I’m in my local pub tonight, eating lemon prawns and rice, writing about shirts. On the walk down, two hot air balloons were just rising up from the local airport into the sunset-dappled clouds, framing Mt Rainier as it rose up into pinkness a hundred miles to the south. It’s beautiful in Seattle this time of year: the highs are usually in the 70s, the lows are in the 50s, and it’s rare to get any substantial rain. Mix that with a friendly Threadless sighting yesterday (Quentin was wearing the odd coulpe’s Satan’s Little Helper, and an interesting set of shirts printed this Monday, and it’s been a good week.

Given the broad range of tastes in the Threadless buying community, and the fact that none of you are probably inclined to buy ten shirts a week, we have to start understanding the week as a “good shirt week” if each of us can find 2-3 shirts amongst the ten they print that appeal to us. Unlike some of the smaller shirt sites (which have to try to appeal to a smaller range of taste in order to develop a loyal clientele and a strong return business), Threadless wants to be broad enough to keep thousands and thousands of very different people buying their shirts. If any of us like all the shirts any given week, that means some other poor soul is loving none of them. Which would suck for them, and for Threadless’s hope for their business that week. So variety is success, and appreciating variety is the challenge. Here’s to it….

threadless selects

graphicairlines are two people from Hong Kong who collaborate on some very interesting art. A simple web search reveals very little about them other than their home page (which I’ve linked). At Threadless, we know them as the creators of Come Back At Night, the excellent Go Fish, God&Dog, Blitz, Volcano, and the recent excellent Illusion of Rabbit Optical. They’ve always had elegance; recently they’ve started developing a weird elegance; and now they’ve used their select opportunity to print the politically and bizarrely elegant Lonely Snowmen. What strikes me most strongly about the design is the way it hovers and flip-flops between the incomprehensible and the obvious: the tension in all its elements is fabulous, mirroring a feeling any of us who see must have when we pay attention to our world. The design has an angry/sad feel: all the creatures stuck in the carnival booths and chimneys of their world; the one dude railing at the moon from boothtop; and then the lovely balance between the cold white guys to the left of the design and the blank slate to the right. The thematic “statement” is in fact an subtle metaphor of us cold folks fitting into the empty carnival of the modern world, set off from the easel on which we might paint our meaning. Drilling into the design, the left-leaning mass of white works perfectly to call attention to the easel. The grey arc of the horizon frames our lives inadequately, but as best as we can hope for. The surreal drawing style accentuates the unreality of the world. The various plains and lines in the drawing keep our eyes moving amongst the various folks: I like the way I discovered the large people first and then noticed all the smaller and even more trapped people later (that also fits the story). And then there are the details: the garden on top of the central droopy guy, the pipes drawing liquid out of the “snowmen”, the closed cabinet, the fissure down by the chimney guy. And then the topper: fuzzy snow ink used to rain coldness down on this cold pointless world. The upshot is that this shirt achieves a psychological depth and a graphic interest that we seldom see at Threadless anymore. I only hope that this is graphicairlines showing rather than telling….

Type Tees

I think I’ve been able to figure out what’s going on in this design. I believe it was originally made from a needlepoint kit. When I do needlepoint at home, I always buy my kits from Ehrman Tapestries. But they don’t seem to have this one in stock, so, I’m not sure where you can get it in the original. Fortunately, Threadless has made a reproduction. Unfortunately, their reproduction seems to have suffered from water and heat in transit: the needlepoint canvas stretched and shrunk horribly. Look at all those gaps in the grid! Thank goodness the craftsperson who did the needlework was able to compensate with extra yarn here and tightness there, so much so that the text ends up looking almost like normal. And if you step back, you’ll see that (by luck) the gaps make a nice kind of plaid pattern that sits softly behind the stitching in the reproduction. If only the slogan made any sense….

from the competition

Mikko Terva is having an interesting introduction to Threadless. His hipsters lounging on the couch got a 1.75; his workman blasting cotton candy into lips got a more dismal 1.19; and then his psychologically substantial My Green Forest was printed. There’s a lesson there for you, Mikko: communicate universally, and the universe will link in. My Green Forest is brilliant. My favorite thing about it is the technical concept: all these varying textures and shapes created with black and white, and then the green blotches lay more or less accurately on top of the drawing. The effect, for me, is of a world richly imagined in its particular textures, broadly filled in in its details, and then imagined by the little dude down there in the right corner (his hair being the same color as the splotches of green in the imagined world is a bit of symbolic genius). All levels of this design offer pleasure: you can enjoy the drawing, especially the way line is used to create texture here and outline there; you can enjoy the lovely sinuous balance of the design along the down-curving line at the base and the up-curving line supported by the big tree; or you can enjoy the simple rich dream being had by the sleeping guy, and whatever projection you place upon it. Lonely Snowmen shows us the cold side of the world; My Green Forest shows us the dream side. If only it wasn’t white….

