[Steve] With all the whinging about the good old days and how the shirts today aren't nearly as good as they used to be, I thought it might be fun to launch a series of reviews of Threadless Designs Past. Since it's impossible for us to enter into the spirit of those early days when print runs were 75 and in jokes were rampant, I thought it would be fun to find someone with a completely different aesthetic than mine to play with me here. Just so we have a couple of bases covered. It'd be fun if some of you who were here from the get-go would chime in with memories about the circumstances surrounding the prints. We approach them as modern-day Threadless customers interested in considering the older designs from our current aesthetic point of view. A foolish task, perhaps; but we're just the fools to do it.

[Bananaphone] Yes when Steve was looking for fools for this job, how could he go past everyone's favorite/least favorite (select one) bananaphone? And after I gave the prospect a long hard think over the course of two minutes, I decided to accept. I'll say it has something to do with thinking about the children. As for what we are doing, well we are going to go through as many of the tshirts threadless has printed, from back in the old days to the present, and write about them. It's all very simple really and your grandmother would be proud (and wearing hitchcock).

Prate" [Retired]

[Steve] It's kind of cool that the first shirt in the Threadless print list was made by Jemma Hostetler (nee Gura). Check out her marketing/personal web site and her design web site. She's brilliant. The shirt itself looks to have been created as a hip logo shirt for her design web site. It's got a bit of dynamic interest in the asymmetry between the down-flowing PRATE's that stretch across the upper two-thirds of the shirt and the upwards flowing art-like words there at the bottom. It's in scarlet and grey, always an excellent color choice. Hard to judge against the shirts we get today: marketing....

[Bananaphone] This tshirt basically looks to me like Jemma Gura playing with her designing names identity on the front of a tee. Nothing too amazing but I am sure over time the significance that may have once been tied to this tshirt and it's design is long gone. Is this a person so confident in their own design identity that they are willing to play with it in a way that barely relates to the other instances, or is she unsure of her identity and thus she has created a multitude of them under the one name? That is the brander in me talking.

This design also shows some of the standard trendy graphic treatments of the time, for example the random cross backgrounds. This has slowly fallen out of favor over time in favor of speechbubbles with an X in them (how very creative and usually thoughtless).

Evil Mother Fucking Web Design [Retired]

[Steve] This shirt is credited to Livenootrac; the link points to the myspace page of a guy named Lionfood, who is hungry like a wolf and plays you Blinded by the Light when you visit (Manfred Mann's version, not the original Springsteen). This is a logo shirt for what today appears to be the antithesis of evil muther fucking web design; somebody somewhere lost control of a domain name, I presume. Ignoring the ugly text, the design itself is beautiful: a stylized devil running stage right at high speed, shooting a spell off in front of him. The play bewteen the blue body, the white outline, and the negative spaces created by the two colors is really remarkable: lots of dynamic energy that further enlivens the figure. Could we pay Lionfood again, lose the text, and have this reprinted on black as an unmistakably different design? Wow!

[Bananaphone] This design is actually printed quite nicely on the tee (nice and big) and the graphic itself was pretty good for the time, especially for a 2 colour job. White lines are used to decent effect to fill in extra detail in areas that are filled by the tee colour.

That said the message of the tee, while it may hit a specific audience, just comes across as lazy and juvenile, and not in a guilty chuckle kind of way. It screams 16 year old webdesigner that talks smack on the internet, which is all well and good if that's what you want to be screaming. How exactly does one do evil mutha fucking web design anyway, popup ads?

Dead Sexy Designer [Retired]

[Steve] I have no idea who Scott McCready is. The dead link on the product page doesn't help, and the way he shares a name with an american football player makes search problematic. The boy-name against the obviously hot girl-illustration leads to a lot of possibilities: is that a guy with long red hair, man-boobs, and an innie? or is there some gender-bending going on here? or is it an in-joke lost to the past? This is the first print in the "illustration" category that some people on the blogs love to rail at these days. As the shirt is not all that interesting a design, you have to be able to get inside the jokes and meanings you find in it in order to appreciate and want to wear it. Just think: here's the mother of all food with faces designs, holding her tits high and boastful, wanting you to want her! If only it said "software architect" instead of "designer", I'd be there.... Though after reading Matt's comments below, I worry that exposing the youth of today to this kind of stimulation might be more than a bit risky.

[Bananaphone] I quite like this tshirt in that it is about time the transvestites with oddly shaped hands design community were given awareness. Every day thousands of these poorly blessed transvestites struggle to do things that we take for granted, such as opening jars and shaking the hands of corporate associates without terrifying them. That is to say, it's not that good, but I guess you could have told me that, and then you could have started your own series of articles reviewing all the old tshirts, and written something similar.

