Congratulations Chris! Your lame attempt at snarkiness managed to impress one bad blogger who regularly makes lame attempts at snarkiness! You’re the man, Chris! Keep up the good work! Maybe someday YOU can be a bad blogger, too! Keep hope alive!

Keep control over your copyrights! They truly are the most valuable thing you can own as a designer, especially if you are creating the artwork for yourself. Make YOU your first priority of business and make sure you’ll have something to “repurpose” down the line. When you give up everything for a quick buck, you are stealing from your own future, and cutting off a very important part of your ability to make your career pay off.

Here’s a simple homework assignment: Go look up how much an average artist/designer would be paid for spot illustrations for apparel/t-shirts in the Graphic Artists Guild handbook. Now, look up what the going rates are for posters. Now imagine every artist getting this information into their hands and realizing that without their slavish work, Threadless is nothing. NOTHING.

Kids, reconsider your decision to hand over all of those very important copyrights to Threadless. These designs could be your livelihood. I’d sooner market my own work and make the money. Just look up what “Glennz” (Glenn Jones) has been doing recently. I’ll give you a clue. He couldn’t make a living on Threadless, so now he’s selling his own line of shirts. Smart man.

Threadless’ contribution amounts to brokering the deal between the artist and Timbuk2 — brokering a BAD deal. They also provide advertising and a built-in market, but the artist whose creativity the market is buying doesn’t profit from that, Threadless and Timbuk2 do. Tom Burns has already asked if he could exclude his designs from being used for paper prints because he could instantly see what a poor deal it would be for him to have Threadless sell prints of his designs, and it won’t be long before other artists see the same writing on the wall.