Coty Gonzales brought up a really interesting debate in a very thorough blog post he made recently about a book cover design competition Guy Kawasaki is putting on. The basic premise of the post focuses on highlighting the grey area between what is and is not spec work in the design world, specifically as it relates to Threadless.

Before I move on, let me clear some things up and make sure everyone is up to speed. Threadless does not design their own shirts. They use a crowdsourcing model where thousands of designers create t-shirt artwork and then submit it to the Threadless site. Visitors to the site (which include other designers AND regular schmucks like me) then vote which designs get printed.

One more thing to clear up; lets go over what spec work is. Here’s how it’s defined by no-spec.com, an issue-position website that seems to be the most thorough resource for anti-spec designers out there.

What is ‘working on speculation?’ By Elisabetta Bruno of ThinkCreation

What is “spec?”

“Spec” has become the short form for any work done on a speculative basis. In other words, any requested work for which a fair and reasonable fee has not been agreed upon, preferably in writing.

What’s so wrong with that?

In a nutshell, spec requires the designer to invest time and resources with no guarantee of payment.

So as I understand it, spec work occurs anytime a client requires the designer to essentially deliver a final or near-final version of the work in question so that the client can see the work before committing to pay for it. The designer is speculating, or betting, that the client will accept the work, and it understood on both sides that the client may walk.

So here’s the big question:

Is Threadless Spec Work?

Of course it is. An artist can’t get their t-shirt printed by submitting a proposal, a paragraph on what their shirt would look like….they have to actually do the work, and they have to do it first with no guarantee of payment.

• Just to get consideration for acceptance of a design, the designer has to perform the exact same work that would have to be performed had they been guaranteed a print and paid up front.
   
• There is no guarantee of payment or acceptance of the design. Having performed the work to design the tee doesn’t assure any level of compensation or printing for the shirt. Some intangibles like name and style recognition within the group of people that voted to print a losing design could be present. This isn’t available in situations where designs are all submitted directly to a client for internal review, but is something publicly visible crowdsourcing models like Threadless can offer.
   
• If the client chooses not to accept a specific piece of artwork, the designer is still out the time and effort it took to create that artwork. By creating and submitting artwork to Threadless, the designer is essentially betting, speculating, that the design will be printed.
   

Designers, as far as I can tell, seem to hate spec work. I don’t blame them. What if after a day of work at my day job, my employer says “Look, it was pretty cool the way you completed XYZ, but we’re going to go with the way Dave did it, so that’s for your time, but we’re not paying you.” Hell, I would be livid, so I can see how a designer doesn’t want to do spec work generally.

So as far as I can see, Threadless is definitely spec work. The difference, is that it’s spec work worth doing, and it’s spec work that designers are glad to do.

There’s a HUGE difference between designing a tee for Threadless and designing a logo or website or whatever for some brand. When you design a logo, there’s really nothing else you can use that for. You can’t go offer that to someone else or anything.

When you design a t-shirt, if it doesn’t get printed at Threadless, you’re NOT out all the time it took you to design it because you can take that shirt somewhere else. You can hold onto it in your “completed” folder and wait for the right time to sell it yourself. You can take the artwork off the t-shirt medium and instead offer it on your website as an art print. You still own it, you can still USE it.

Let’s use another analogy here. You tell me and 2 other people that if we bake you a cake, you’ll check it out and might buy it. I bake you a chocolate cake, someone else bakes you a carrot cake, and the third person goes with vanilla. You take a look at all 3 and decide the carrot cake looks delicious, so you pay the guy that made you the carrot cake.

What about me? What about captain vanilla? Are we out a couple hours of time and effort? Definitely not, because we can still enjoy the fruits of our labor. I can take my chocolate cake next door and offer it to your neighbor, who might pay me for it. I could give it away, donate it to a charity bake sale or I could even eat it myself.

The risk-reward ratio of designing for Threadless is just…stupidly awesome. This is especially true for artists that aren’t established. You design a t-shirt (which is something you’re going to do anyway, and if it doesn’t sell at Threadless you’ll do something else with it) and you get to parade it around in front of prospective buyers. If you’re chosen, you get a shitload of money and a feather in your cap. You’re not just a t-shirt designer anymore, you won at Threadless, you’re good and you can take that to any brand you may design for in the future.

One could argue that it’s not spec work if it’s something you’d do anyways, without Threadless. I mean, if you sit at home and just kick out dozens of t-shirt designs without knowing where they’ll go, Threadless probably isn’t spec work to you. After all, you’re deciding after the fact to send it to them and the work’s already done at that point.

