First off, I want to apologize for catching this design on its last day. (Especially since the artist requested a review… the weekend and holiday ended up being very busy for me and yesterday I had class and new prints to write up.)

All excuses aside, this Blik submission is a pretty sweet design. I’m not sure anyone is in a hurry to stick amoebas on their walls, but just as a shirt, the concept is amusing. The colors give it a retro feel and the characters also remind me of Pikmin. (And for a Nintendo fan like myself, that’s a good thing.)

Don’t forget that the Blik competition ends tomorrow on June 1st. Use the links below if you still have anything left to submit or to browse some of the final designs. Tomorrow is also the last day to get 15% off your Blik orders using the code THREADLESS during checkout.

Verdict: 4 (View Submission)

Submit Yours | Competition Details | Current Submissions

The beginning of the week is never disappointing at Threadless these days. Four delicious new prints have hit the shelves (or, electronic catalog, as it were) and two tasty favorites make a comeback.

First on the menu is You’ve Got Some ‘Splaining To Do! which shows that infidelity [and some light-hearted racism—ed] can be delightfully hilarious (at least when it comes to bottles of milk). Printed on gold, the design ended up with an amazing average score of 3.56 which may be an indication of how quickly it’ll be selling out.

If milk isn’t your thing, perhaps Know Your Meats will sate your appetite. We all knew popsicles were just another yummy source of protein, but now you can own a shirt that proves it. The first product photo looks navy blue to me, but supposedly it’s printed on dark grey for both girls and guys.

Not Another Skull Tee makes me groan “not another brown tee!”. It’s tolerable, however, since the detailed design really does work great on the color. It’s perfect for those of you who like adding a little flavor of morbidity to your wardrobe.

If you’re looking for something more simplistic, Empire may hit the spot. Printed on black, this silhouette design makes perfect use of negative space. Some users are musing over the image’s meaning, but what is there to “get”? It’s just an artfully elegant illustration.

Four Delicious New Designs:
You’ve Got Some ‘Splaining To Do!
Know Your Meats
Not Another Skull Tee
Empire

Two Tasty Reprints:
Nice Boobies
Biblical Disaster

Loves Threadless is a bit myopic in its content. The concept is built around reviewing shirts, and that’s that, and all’s well. But I know that anyone who’s a fan of Threadless is certainly a fan of their own crazy collection of music, and I’ve been looking to perhaps broaden some of the content here.
I love all sorts of music, and I’ve looked around at Napster and Rhapsody and a few other services before, but never really tried any of them. Well, I’ve been getting into Pandora lately, which is an awesome, free streaming service that shows you all sorts of new music based on what you like. I coupled that with a totally cheap Rhapsody subscription, and I’m able to download an entire album in 2 minutes, CD-quality, and completely legal. Or stream it instantly through my browser.

As someone who’s always looking for more music to grab and love and share, I’m absolutely loving the entire unlimited quality of this.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that you should at least take a look—they give out completely free trials that last 14 days, and I don’t usually shill for companies at random, (let alone Real) but I really think they’re on to something here.

Check it out here. Seriously, today alone I’ve downloaded Gnarls Barkley, Ivy, Paul Oakenfold, Raul Midon, Rubyhorse, Snow Patrol, The Jealous Sound, Zero 7, and a bunch of other full albums, all playing in Winamp. And in the mean time, if you’re up to it, leave a comment with whatever band has completely blown you away lately. I saw Jamie Cullum live in concert last night and am still working on getting over it. Anyone else have an awesome live show they’ve been to lately? Let us know. Broaden our horizons. Et cetera.

So it’s true that the last two gift certificate contests were far too easy to complete. You put on your little thinking caps and tried your very hardest and managed to blast through my challenges with the grace and poise of a wounded panda, blasting through bamboo barriers and completing the challenges within a half hour of their posting.

You’ve won those rounds, but now, the stakes are higher. Threadless bumped up the minimum gift certificate purchase to $25.00, and I? I’ve heeded the call.

You see, while it’s true I occasionally put forth some time into contributing and running the Loves Threadless blog, (with the help of my lovely assistant, Bree) I also own a web development & hosting business. Or, rather co-own the business.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to identify the full name (that means first and last, kids) of my business partner.

A few things of note: There should be enough information between this page and my Threadless profile to complete this task. And I deleted my other tip, because it was too easy.
That’s all I’ll give you for now. Post your answers here in the comments. Don’t spam the site, but post as many legitimate responses as you can find.

Good luck to you. Godspeed. $25 in crazy-awesome t-shirts is on the line.

Edit: Winner Victoria tells us:

I found the name by googling “synapsestudios,” which is where I discovered that there was somebody with the email address [bob's email address] =). That was really fun; thanks so much for holding the contest!!! My threadless id is “prophetess.”

(I killed his email to prevent spam, but you get the idea.)

Garden Pet is a fantastic exploration into the life and times of your favorite gastropod. I love the depth this design brings with it. It’s a very clever implementation of the few colors it actually makes use of. I do wish it had some sort of a hook, though. I mean, it’s a snail. On a shirt. And I can’t help but feel it could be so much more, though I honestly don’t know where you go with a snail on a shirt.

Still, the design is endearing and well-executed, and it just looks cool. As far as snail-shirts go.

It’s nearing that time again—where I indiscriminately throw money away at people I don’t know simply because they’ve proven their ability to complete menial tasks and guessing games. Yes, that time.

This time around, I’m asking you guys:

What should the competition be? Something creative and artistic? Something like a scavenger hunt? Something trivia based?

If you have any ideas for something completely original, let them loose as well. Hell, this might even be the contest…

Leave a comment with your input, and watch this space for your chance at $25 at Threadless.

