In honor of tomorrow’s Space Shuttle launch, we present at least one space-based design for your approval: Dripping, by filak, whom we’ve reviewed two other times.
I wanted to like this design more, but a few problems stood out. One very obvious issue is that it’s simply not at all to scale. Uranus and Neptune dwarf Earth, and it stands as a glaring flaw for anyone even remotely aware of astronomy.

Also, I’m not sure how I feel about the spatters. I think there was a lot of potential to use the disconnected paint spatters as representations of the planet’s moons, but instead, they’re relatively random.

Earth shouldn’t have “home” under it, because it detracts from the concept, and lastly, as one commenter on the sub page pointed out, at a distance, it might easily be mistaken for bird crap on your shirt. Which isn’t terribly pleasant.

Still, I like the feel and the general overall idea. I really did want this to be a five, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Verdict: 3 (View Submission)

This is a pretty rad Threadless Loves Threadless design. After all, it’s not every day that you see someone sporting a microwave as a weapon.

All three color schemes work splendidly, but the khaki and sagestone versions definitely have a more ‘radioactive’ feel to them than does the royal blue.

It’s whimsy, detailed, original, and just plain fun. It also prompted one commenter to leave a valuable bit of advice:

mr28 on Jun 30 ‘06

Lol, remember do not put your cat in the microwave

Verdict: 4 (View Submission)

Submit Yours | Competition Details | Current Submissions

I guess I missed the Threadless outage, since the site seems to be running smoothly at the moment.

I don’t have anything spectacular to bring to your attention, however, as this design is so-so in my opinion. I certainly appreciate the message (Tobacco does kill, so quit now kids while you still have your larynx) but there’s nothing about it that really impresses me.

Simplicity works great for many designs, but in this case it just feels too flat and basic. As far as word bubble usage goes, I think the design would work with or without. There’s always discussion in the comments when bubbles and text are present but I believe it’s an arbitrary matter… either you like them or you don’t.

Verdict: 3 (View Submission)

It’s true that occasionally, from time to time, the Threadless server farm finds itself swamped, buckling under the pressure of ten thousand bloggers, clicking F5 as quick as possible to see what new replies their witty blog posts have garnered. When this happens, the site goes down, and our images don’t show up, because they’re generated from the Threadless servers, to provide live stats.

In reality, I’m guessing it’s a DNS issue, or perhaps a load-balancing problem… It looks like the machines themselves are up, but that there’s some routing issues going on at their ISP. Which is, you know, what they pay them for.

Anyway, as much as I’d love to be reviewing a shirt sub for you (mmm… …sub) this very instant, I thought I’d at least explain away the broken images all over our otherwise pretty page.

This has got to be the first submission I’ve ever scored which has actually played music at me. (And no, I’m not kidding, view the design and hear for yourself.)

The actual illustration is pretty sweet, both in idea and execution. “The early bird gets the worm” is a tired phrase, but this image takes that concept in a fresh new direction. I love the fact that both the bird and the worm are in business attire, they’ve obviously moved up in the corporate world since the original term was coined.

I’m just wondering how much of my vote is being swayed by that catchy tune. It’s so pleasantly addictive… perhaps it’s hiding some sort of subliminal message compelling me to vote five. (Or, more likely, I’m just easily impressed.)

Verdict: 5 (View Submission)

With the advent of Type Tees and the merging of the OMG Clothing concept into the Threadless mainstream, there’s really no point bothering with posts like these. LCD font. Single color. Thanks, but no thanks. Maybe if it had a parenthetical (Read Upside Down) or some such beneath it… But as is… this is just a slogan.

View Submission (Verdict: 0)

Not entirely (or at all) dislike Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you can win your own prize (but tragically, no free trip to Chi-town) by finding the magical Golden Tag inside your next Threadless shirt purchase! Preying on the obvious truth that people will buy shirts they’d otherwise spit on, just for a chance at seeing its sirenesque sparkle, there is one tag printed for each size of a design. If you find yours, you’re to take a picture of yourself with it, basking in its glow, for a nice, free shirt. This brings the odds of you winning to about 1 in 1,200 or 1 in 2,000 depending on the print yield for a design.

