it's not something you'd see in a zoo gift shop (it's a bit too twisted for that), but still. if this gets printed, better stock up on the girly sizes and go short on the boys'.

briteshine's Birds in my Brains! is another design that stoops to quickly to an easy, sophomoric grossness. it's interestingly drawn: the shaggy, roly-poly nature of the little bird-feeder creature is achieved with a remarkable economy of line (and an interesting border technique). little details like the eyes and the belly button really add to the effect. the only change to the colors that i might suggest is to pick a shirt color that stands in greater contrast to the brain-pink: the rest of the colors are quite well thought through. the problem is in the concept. there might be a few people out there who would identify with this shirt so deeply that they'd wear it regularly (jeff dahmer's kin?), but for most of us, casual brain-eating really doesn't have much staying power. it's unclear who you'd wear this in front of, and how often. when you're buying a shirt, those things matter.

Gringz has a winner here with devil music. it's a very nice drawing in a smooth thick-lined style with a cool rich palette that almost makes you hear the bluesy folk music our hero is playing. the pink nose and battered hat tell us that our hero is more than a bit down and out: we're not surprised to see signs that him playing that well involves intervention from beyond. this is a very nicely-rendered character: i think he'd be fun to wear. i wonder if gringz's a lefty himself....

zhero2's Drops of Love is every bit as over-sentimental as a bear for the bear, if not more so. it's not drawn as well, either. then why am i mentioning it? only because you should check out the submission comments if you haven't already, and weigh in on the great buttock/testicle debate. i'm in the leaky boob camp, myself, but as nobody else has brought that one up so far i'll just keep it to myself.

it's quite a shock the first time you see montmont's Fountains of Fungi turn from red to green. if you're the sort of person who believes that color decisions don't really matter for a print, here is the perfect counter-example for you. it's an interesting design, encompassing several different very practical uses of texture and a very economical use of color (i particularly like the grey/blue accents on the black mushrooms). the odd placement works well: i'm particularly intrigued by the way the relatively sparse elements in the lower right pull the whole thing over to where it looks balanced. as a whole, the submission works well because montmont avoided many ways in which he could have taken the design too far. interesting job.

I Do Voodoo is yet another of this week's interesting yet gratuitous submissions, this one by d3d of all people. i like the little voodoo doll, and i like the notion of another "threadless" shirt in theory. the detail in the pins and the nooses is quite well done. but i can't for the life of me see through the details to the point where i can get my head around the why of this design. are you tired of waiting for all your fine submissions to be printed, leon? are you wishing harm on the folks in chicago? are they wishing harm on someone else? is this the shirt you buy your ex-lover? this inquiring mind can't see his way to a "$" without at least some cover story here...

JOHN2's Kabuki Fish is an astonishing submission, by far my favorite of the week. there's so much going on. i love the japanese graphic elements: waves, kite, boats. i love the dynamic energy being created by the fish: it sits perfectly to the right of the design, jumping up and into the center, destroying constraint in all direction. and then, the question: what is going on? as opposed to having no idea, here we have many different ideas springing immediately to mind, and they all inform one another in amusing and substantial ways. is that a kite being flown as part of a puppet drama? is that some sort of japanese moby dick, being hunted to supply the demand for raw fish at sushi bars worldwide? is this truly one of the 300 classic kabuki dramas, and is there a name for the men who had to play the fish's part once piscus was outlawed in the late 17th century? whatever's going on, it's an excellent example of how quirk and talent can come together to make something unique. my "hope this is printed" selection of the week.

i'm not a big fan of the death thing in shirts, but i might make an exception here because of the high quality of digart's graphic style and sense of humor in The Hunter. it's an incredibly coherent design, from the sparse grassland through slim ominous efficiency of the animal and its village/society and on to the fat ineptness of the dead hunter. the drawing style is interesting in its simplicity (as well as when it gets slightly rounder for the dead fat guy). i particularly like the use of color here, the orange in the eyes, all the blue-grays deployed so thoughtfully. there are some off notes (you shouldn't see the hunter's other eye from this angle, and the gun is being held at a very awkward angle), but, all in all, it works. please not on the white: any sort of ash or grey would work a whole lot better.