Live Brief | Threadess

One of the criteria for the Locating Unit is to create a project based on a Live Brief. As well as creating online portfolios and uploading work, I decided to create an entry for the Threadless competition 'Bad Luck'.

Taking the projector photographs from the self-initiated brief as inspiration, I came up with the idea of working with the word 'Glitch'. Some of my original drawings already had this appearance, which is where the notion came from. My connection to bad luck came from the internal breaking and smashing of phone/laptop/tablet screens. From personal experience, I once dropped my phone which resulted in the bottom of the screen going black along with a glitch half way up the screen. All while my mum had only just left to go on holiday, and with the contract in her name I had no way of getting it fixed or a new phone until she returned. Definitely bad luck!

From my ideas I started on Pinterest and made a new board gathering some ideas, from there I added glitch effects to the photographs I already had. These came out really well and have the damaged and impaired look I was going for.

Using these edited images, I began to create T-shirt designs in Photoshop. Normally my designs are more fashion based and aren’t intended to be particularly literal. However, Threadless competition designs do tend to speak for themselves with no disguised or concealed meaning. Because of this I tried to make the designs literally look like a broken screen, which wasn’t as easy as I originally thought it would be.

Eventually when I got the hang of it I came up with a design I really liked and chose that one to submit. Generally on Threadless people create a 1200 x 1200 pixel document showing the print itself along with an image of it placed on a tshirt. Also, you have to title your design. People come up with quirky and clever names for their tshirts so I decided to go with 'Drop beats, not phones'. Here is the finished design: