When I visit the Threadless blog site these days, I’m constantly struck by the amount of negative energy on display. I have to imagine that everyone on the site likes some of the shirts and dislikes others. It may just be me, but people seem much more inclined to communicate their dislike than their like.

Once it starts, it’s a cyclone. Folks who like playful-cutsy shirts love to rail away at the selects and their artisticly-oriented designs. People quite interested in design as design love to rant at the “cutsy illustrations” on the site. People who get lower scores than they think they deserve misinterpret the votes as an aethetic judgment, forgetting that the voting is nothing more than a popularity contest. People who want to get printed diss threadless’s judgment rather than pay attention to what they’re looking for and try to design something that fits the vibe. And on and on and on…

I’m left wondering where the fun is in all that, for everybody.

threadless selects

UPSO is the public name of Dustin Hostetler. He’s a graphic artist, a curator, and a publisher who takes his phone calls in the northwestern part of Ohio. He has one previous print at threadless, the epynominous Upso. As an aside, I wonder why some of these great old shirts aren’t being brought out of retirement and reprinted alongside these guys’ newer select shirts? They could be modified in some way that guarded the collectability of the original. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to buy both of these at once? But I digress. UPSO’s select shirt is Prepare For Fight, a sequel to UPSO. That’s a very interesting idea.

Things have happened to Upso since last we saw him on a shirt. He’s grown in a jaw, for one: perhaps he now feels like he can form a message to us, whereas before he only communicated diffuse love. He’s developed his third eye, his ajna chakra, which signifies enlightenment or clairvoyance. In addition to his powers as a seer, this third eye also seems to have brought him into contact with the powers of the eye of heaven, the generative masculine pillar, the bolts of the thunderbird. And his hands, previously opened in an almost childlike peekaboo love-greeting, are now pulled back into gestures that partial conceal and partly focus all this energy. Clearly Upso has been through some growth since last he designed for us.

Even if you’re not impressed by the psychological significance of the symbols here, it seems to me that Prepare For Fight wins just as a design. The muted color scheme is quite unique and attractive. The kind of mummy-technique used to fade the hands off into the background is arresting. I particularly like the dynamic inbalance created by the two hands at the different levels. Factoring in the cool new print process (which seems like it’ll make a particularly nice-wearing shirt over time) and the “regular” price of $15, and it seems like this is as buyable a select as we’ve seen.

from the competition

I’m surely showing my age, here, but Fen’s Funkalicious reminds me of nothing so much as a twenty-first century Truckin’ guy, cruising down the planet, listening to some tunes, lost in some world of its own. I think you’d buy it if you appreciated the multiple layers of reference (hippy, boom box, spaceman) enough to get past the lack of any really deeply interesting design work. Which should be easy. Personally, I think the drawing style suits the shirt perfectly: the simple linework and lack of unnecessary detail, the “tracks” fading behind the astronut, and then the ludicrous mind-screw of the boom box playing the the vacumn. At least passersby wouldn’t be bothered by other folks’ music, huh? But I could really see this on some modern-day jam band poster, or maybe marking the brand of some sort of illegal substance or the other. Quite cool.

I’m not a great fan of the placement of Alezunde’s Water Tower, and I worry a bit about the lack of contrast in the blue/black palette used here (especially when compared to the browns that were featured in the submission), but I really love the moody layers of meaning and the drawing style of this shirt, and I’m delighted to see it printed. My favorite bits about the drawing here are all the strange little details scattered through the design; they do the same great job of creating a feeling of antiquity and use that the dirt on the spaceships did in Star Wars. The proportions of the arm, the child, and the water tower work really well to create a feeling of a decayed but still useful past looming over the people (children relative to the giants of industry in the past) who live in the land today. The repurposing of this derelict robot as a water tower (was it always a water carrier?) enhances the feeling of this still more. I really love shirts that come across this way: they look good as kind of an abstract design, and then they create an interesting mood in anyone who cares to focus on the shirt’s details. Very nice.

reprints

I really liked arzie13′s 99 Luftballons when it was printed. While my selfish self longs for occasional reprints of less popular and older shirts, this design is great, and its a welcome reprint. If you were to wear this shirt around the places I’ve worn it, you’d get two sorts of reactions. First, people kind of like the way the ballons kind of meld into a single abstract up-flowing thing when you’re far away and then resolve into ballons when you’re up close: the contrast between the red and blue on the shirt, the relative density of balloons, and the wispy balloon tails all feed into the effect. Second, people (at least the people I work with) have what I took to be a horrible tendency to see these as bloody sperms. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a bloody sperm, but if there were, I sure wouldn’t talk about it before lunch. But we wear shirts to please others, right? This shirt offers lots of pleasures.

I find jbyron’s Flowers in the Attic reprehensible, so it’s hard for me to talk about it fairly. If you’re the sort of person who can see past the horror of suicide and find pleasure of any sort in an analogy between butterflies and the brain matter and blood erupting from a skull destroyed by a powerful pistol shot, you probably don’t care much about what I have to say about the shirt. And if you’re not that sort of person, you’d probably prefer to not read about it at all. So I’ll please everyone by saying nothing.

Ben’s Ctrl Z is, so far as I can tell, the oldest threadless shirt that sees regular reprinting. I can’t see any of the rest of them working as reprints (except maybe for Neonmedia 1), and they’re all retired anyway, so if you want old skool threadless, it doesn’t get any older than this. I think there’s two appeals here. First is the fantasy of the life replay, which we all have to have had at one point in life. Second is the design technique typical of the time: people seem to like it, even though if the idea came through today I think it’d need to sport smooth vectorization and fancy colors to achieve much appeal. But it’s a good reprint, worth picking up for either of these reasons.