The hands do give off the illusion of holding breasts though, really if you look at the design technically they don't necessarily need to be holding anything, as nothing is particularly defined, but the thumbs however witchly they are do lead into the armpit area defining the top.And as disturbing as it is to write about, the design is fairly well balanced in that the head and lower body counterbalance the curve and arms in the middle of the design.

I am not sure what part of the title is more debatable, designer, or dead sexy? Though this could be a parody of what dead sexy is, kind of like if I submitted a design with roadkill in it, with "dead sexy" written underneath. But I am not sure even that amount of thought had been invested, and with that...

I am going to stop writing about this one now because I feel rather dirty and disturbed and not in a good way.

Pixel_Banjomonstar [Retired]

[Steve] Moltar was one of the vilest of Space Ghost's enemies. Once captured, he hosted a cartoon series for a little while, and then he helped Space Ghost as producer on his talk show. He didn't put much real care into his production duties, and he doesn't appear to have taken his shot at a Threadless Special very seriously either. I think what Moltar's done is give us a portrait of Space Ghost: do you see the hood and mask there? The choice of color is kind of lame (grey on black). The line work is rather thick. He hasn't achieved much depth of characterization at all. Overall, this is not a very good design: you have to really love minimalist illustration to be into it. Frankly, I think Moltar did this with MS Paint. You know how that can be.

[Bananaphone] Imagine if this got printed today? And people keep screaming out for threadless to go back to its roots! Either way whilst this design is simple and totally uninspiring, it probably wouldn't be that bad a tee if a colour combination that is less stark was used. If the 2 colours were closer and more vibrant rather than black and gray then it wouldn't be too bad, kind of light nifkin's white on light blue which is one of the reasons it looks far better.

Destroy Nifkin

[Steve] Your nifkin is that flat place between your wee-wee (whatever shape it is) and your anus. Nifkin also became a nickname for Michael Raichelson, a very talented designer from Annapolis, Maryland in the USA. The fact that Michael followed up Moltar's MsPaint shirt with another one using the same unsophisticated graphic design tool teaches us one of several things: he might be doing a Moltar homage here, or we might be seeing evidence of some oldskool aesthetic thing we're no longer privy to, or it might be that they the designers couldn't afford good software back in the day. On Michael's web site, we learn that this went through three print runs of 75 shirts each. As it combines a really slick and simple design with a whole diffuse slew of nifkin jokes and an appealingly printabile look, it makes a very intriguing reprint possibility. Imagine the dissonance you'd create by wearing this the day after you wore your favorite GlennZ. Very interesting.

[Bananaphone] Potentially the best thing about the tshirt is it's open ended message. Destroy Nifkin before it's too late, too late for what? Who the hell is Nifkin? Well Nifkin was the cobber who designed this for threadless, but whether he was named after something else - or the name just came to him, is something else.

One theory is that nifkin is an old gaming villian. Another, the reason why I shouldn't do any research when it comes to these writeups, is that the nifkin is the area between the back of a mans genitals and his crapper. Yes, these are classy writeups ladies and gentlemen.

So I guess the last question remains, is Nifkin talking about himself on this tshirt as a designer, or is this a tribute to what he named his username after? Probably the later, but I suggest you come up with some completely different theories if you have this tshirt and a few beers.

As far as the design goes, it is pixel perfection. Very simple, nicely laid out and proportioned, and has a nice clear message. The one colour print works well in white over the light blue, presenting a light and crisp colour option that Banjomonstar could have used. Threadless's first decent tshirt as far as I am concerned and one I wouldn't mind picking up in a 10 dollar sale but probably wouldn't go the full 15 - 17 for.

Neonmedia 1 [Retired]

[Steve] Eric Kelly's link on the product pages sends you through a cheesy set of pop up windows provided by the Tokelau web authorities to a site that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Like Scott McCready, he shares a name with a famous American Football player, which makes searching for him difficult. The design is made from two very roughly reduced photographs laid over top of one another, one of a gas mask, the other of a bunny rabbit. The rough style makes immediate identification of the subjects difficult, which provides some nice interest to the design as ones eye tries to make sense of what it's seeing in a variety of ways. I liked it better before I sorted it out: it seemed like a post-apocalyptic jackaphant, or a creature extruding sausages from a device jammed into its bovine mouth. Amusing.

