a foray into the threadless world…

Jarred Elrod, graphic design, art, shop, threadless

a work in progress…

⬇️ ⬆️ After going through the process of creating the “Fare o Essere” collection for my first exhibition here in Italy, it’s nice to see these prints together in context with other things I’ve made in the past. Putting trust in another entity (threadless) for printing does feel a little strange, but their range for printing is pretty astonishing. While I’d love for the shop to be financially successful, I’m finding value and satisfaction in the process of simply sharing things I’ve made again. The fact these things have life feels good and it’s fun to play around with the graphics on different media platforms—in many cases it’s thought-provoking to play with mockups of the designs on different types of products because of the context of the product. Example: putting the “Nothing Worked Today” graphic on a blanket adds a whole other level of meaning I never considered prior as opposed to putting it on a shirt or sticker. There’s no way I could replicate this with the production tools I have here…so…I’m going to keep refining the shop and we’ll just see where it goes. That said, I’m not giving up on printing myself! I have some exciting things lined up for this December I’ll be sharing in the coming weeks.

Jarred Elrod, Threadless Shop, Shirts, prints, cards and accessories

⬆️ I’m definitely still learning how to make my shop build better. I created my first collection to house the Fare prints, but I can’t say I’m a huge fan of how the menu is working on my site as of now—it’s too complex. I keep learning new stuff to streamline things as I go. As I mentioned earlier though, it is nice to actually see this work together with production potential. I can’t help but frequently think back to when I was in college starting my career as a designer. I thought I was a badass because I had the hard drive partitioned on my 1st gen iPod to store both my music library and my design files (as opposed to ZIP drive). That was such an exciting time. I was making lino-cuts and running over the plates with my car to make a print. And now this is the landscape designers are coming into—ready made digital spaces to show and potentially sell anything on any surface. It’s freakin’ crazy, man! Sometimes I think I should just go completely analog—or maybe even in totally different career direction with everything going on with AI generated imagery etc…but then the sketchbook or camera calls and I just can’t help myself. I have to make stuff.

Vote Here!

⬆️ My first design submission from my shop to the threadless website…I reckon the idea is to up-vote the submission as much as possible to get the main threadless site to pick up the design from individual the artist shops. Not gonna lie, figuring out how these sites are related and how they differ was a little confusing from a design perspective, but what are you gonna do? I know the threadless site came way before artist shops, so they are kind trying to Frankenstein them together for lack of a better term. I was also bummed to see that only people within the threadless community can vote on these designs. I suppose I see why given the kind of social media followings (or even leveraging bots or fake accounts) people with power can leverage these days, but it makes it tough for someone without an existing following on threadless to even get votes. I’ve noticed many folks that sell through shops and on threadless leverage discord and reddit pretty heavily—I have pretty much zero interest in spending a lot of time in either of these spaces. Alas, I’ll keep trying.

✍️➕🖼➕👕🛒