Threadless, not threadbare

I posted my first design to Threadless today, I'll find out in about a week if it has been accepted to be scored and scrutinised by the masses. The basic premise of the shirt is a play on CTRL-A meaning "select all". Yes, I'm a geek, but geeks rule the world (and hopefully buy the T-shirts to prove it) so fingers crossed :)

This T-shirt design is my first ever attempt at using a vector illustration program. I downloaded the trial version of Zoner Draw 5 (rather than paying several hundred pounds for a copy of Macromedia Illustrator) and it was relatively painless, once I figured out the basics... like how to join shapes together and fill them with colours.

For those that have never heard of it, Threadless is a T-shirt site. "Great!" I hear you say. But there's a twist... Threadless is a Web 2.0 T-shirt site, which means that community collaboration is the key.

The designs are created by users. The designs are voted on by users. The most popular ones (via the black box of Threadless' final decision making process) get turned into T-shirts. Users then buy them and send in photos of themselves wearing them. They also tell all their friends to visit Threadless and buy them too.

So Threadless, as far as I can tell, needs no designers, market research, no models, no photographers, no advertising budget... just a website, a warehouse and a bank account. Now why didn't I think of that :)