compete-tee-tion

There's a big sale on at Threadless... at least for half the population. Until October 12th all girls sizes are marked down to just $12.



A Voyage To Lilliput by Patric Schade (.java) is my pick of the week. What I love about the concept is how it combines two iconic elements- the story of Gulliver and Converse shoes. Half familiar and half exploration, it's the kind of design that helps to make even everyday moments seem full of imagination and possibility. The tiny creatures investigating the shoe are a lot of fun, all interacting with the shoe and each other in ways that are fun to discover.



The Sound of Colour! by The Boy Fitz Hammond is a shirt about CMYK and RGB, showing the pronunciations of those letters in the color they indicate. This kind of design in-jokey shirt is always popular with the Threadless crowd, and it's a good-looking tee. What harms the concept is that the style is a bit too reminiscent of Teetonic's excellent 16 Colours So What, which I regard as having a similar style but a lot more thought behind it.

Modern Kangaroos by Brock Davis (Laser Bread) combines a detailed illustration with informational elements to depict animals in a more contemporary context. It's a slick parody of the kind of largely useless (but enticing) convenience that modern products are packed with. A kangaroo doesn't need a cup holder or a pen loop, and really neither do you. While I like the design, I don't feel it's a great fit for the medium- the small type and odd illustration shape are directly at odds with what t-shirts do best, in my opinion.



Swamp Party by Horsebites (Richard Minino) is this week's Select. The title is really the only thing indicating a solid concept, as the style of the shirt is distinctly in the pile-of-awesome-things tradition. That's not meant as a burn, just an explanation that what makes this tee worthwhile is almost solely visual. The zombie hands, turtle, and shades-wearing wild cat don't necessarily make sense as a group. But the way they're drawn makes them a united piece- each zombie hand seems to pair off with an animal, with angling that relates to the creature's mouth. The design is further pulled together by rough, claw-like stripes in the back and some fluttering feathers out front- all indicators that some kind of danger or badassery has either just occurred or is impending. Good stuff, and a great departure from typical Threadless style.



Family by Ryan Lin (Kojima) shows a constellation as a collection of cartooned stars held together with string. It's not a bad shirt by any means- the drawing is well-done and the concept is amusing. The problem I have is that it doesn't grab me at all. The characters don't have enough personality to get my imagination racing, and they're so small that this would appear to be a typical constellation shirt except for people who got very close and really examined it. My gut feeling is that it might have been a stronger piece if there was more of a connection between what the stars are doing and what constellation is represented. As is, finding the star characters is fun, but not really memorable.

217 Finicky Fish by Elise Stella (Starrfold) makes nice use of the space on the shirt. It pretty much perfectly captures the reason I can't go fishing- my unshakable belief that the lake is chock full of fish, they just (for whatever reason) sense that my fishing line will mean their demise and they stay away. The style is spare, but still nicely varied- the fish don't feel like an exercise in copying and pasting. My only quibble is with the shape of the school of fish. It feels very rectangular, and I think something a bit more organic on the outside edges (tapering inward as it descends the shirt) would have made for a more attractive shirt composition.

Threadless prints new shirts every week, chosen from the designs submitted by and voted on by site members. Winners get $2000 cash and $500 in Threadless credit, with the possibility to earn more through Bestee awards, poster prints, and reprints.

Labels: sale, threadless