Or maybe it’s the same one. I saw this over at Hide Your Arms and had a Groundhog Day moment, because I’ve seen it before. Then I read Andy’s blog – I don’t always do the words, you know? He thinks he’s seen it before too.

Weird.

So, while some of the reviewers wanted the blank to be a different colour so that it would really ‘pop’ I’m not totally convinced by that idea: I like the subtle approach of putting line-art on a grey T-shirt and I think it enhances the idea that the picture is like a botanical illustration, which plays up the visual joke of the ‘kiwi’ being kiwi fruit inside.

$20 seems a fair price for a T-shirt that could be worn most places, although some people are carping about that too. I dunno. You can buy a T-shirt for a quid most places, but really, would you want to? What I pay for in a printed T-shirt is the image, which either resonates with me, challenges me, or cheers me up, and getting that from something I can wear seems like a bargain at $20 imo.

Post by Mikey who prefers pineapple to kiwi …

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One of the lovely reprints over at Threadless caught my eye and then my heart. Budi Satria Kwan has an $18 tee that has a triple classic theme:

Classic story – it’s a nursery rhyme, right (not a Meow Meow trip, as Mikey keeps suggesting) but sweetly updated
Classic twist – there’s a ‘fail’ joke in the design which gets funnier the more you look at it
Classic styling – the combination of nursery style imagery, humour and strong colour use gives this teeshirt a bright but surprisingly sophisticated vibe.

Often the Threadless shirts that go reprint have something strong about them that makes them worth the revisit – this is definitely one of those: I missed it first time around but I’m glad to give it my vote on a second run.

Post by Kay who thinks cows are cooler than cats …

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You can visit Threadless every day and look at the new Tees and it gets a bit like clothing porn. Yeah. Yawn, T-shirt. Yawn. ‘nother T-shirt. Drink coffee. Do work. Yawn.

Which isn’t to say they aren’t good tees – quite often they are. But it takes something really outstanding to be stand-out. And this T-shirt by Alvaro Arteaga was enough to stop me yawning.

Born in Spain but living in Chile he’s graphic designer and illustrator and I believe that always shows in clothing work, because while untrained artists can produce great art, what they generally lack is the ability to site that artwork well on a garment. What’s so impressive about this teeshirt is the shadow-work which is utterly three-dimensional, despite the colour range used being very limited, although vivid, which gives an extra feeling of weird to the garment as a whole. It’s more Bosch than Goth, is what I am trying to say, I guess.

Our guy Al wants to move to the States – what’s wrong with the T-shirt world as seen from London England? Mind you, if you were born in Spain and you’re living in Chile you’d be even more than usually stupid to move here, so perhaps I can understand his thinking after all.

This post by Mikey should have been blogged on the worst day of the year, but it was such a baaaad day he didn’t even post …

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Picking good design often involves considering what has stood the test of time, and how it can be given a new twist. Burberry, for example. Okay, I’ve stopped laughing now, but seriously, the way Burberry re-invented its weird sticking-plaster coloured tartan garb is a lesson in how classic design can be brought up to date.

And my pick for today does a similar thing but in a more interesting way. Over on Threadless, Olly has a T-shirt that uses some of the most iconic gaming images of the past twenty-something years and unites them in a T-shirt that uses simple white on black imagery to create a stunning visual effect.

Interestingly, Olly himself is twenty-something years old, which means he’s used elements in this T-shirt that existed before he was born, like the Che Guevara teeshirts worn by kids who don’t know who Che was, what he represented or how unpleasant he was. If you don’t believe me, go read a history book!

Anyway, the point is, reworking this kind of ingrained cultural image can give a really fresh perspective on society – what does it say about us that we have spent the last 20 years finding new things to kill in virtual space? Actually, who cares. What is important is the solid design of this T-shirt which, sociology apart, says interesting things about T-shirt printing and how the simplest, most easily identifiable images, can also be the freshest, when they are treated in a new way.

Post by Mikey who has an itchy trigger finger for Burberry …

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You either love twitter or you hate it. Or maybe, if you’re very old or something, you’ve never heard of it. But assuming you are part of the current century, you tweet.

I tweet. I love to tweet. I am the tweetiest little twitterer you could imagine. And all my friends tweet back. Like a chorus of electronic canaries (Mikey just muttered something about crows, but we’re ignoring him today) we tweet all day long. On the way to work from our mobiles, from netbooks on mass transport, we go and buy lunch and back in the office, we tweet from our PCs about what we’re eating.

Okay, it’s a bit … lightweight. You can’t get heavy in 140 characters. And you mostly end up reading the tweets of people you could have texted anyway, but it’s fun!

So to Threadless. Sometimes I sort of feel we shouldn’t support Threadless – it’s too big and amorphous and not in line with our kick-ass policy of backing the indies. But sometimes Threadless is totally on top of the day – it has T-shirts that some up your day, or your week, or your life in such style that You. Just. Have. To. Buy.

And that’s my pick for today – the Tee of the zeitgeist (see, I know big words, even if I can’t work out how to fit them into a 140 character tweet) is the twitter Tee. And I love it.

Post by Kay who is going to tweet about it … now

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