It also gives me an idea for a secondary prize, if you send us the picture first. I’m not sure what the prize is, yet, but send it to goldentag [ at ] lovesthreadless [ dot ] com. First one in will get something tasty, and probably worth more than a shirt. Who knows.

See what’s available in your size, and start shopping…

Well I’ve finally got round to reviewing my first submission for lovesthreadless, so I thought I’d start with something I like, which is actually quite a rarity.

Monday saw the release of 150 new submissions into the running. After sifting through mounds and mounds of, in my opinion, utter crap (namely, chum chum, Hello world and Communicyclist, which, to my despair came up in sequence), I finally came across spires’ wonderfully eerie Solumn Watching.

Looking like a cross between a futuristic stonehenge and a backdrop from Henson’s masterpiece A Nightmare Before Christmas, I think this is my favourite sub of this week’s batch. My only criticism here, is with the planetary object in the background. It just seems far too clean for my liking, and thus receives only 4 of my precious points. Mix it up a bit, roughen it, distress it or even add some other intergalatic objects. Just do something that will make it look less perfeck and it has the potential to get the old 5 anna dollar sign.

Dave.

We’re fresh out of the gate this week with Threadless Select offering Psychadelic Creatures. At $25, it’s not exactly for me, but, um, at least there’s plenty available…

Next up is the very urban-post-modernite Decay by Eli Horn. A dying fish intertwined with a dying bouquet of flowers. It’s poetic, beautiful in its own way.

Not So Treacherous Waters is sparse, clever and one of the Blik contest winners. Good times.

Oh My Virgin Eye, by Rachel Gottesman, is a cute squid, flashed by a fair-haired maden. And quite a shocked squid, at that.

Next up is the clever, but erstwhile-overlooked-by-me 1984 Gran Hermano vs. El Liberal, all full of moxy and kitsch, and printed on shiny, bright-blue foil.

Meanwhile, HI, by Ray Fenwick managed to dodge a 1.76 score and get printed—quite possibly the lowest scored, printed shirt we’ve seen in a long time, and quite an accomplishment, considering there’s the new scoring cut-off that removes your submission from the running if it doesn’t fare well with the first few hundred voters. I think that while it may serve its purpose as a bit of a creative inside joke-esque print at Threadless, (or maybe someone at SkinnyCorp lost a bet…) I think it’s a bit of a disservice to some of the absolutely amazing designs not yet granted the privilege of the light of day, simply because. C’est la vie, but still. What do you think?
Last up in the regular batch of Threadless goodness is the awesome Sasquatch Redux Peach Out. It’s doesn’t bear description, so just go check it out and buy it.

We’ll round up with the full list, including the Type Tees design and the two fresh Reprints, ripe for coupon code Stay Classy:

The News:
Psychadelic Creatures (Threadless Select)
Decay
Not So Treacherous Waters
Oh My Virgin Eye
Sasquatch Redux Peach Out
1984 Gran Hermano vs. El Liberal

The Texts:
Purple is the new blue and red (Duh.)

The Olds:
Ask Me How I Became A Pirate
You Sank My Battleship

And if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been in a major Sufjan Stevens kick lately. He’s amazing. Enough said.
(Yes, the “now listening” line up above is what I’m actually listening to. Or what I was last listening to, as the case may be.)

I hereby declare this design to be completely friggin’ awesome. I didn’t think it was that great at first glance, but at second glance it intrigued me. At third glance (okay, let’s face it…if you get to three, it no longer qualifies as a “glance,”) I was in love.

It’s a guy, sitting on the back of a dragon, whom he is luring forward with a pineapple on a string. It’s perfect. What other food (barring virgin princesses) could possibly lure a dragon forward? It’s friendly, it’s playful. It’s fantastic. It’s modern! It’s got a pineapple on a string!