But if you sit down and say “today I’m going to design a shirt and try to get it printed at Threadless” then yeah, it’s definitely spec work. It’s the kind of spec work you ought to be doing because the risk is practically zero (you can get paid for that design, if not at Threadless, then somewhere else) and the reward potential is so high.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

There is no drink that screams summer more than iced tea. OK, maybe lemonade if that’s your thing, but iced tea is where it’s at!

Now, being from Michigan, I grew up drinking iced tea and sun tea as-is. That is, it’s chilled, but there’s nothing else in it. It’s good. It’s got a little bit of an aftertaste, but I couldn’t imagine adding sugar to it.

Five or six years ago, while vacationing in Charleston, SC I had a glass at a friend’s house and ended up drinking sweetened tea at just about every meal for the rest of the week. I don’t even think you can get unsweetened iced tea down south without having to make it yourself. There were a few other delicious things I tried down there (like boiled peanuts!) but sweet tea’s the only one that’s stuck with me. To this day, it’s actually one of my favorite ways to relax after a day at work, sitting on the balcony with a glass.

There’s a t-shirt for everything, and sweet tea is no exception. Sweet Tea Junkie’s got a little over a dozen tees celebrating what may as well be the official drink of the south. There’s a pretty interesting story to the origins of this brand too.

Our story began with a group of four friends that would gather at IHOP for breakfast quite regularly. We almost always had the same server, and every time we went in each of us would drink 5-6 glasses of Sweet Tea. After a few visits our waitress began calling us “The Sweet Tea Junkies,” this got my entrepreneurial side running immediately.

I love that “grab opportunity by the balls” mentality. Someone getting an idea and actually acting on it, it’s great. Sweet Tea Junkie does have some shirts that feature their brand name pretty prominently, and that’s something I’m not too keen on. I’m generally a believer that good design will speak for itself, and I think that’s especially true for the text-based design you see here.

Here’s a bonus though. All the Sweet Tea Junkie shirts have a sweet tea recipe printed on the inside of the shirt. This is one of the first really clever uses of inside-printing that I’ve seen and wouldn’t be surprised if things like this catch on a bit more.

Most shirts are 17.50 at Sweet Tea Junkie

Use promo code “tsrb” at checkout to get 15% off all items!

So how’s t-shirt land been? I’ve been away a while and haven’t had the chance to keep tabs like I usually do, but I am still around. Real life’s got to come first, after all.

If you know me, you’ll know that when I’m not tending to my herd of unicorns or feeding small children to the alligators at the zoo I’m usually pretty active online. I’ve been pretty absent from Facebook, Twitter, and here.

I miss TRB the most though, so let me fill you in on what’s coming up. I’ve got a few more t-shirt sites that have been sort of sitting in the oven for a while, and I’m going to try to squirt those out this month. I’m pretty good at half-baking an idea and design, then not flipping the switch and making it a live site. It’s about time to change that.

I’ve also got a handful of Thread Notes TV episodes recorded and sitting on the hard drive. As soon as I can edit those, they’ll be up for you to enjoy. I enjoy shooting them, but the editing is crazy time-consuming.

Anyways, I appreciate you stopping by and those of you that have asked to make sure I’m alright, here’s to finally having the time to touch the PC again!

In this episode of Thread Notes TV I take you to the park (because it’s practically criminal to sit at home when it’s nice outside here) and tell you a little bit about a sweet t-shirt Patrick from Tilteed sent me. There are a lot of things that set Tilteed apart from other t-shirt design competition, so they’re definitely worth a look.

In this episode

Jungle Book – Tilteed (t-shirt details) – Price: $18

This intricate design from Tilteed delivers a classic 1-2 punch: it stuns you first with its attention to detail and the delicate lines on the book pages then knocks you out when you realize there’s really nothing random about it and the message is quite focused and clear.

It comes across like an illustration you’d expect to see on an old British children’s book, Danny or Christopher Robin perhaps?

It just really makes me think of all those times we had to read a book in school as child. I didn’t want to do it at first because it wasn’t a book that I picked out, but after a while I realize it’s a good story and there’s a reason the teacher picked that book.

Soon enough I’m engrossed in the story and don’t want to put it down. The imagination is in full gear and I’m filling in details and backstory on my own. Then, just as you’re knee-deep in it, somebody taps me on the shoulder and it’s like being startled out of a dream. All that smoke and color goes back into the page and you’ll left with just a bunch of words on a bunch of pieces of paper. It’s about that time that there can be a brief moment where you realize the imagination’s power to turn something so literal and concrete into such a vivid and vibrant experience.

Leave a comment down below and let me know what you think! If you’d like your t-shirt featured in a future episode of Thread Notes TV, check out my submit a t-shirt page.

Thanks again to Patrick at Tilteed for sending over Jungle Book and being so patient while the review was edited and put online. Zip over there and check out their latest designs.