RawB’s I’d Hit It! is an example of a vague shirt design becoming even vaguer (and less interesting in my humble opinion) during the edit process. When it was originally submitted, the shirt was called “Attention” and had a thought balloon rising up from one of the penguins saying “I’d Hit It”. At the time, I thought that the penguins were imagining eating the nun, which would surely have been to her chagrin if she had known what was going on there in the subtext. This is one of those sad designs where the thought bubble made the story, in my eyes at least: as printed, without the thought bubble, I can’t see this as anything other than Julie Andrews gathering a family of penguins around her and trying to get them to sing ” Edelweiss” at their father’s going-away concert. Despite their naughty other-thoughts. Mary Poppins as a nun never appealed to me, though, and the drawing/layout here is extremely uninteresting. This is not a design that I can see my way into enjoying. You might like it if you went to catholic school and fancied yourself a penguin?

Leroy_Hornblower’s Lonesome George looks for a wife has a lot of nice qualities to it. The drawing is really cool. Look at the way that the background cactus becomes more detailed in the turtle, and then how neither has as much detail as George and his baggage. I like the way the design focuses your attention up to George, and then the way that his obliviousness ironically points your attention back to the details he’s not seeing. It would be beautiful if he was looking for seal rather than a babe (when I look at this without the title, it’s failed seal-hunting that I see). The design is a great positive example of the use of white and black speckles to texture and balance without adding detail to the picture. If you’re the sort who is on a naive hunt (whether or not you know it), you should definitely buy this shirt and wear it proudly. Better, if you have a naive friend who likes green and turtles but doesn’t know they’re on a simple hunt, buy this for them and then giggle when they wear it!

my first reaction to grayehound’s Poetic Irony was grumpiness. I had a hard time seeing the plane of the casket as anything other than a mistake, since it was off from the plane of the ground on which the mourners were standing (seeing it as the tilted surface of the coffin Poe is trying to escape from takes more work than the average viewer will give a shirt). Allusions to subtleties such as the reburial (but without his wife?), and then what the weird mourner has brought since 1949, are beautiful but beyond even the most obsessed lover of this shirt. So, why did I buy it? I like the wonderful metaphor created by the mourners, the gravestone, the line down (we don’t have to get that the frightened dead back then wanted a bell to pull if they were buried needlessly, to understand the fear alluded to by the image, eh?), and the corpse seeking release. And then you see the skull, hidden there on the right! And that causes you to drill into the details, which is when you really see the richness and simplicity in this design. This is another of our shirts printed this week that really plumb the psychological depths: thanks for that, and for the chance to wear this and make people think.

While Ray.’s designs always leave me wishing for more drawing skills, his concepts and design savvy are marvelous, so I’ve always found myself loving each manifestation and wishing for a print. None of his designs could illustrate that tradeoff better than Magical Powers. At the detail level, while Ray. has chosen a subject that forgives his technical weakness, still we could benefit from better-drawn hands and flames here. But then any thought of criticism stops: the arcs of “magical powers” swoop across the shirt in a way that drives the eye constantly back and forth, back and forth: have we seen anything working that way? I’m not sure I remember it. The shirt might work incredibly well with the two hands emitting magical powers to one another (that’s one of Ray.’s secretes: things work well on all scales, in his designs), but then he’s given us this wonderful text-fill to flush out the design in a unique and appealing way. The hands draw your attention, but then the fill catches it, and offers humor at nearly every phrase: Ray.’s notion of superpowers is subtle and mature and engaging. This is a shirt one could wear almost anywhere, if only because it’s depth of wisdom and lack of challenge would smooth over nearly any sane objection. Nice.

cold83’s A Spaceboy Retrospective is a very excellently rendered design. Check out the various uses of line thicknesses. Enjoy the use of detail to establish “weight” in the astronout and “innocense” in the boy. See how color mirrors that effect. My confusion about this design centeres aroudn what it means. The big boots on the boy put off the 14-year-olds amongst us that might identify with the boy directly. The salute puts off those amongst us who don’t want to show (via the worn t-shirt) their younger projected selves saluting some mythic hero. I guess the shirt is aimed at those people old enough to enjoy their younger worship but not old enough to begrudge it? And why would anyone wear such a subtle thing? Woof….

reprints

barrie’s Russel! Hows’ yer Ma!… is one of the designs you look back to if you hate cartoon shirts and want to see how they got a foothold in the Threadless psyche. This puppy is not drawn very interestingly. It’s balanced well: the larger dinosaur leans to the left, in opposition to the smaller talk-balloon that stands up between the dinosaur and the unicorn and provides the punchline. The dialog itself is lower-class American: not southern or hillbilly lowerclass, but rather some twisted well-educated but fallen new england sort of lower class, which accuentiates the humor. I could imagine you liking it or not: it’s such a knife-edge thing. I hope it sells! Because I love other knife-edge possible reprints even more

label’s Time Fades is one of my great favorite designs. So what can I say? Other than….
 

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future.

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution

Feed the babies
Who don’t have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin’ in the street
Oh, oh, there’s a solution

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Fly through the revolution

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future