I'm So Done With Threadless...

Or, "Hipster Reform School, Lesson #227".

About six months ago, I saw a t-shirt design that was awesome. It was hilarious, timed just right and made me think art wasn't dead after all. The design was the 'Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man' from Ghostbusters wandering Godzilla style through New York City with a big subscript underneath that said, "NEVER FORGET". Fucking brilliant.

This design was part of Threadless.com's never ending search for the next uber-hipster t-shirt that Seth Cohen will be wearing on every other episode of The O.C.*. The way their site works is that hundreds of designs are submitted and they choose a couple each week to actually produce and sell. This all sounds like a sound business plan, but in actual operation it sucks, mainly because the internet is filled with losers.

Over the past months, I've looked over all the designs in the running (probably 3 to 4 hundred a week) looking for stuff I like. Most (and I'm talking 99.99%) of the designs are fucking awful. Nothing but bleeding heart, amateur Tim Burton ripoffs made for Cutters by Cutters. Honestly, if I see another of their designs that features teenage depression as it's inspiration, I'm gonna puke.

Every once in awhile, however, one of their designers will come up with something I think is clever. Examples include this, this and this. The problem? Threadless will never make these shirts because the losers they have in charge there have no sense of humor and insist on putting out the same dumb joke shirts and unicorn/Nightmare before Christmas crap that brings in the 12 to 14 year old crowd.

So screw you Threadless. Stop encouraging shitty designers. You're only making aging hipster geeks like me angry...

* - I realize that an O.C. reference makes me totally outdated, but Laguna Beach sucks, and you're not going to make me watch it.