I found this dramatic t-shirt while poking around Google images. It was a shirt that was available for purchase to participants of the 2007 Terry Fox Run in Kuala Lumpur. It’s got an incredible black and white photo of Terry during his Marathon of Hope run across Canada.

If you’re unfamiliar with Terry Fox, I encourage you to read his dramatic and inspiring story at Wikipedia. Terry ran the equivalent of a marathon every day for 143 days in a trek across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. He did this all on a prosthetic limb after losing his right leg to bone cancer.

Terry wasn’t able to complete his journey as he lost his life to the disease at just 22 years of age. Around the world though, organizers host an annual run in the fall in Terry’s name to raise money for cancer research. The run has no winners or losers, and everyone is free to go at their own pace.

I haven’t seen anywhere to purchase this tee, and the Kuala Lumpur event seems to have a new t-shirt each year, with 2009′s tee being a closeup of Terry’s face on a black shirt.

Nevertheless, I thought it was a really interesting t-shirt with a cool story behind it and wanted to share it with you.

I know my house pretty well. I can usually walk around in the dark without running into things. Usually.

Most of the time I know that at the end of the hall I have to walk straight forward until I can see the microwave clock before it’s safe to turn left. If I don’t, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going face first into a wall I forgot was there.

Every now and again though, we all do it. We forget where something is and run right into it. It’s usually enough to keep you from making it back to sleep right away because, well, it hurt dammit!

This shirt from Snorg Tees is instantly relatable to anyone that sees it. That means you’ll see a lot of positive reaction wearing it out and about. It’s printed in two colors on a black tee, and I have to admit I’m digging the font they used too. Pretty neat shirt, and it’s on sale just this week.

Grab “The Shinbone” from Snorg Tees – on sale for $14.95 this week only

So here’s a story of a t-shirt hunt with an almost-perfect ending. The other day I got an email from Liz, check this out:

Hello!
Stumbled across your blog, loved it, realized I had found a shirt a week ago that I loved but, unfortunately, it was too small (I was thrift-store hopping, they only had one). So I was wondering if you couldn’t hunt it down seeing as you seem to enjoy that sort of thing.

I looked for it online because the brand of the shirt itself was on the tag but it turned out that someone had simply silk screened it after buying plain shirts in bulk from that company.

Anyways, the shirt was black and it had an outline of Texas on it with the words, “Let’s Mess With Texas” written over top. It was pretty funny at the time.

Thanks in advance if you can find it. If you can’t, no worries, just thought I’d give it a shot.

Liz

This sounded like a tall order simply because of the sheer number of items you can buy with “Don’t Mess With Texas” plastered all over them. I also wanted to weed out as many print on demand (POD) items as possible, since Liz indicated in her email that the had been silk-screened by someone.

I got lucky, and I think I found the shirt:

Hopefully that’s the shirt you were talking about, Liz. I found it on Storyville Times, from a post dated Oct 1, 2007. The post tells me that the shirt was designed by a group called “Metro Three.” Some Googling brought me what looks to be their homepage and Twitter account:

Metro Three Homepage

Metro Three Twitter

I half-expect a tumbleweed to roll across that Twitter profile, it’s been deserted for so long. Nevertheless, Metro Three seems to be active, though that shirt doesn’t appear to be for sale right now. I’m thinking your best bet, Liz, is to contact them and see if they can’t make one appear in your mailbox one way or another.

If they can’t, here are some alternatives:

That’s Mess With Texas from Threadless, currently sold out but you can request an email notification for a reprint.

Here’s "Please Mess With Texas" from Protoculture Apparel. It’s a bit pricy IMO for the amount of print that’s on it, but it’s available in blue and green.

I also found this one on Cotton Factory, "I Messed With Texas." This one’s more reasonably priced at $16.

Hopefully you found something here you can run with with, Liz! Thanks for shooting me a message about this shirt you’re looking for. If anyone else has a shirt they’d like to see, hit the submit button up there on the right and let me know about it!

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Sometimes I’ll be lounging around the house and I realize a run to the store is in order. Nothing major, just a quick trip. That may or may not be a beer run. Right. So I take off the old t-shirt I was wearing around the house and toss on something a little more respectable to run to the store in.

I’m back to the house in 20 minutes, what happens to the t-shirt? Do I put it in the laundry? Do I hang it back up? I mean, I wore it for less than a half hour. This t-shirt is suddenly in cotton limbo. What do you do? Almost invariably, the shirt will see a second run before it sees the laundry basket. It just doesn’t make sense to wash something that’s essentially clean.

This tee is perfect for those situations. It’s the simple, cheeky humor that Snorg Tees is known for. It’s printed single color on a grey shirt. If you look closely, you’ll see the recycle symbol is actually 3 t-shirts instead of arrow. Pretty clever!

Pick up “I Support Recycling” from Snorg Tees, $14.95 this week only

You’re an individual. You’re not a number. This isn’t THX 1138. We aren’t expected to act alike, and we certainly aren’t expected to dress alike.

Because of this, there’s a certain tendency I think to emphasize how different a tee make you feel. After all, to all but the most superficial of us a t-shirt’s about the experience, not just how it makes you look.

The experience. Think about that for a moment. How do you feel when you put on your favorite shirt and walk out the door. Confident? Invincible? Prepared? Who knows. It’s different for all of us. The point isn’t what you feel but that you feel something. The experience isn’t just about what happens when you put it on though.

Think about when you bought it. Think about when you pull it out of the clean laundry and hang it up, knowing it’s back in rotation. If you bought it online, do you remember when you came home and saw a little something extra in the mail or on the front step? You get inside and open it up and for just a minute, you feel like a 6 year old on your birthday.

When you pick up a new shirt, you’re not just buying the shirt. You’re buying the experience. The fact that you’ll get a few years out of the shirt, think of that like the dividends of this little deal.

So the question then becomes, if you’re going to find your next favorite shirt, how do you go about enhancing the experience?

I think the folks at LTD Tee have the answer. They’ve taken the experience you have when your new shirt arrives and turned it on it’s head. You see, instead of a USPS generic postage bag, you get something a little different on your front step.

The LTD Tee package includes not only the shirt, but an 8″ x 10″ print of the artwork and a biography of the artist. The whole deal comes in a custom box printed with the shirt’s artwork. It’s really a neat approach to how shirts can be presented as art. Sometimes there are other goodies thrown in, like a sticker pack.

Now, when it comes to selling t-shirts these days, exclusivity is all the rage. There are a dozen different places out there where you can get a shirt that’s only available for sale today. There are places where they print a limited number of tees and serialize them, like you’d expect on a hand-built Ferrari.

LTD Tee makes their t-shirt packages available for a week. There’s a countdown on their site for those of us that are challenged by clocks and calendars. The interesting thing is that the tees aren’t even printed at that point. When you buy, you’re on a waiting list, and they only print as many tees as were purchased during the weeklong sales window.

A waiting list! It really is like buying a Ferrari. It’s a bit less expensive though. This week’s LTD Tee package is right around $30. While that’s a bit more than I’m used to paying for a t-shirt, I think it all goes back to the experience of opening that package and having all those cool extras. All things considered, you might even call it a bargain.

LTD Tee is only in their second week as I write this. Therein, as they say, lies the rub. We haven’t had enough time to get a really solid feel for the kind of shirts you can expect. While they work closely with a different designer each week, every designer’s going to have a unique voice.

Their first two designs are pretty different, so I think it will take some time before we can tell which direction the art will take. I say this to encourage you to keep an eye on LTD Tee. If you don’t like this week’s tee, a new design that you might be crazy about is only a week away. So head on over to LTD Tee and check them out. I think you might be pleased with how much more the new t-shirt experience could be.

Check out LTD Tee and save 10% on their t-shirt box sets using the discount code “tshirtreviewblog”

Next time you see a bunch of comic books, grab a handful and throw them all in a blender on the highest setting. What do you get? A ton of shredded paper. You’ll probably piss off whoever owned the comic books too. Don’t do that. Why don’t we throw them in a metaphorical blender? That’s better. Now when we turn off the blender, instead of getting the stinkeye from a crushed comic book collector, we get Fistful Apparel.

Fistful’s artwork really leaps off the page. Sure, I’m talking about the shirts, but the website compliments the tees so well, it’s impressive. They’ve got an all-star line up of designers that clearly have their style figured out. Too often I see promising designers that, while talented, haven’t found their voice yet. These people get it, plain and simple. Bright colors and bold, oversize designs that aren’t always center-chest really grab your eye. If I saw one of these walking down the street I’d look twice. (that’s what SHE said)

Their designs walk a fine line between comics and cartoons, with some hints of classic movie posters thrown in. There’s a focus on character, which isn’t something I see on a whole lot of shirts. Sure, I’m used to seeing a person in a particular situation on a tee, but I’m not used to reading their backstory alongside the tee. It’s a pretty interesting approach.

Their blog uses lots of videos that really help you climb inside the illustrator’s head and see the kind of thinking that inspires the designs. They also post fan-submitted photos of their shirts, which is always a cool way of “completing the circle” and helping people feel connected with the brand. If you check out Calavera Comics you can see some more artwork in the same vein, available as prints. Metal on Metal is EPIC.

Fistful’s tees weigh in nicely between $15 and $20. If you decide to pick up a shirt or two from Fistful, you can use the coupon code fistfulfriend10 to get a 10% discount.

Check out Fistful Apparel and Calavera Comics