I love it on banana, and I love it on gold. The other colors are kind of blah, but those two blow me away.

Look at the dragon–he is so happy!

Hey there! I’m Verdana from over at Ye Olde T-shirte Shoppe, and I was recently “discovered” and bullied into posting over here at LT. =]

I’m a pretty cheerful girl, and I will probably only be posting about things I like. I’d feel silly announcing verdicts at the end of each post, but if the lack of conformity bugs people, someone else can go back and tag my posts as $5’s.

I love stickers and free stuff, my favorite color is orange, my favorite animal is the capybara, and I like wearing novelty socks. …I think that about covers everything important.

I apologize for the delay, but the girl came back just for the weekend from her training, and then there was a baseball game. And drunken Catch Phrase. And meetings and work, and, you get the idea. Suffice to say, here are the two runners up: (OMG two?!? Yes, third place gets a $5.50 GC. Courtesy of Bree.
julia!’s entry takes second place, while tracerbullet brings home third place and a pat on the back for an awesome user name that oh-so-subtley pays humble reverence to Calvin & Hobbes.

Julia’s name will be in lights, or rather in our links, for the next five or so posts, AND in tomorrow’s new shirts batch.

Tracer will get his gift certificate (which is good for… um… most of shipping, I suppose. It’s sort of like a glorified coupon, really.) when I next chat with Bree.

Thanks again to everyone for rocking the contest. Look for the next one, coming up very soon. It’ll likely be a scavenger hunt or some such, so subscribe and stay tuned.

Buy shirts! or Buy shirts!

I won’t lie, this design seriously creeps me out. Yet the craftsmanship and detail are amazing.

Oddly enough, it’s the freakish nature of the illustration that makes it so irresistibly alluring.

Further description can’t do this eerily original image justice, so view for yourself to form your own opinions.

Verdict: 4 (View Submission)

Submit Yours | Competition Details | Current Submissions

This is an interesting design (sans the grammar error).

The white on green imbues a refreshing minty feeling… and since ‘fresh ideas’ are what the shirt is all about, I think it accomplishes its goal.

The dotted lines are an interesting effect, which I like, but it’s difficult to recognize the items on the counter and the word bubble gets somewhat lost from a distance. Perhaps varying with line widths would help certain areas stand out better.

There’s room for improvement so my score remains conservative, but it definitely has potential. Everybody loves shampoo (except for those nasty people who seldom wash their hair, but let’s not get into that) and Threadless could really use some more green shirts.

Verdict: 3 (View Submission)

The battle was waged for an entire week, and still no one was able to guess all 10 designs. (Good. It’s about time we present a difficult contest.

Sasha nailed it, matching 8 correct designs. (And the only one to do so, thus no tie-breaker was necessary for first place.) She goes home with a $50 gift certificate Threadless.

Second prize, and the rights to awesome Loves Threadless STP linkage (which, we openly admit, might be worth absolutely nothing in the end) will be determined tomorrow, when I’m not about to fall asleep. I’ll be picking from a pool of, well, four folks who got seven right. We’ll be excluding staffell from the pickings, since the prize makes no sense for him. I’ll either do this randomly, or I’ll do something zany like send a “whomever replies to this email the fastest” message. Who knows?

I know you’re all wildly curious about the official list, so here you have it:

The Communist Party
Flowers in the Attic
Cookie Loves Milk
Pillow Fight
Pandamonium
Damn Scientists
Who I Am
MP(3)
Miss Scarlet in the Hall with a Revolver
She Doesnt Even Realize

One tasty morsel Jacob mentioned was that the results tend to skew towards shirts high in demand for girls. Less girly prints = higher reprint requests on shirts that girls desire. Oh, and one enterprising individual had managed 1,600 reprint requests. Or, put another way, 1,094 completely pointless reprint requests. Que locos.

Runners up posted later today. Or something. And to those of you who didn’t win, don’t worry. We have a few $25 GCs waiting in the wings.
Congratulations, Sasha!