Since I’ll be spending the rest of the weekend working and studying, I decided to do one more review for today.

This is one fabulous fungi design. Both color options work nicely, but personally I prefer the more peaceful blue/green version as it seems to better compliment the whole flow of the image. It’s also refreshing to see mushrooms arranged in a more creative manner for once. The design is fun, visually pleasing, and one that I would probably enjoy wearing.

By the way, if anyone ever comes across a neat design that they would like to see blogged about, please don’t hesitate to send a quick review request via e-mail to: bree [at] lovesthreadless [dot] com. I rarely have time to hunt through every new submission so I know I miss a lot of interesting designs each week. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something great, either. It can be weird, shocking, funny or downright awful… my only stipulation being that the sub has at least five or six days of voting left (just in case I can’t blog about it right away).

Thanks in advance, hopefully I’ll be hearing from some of you in the near future.

Verdict: 4 + Would Buy (View Submission)

This design makes me cringe in disgust. Yet, strangely, that gives it an appealing quality.

Too gross for my own taste, but a wonderful morbid-storybook type of style… that’s all I have to say.
Verdict: 4 (View Submission)

This design is both simple yet striking.

I suggest some more color variations since it’s easy to miss the sloth altogether with him matching the noodles. (Which is great if the little guy is going for camouflage, but not-so-great if you don’t want to miss the best part of the image.)

The dotted-line effect is fascinating, however, so hopefully the artist will continue to experiment. Sloths also seem to be a fairly popular animal among the voters so this type of illustration definitely has potential.

Verdict: 3 (View Submission)

Without a doubt, this is adorable. I also love the fact that it departs from the usual color scheme. (I, for one, am getting sick and tired of brown and natural t-shirts.)

My only qualm is that the bottom edge looks too boxy. It seems cut off and doesn’t flow with the rest of the image… but perhaps I’m just nitpicking.

Overall, it’s very cute and nicely crafted. Although I wouldn’t buy it for myself, I can easily see a lot of other bear-lovers sporting this design if it were printed.

Verdict: 5 (View Submission)

This week brings about a flurry of activity with four new prints and a couple of tasty reprints. It also marks the first week I’ve purchased a shirt since Landline’s Revenge came out.

First up are the top winners for the Red Cross Loves Threadless competition: Florence Nightingale by Dan Sherratt, is a very pretty throwback to the Lady with the Lamp and an original submission for the Red Cross contest. I love the design and the feel to this 3rd place winner, though it reminds me of a brighter Angler. I bought this one, partially for the Red Cross coolness, and partially because it’s a great design, and I felt like expanding my collection of shirts with birds on them.

Second place went to St. George Vs. The Dragon by Erik Varusio. A lot of people had trouble drawing the Red Cross connection to this design, but the artist says it well:

fastjumper, at 8:09am on Apr 18, 2006

Help and Love, no matter who or from where you are.

First place, and the shirt I bought for the new lady went to Plus, by Kerry Wicks. I’m surprised they posted this submission, since it relies on the cross shape, but it’s a very clever and well-executed design that works great for the Red Cross.

Rounding out the four designs is a print by the infallable Glenn Jones, Prehistoric Freak. This brilliant design features a Barney costume fossil in a museum and is just perfect. My only complaint, and the only reason I didn’t buy one of these is because it’s printed on Natural, which I just hate myself in. It makes me sad, though, since it’s just another Glennz classic and a truly great design. Hopefully, we’ll see a reprint in a slightly darker color sometime soon. You know… after this one sells out. And people request reprints. And Threadless relents. …sigh.

As if that weren’t enough, my day was made considerably more chipper by the tasty reprint notice on a shirt I’d wanted for some time: Well, This Just Really Sucks. So I bought that, too.

Four Healing Designs: (Or, Three and a Dinosaur)
Florence Nightingale
St. George Vs. The Dragon
Plus
Prehistoric Freak

You may remember these from such earlier designs as…
Well, This Just Really Sucks
Damn Scientists

This is hilarious and was definitely worth my time zooming in on each face. (The “walrus” and the “pervert” cracked me up.)

It could use a little tweaking, especially on a few in the last row, but overall it’s a very creative concept with a fitting style.

I’m not crazy about the brown on blue, but black on sagestone (or even khaki) would work splendidly.

Verdict: 5 (View Submission)

I really like this design. I think the colors could be tweaked just a bit, (perhaps a little darker shade of teal, perhaps not) but overall, I feel it’s a strong concept and something that could easily take a high school chess team by storm.

I think that the resemblence to Glenn Jones’ Legendary Design Failure is its greatest weakness, in that I honestly thought it was a Jones rehash myself. I’m just glad it’s not on banana.

Still, it’s clever, well-executed and drawn well. And perfect for chess nerds.

Verdict: 4 + Would Buy (View Submission)

Devotees will recall that I spent last week at E3, playing many an unreleased console and making many a devotee quite jealous.

Gear Live, the blog/publication I went with has published some of the video we’ve shot (although a lot more is still in the pipeline) and published a really cool booth montage that includes me looking at a “pimped out” car… wearing Threadless. (Shock.)

Take a look here:

E3 Booth Montage

To successfully use humping animals in a design it must be tasteful. (Take Afternoon Delight, for example.) This, however, certainly is not.

I’m also confused as to why the little boy isn’t the one thinking ‘love’. It would have made much more sense for the boy to have the innocent thought bubble instead, with the grown-up trying to explain the birds and the bees.

As it is, I have to agree with one commenter who noted that the guy just looks like a pedophile. In terms of design, this isn’t so bad… it’s just that the subject matter and presentation is far too disgusting for any decent person to ever, ever wear.

Verdict: 0 (View Submission)