[Bananaphone] This appears to be a grungey looking bunny with a gas mask on, that has a tube attachment and is missing an ear. This tshirt probably would have benefited from being printed on a darker tee with dark ink so that the messy look had something to sink into rather than looking stark and unattractive.

Assembler.org [Retired]

[Steve] Vitaflo seems like he's Brent Gustafson of Minneapolis, MN. Vitaflo's design is a relatively non-descript logo shirt for a very cool set of web sites that you approach via their front door but only really appreciate when you step inside. There's a lot to figure out on that site; once you start poking around, you also find vitaflo.com. That home page is blank, but as you start fussing with the URLs and find vitaflo.com/v8 and vitaflo.com/v7, the game comes clear. These folks set up web playrooms. It's an interesting idea to wear around a relatively boring shirt that points people towards this sort of graphical/intellectual playground. Cool!

[Bananaphone] Assembler.org strikes me as being a kind of "programmer pride" tshirt for nerdy people that tell you that everything other than linux is the devil. Whilst they may be right about that, that doesn't mean that what they do is art, or even art for boring people. However it is a decent enough basic promotional tshirt and the first 4 colour threadless tee from what I can see.

Ctrl+Z

[Steve] I couldn't learn much about Ben, poking around the web, other than the fact that his name here is linked to the MisterBuster web site. MisterBuster is an interactive band that you might want to check out. Ben's Ctrl+Z is a bit more mundane, as it's the earliest Threadless design that sees regular reprinting. It shares its rough Photoshop technique with Neonmedia 1: I think it's a slightly less interesting design on account of being less ambiguous and visually rich, though the way the black car is "drawn" is quite cool. I attribute the popularity of Ctrl+Z to the non-design appeal of the idea of having an "Undo" key in daily life. I'm glad my life didn't have that feature (I have never been wise enough so that I would have used it appropriately), but that's no criticism of the shirt: I get the appeal.

[Bananaphone] A threadless classic and understandably so. It combines something we can all understand, the frustration of computing, with an image that satisfied associated anger and frustration. The image itself is well designed, and whilst it may not be to the illustration standard of someone like glennz, it does capture all the action perfectly. This imagery works well with the understated Ctrl Z text which helps balance out the gray area on the opposite side of the composition.

This is one of those perfect tees for proud programmers and keyboard slammers because it doesn't say too much, and it doesn't say too little. Making it very different from my tshirt reviews.

Red - 365?

[Steve] Luca's link on the product page points us off to a skull we can use to send them email. Luca's Red - 365? makes a good test case for the literalness of a particular t-shirt viewer. Lots of people seem to want to take this design apart and figure out how it can be arranged into a 3, a 6, and a 5 (it's a puzzle: you have to stand on your head and rotate one of the lines to find the 5). It seems to me that the question mark in the title asks us why the heck we care. Maybe it doesn't matter what can be made of this design so much as just how it looks. It looks slick. I love the simple lines making up the spare, partly-formed 3, the calm way the design seems happy to be simple. There's a little bit less going on here than in Destroy Nifkin, which appeals to me: since I'm not in the marketing department, I can hope for a reprint here with no regrets.

[Bananaphone] This tshirt is a no brainer. It doesn't try to do much, it doesn't try to say much, but it's success is that it's a simple but hot looking design on red. The colour combination is perfect and the lines are nice and crisp. Most of the design elements are located on the left hand side of the design, however the 365 text balances this by providing weight through isolation and meaning.

Neonmedia 2

[Steve] Eric Kelly appears to have been the first artist at Threadless to achieve two prints. The financial windfall this sent his way is (no doubt) the reason he's been able to afford such a fancy web site. Eric's Neonmedia 2 is a paste-up popular with Swiss citizens and fans of Alfred Hitchcock. The digital image on the product page looks incredibly muddy to me, on account of the rough Photoshop technique and the low contrast between the background red and the maroon of the coat and blindfold. But the main product photo and some of the gallery photos makes it look like the white was reprinted in beige and the maroon was reprinted in a deep red-brown, which improves the shirt immensely in my eyes. I wonder if some of these designs would be more reprintable if they were fussed with like that?

[Bananaphone] So Hitchcock has a great "fan tee" of sorts. Why can't more bands sell more stuff like this? It has a solid stencil feel about it and the creme white ink seeps through to the middle of the designs as part of the cross, which provides a nice highlight and balance to some of the design elements. My only complaint is that the bottom of hitchcock, which stops in an abrupt line, could have been a little bit less uniform and straight. This does not take too much away from the design though. The cross itself is very harsh and straight, the rest of what it was contrasting with - hitchcock, is quite curved and stencil like, and this combination of elements works really well in this instance.