The first thing I notice is the period. Not the word—meh is already a shrug in four letters—but the full stop that follows it, printed in the same heavy white lowercase sans-serif against a dark ground. A period is a commitment. It says the sentence is over. Placed after meh, it does something stranger: it […]
The first thing I see is the blue. Not a dairy blue, not a butter-wrapper blue, but the blue of a label that has decided to become a body. The graphic is a salted-butter stick turned costume: a rectangular slab, the kind you’d find in a supermarket cooler, but scaled up to the width of […]
The first thing I notice is not the orange. It is the eyelashes. Two small, deliberate strokes at the top of each carved eye, the kind of mark that turns a hollowed-out gourd into a face with a point of view. The jack-o’-lantern on this shirt—a standard t-shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective, listed as Cute […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The first thing I notice is the missing comma. On the shirt, the word WAIT sits alone in white, a clean sans-serif block, and beneath it an orange cat in black sunglasses stares back. Under the cat, I’M GOATED appears in white letters with […]
There is a white bird in an orange jumpsuit, and it is holding a black board. Above it, in letters that look like they were stamped by a clerk with no sense of humor, the shirt reads GOT TOO SILLY. The bird is a goose, or something goose-adjacent—round head, flat beak, the blank stare of […]
The graphic is an orange jack-o’-lantern face. Triangular eyes, a small stem, the usual carved grin—except that the grin is not a grin. Two white vampire fangs hang from the upper lip, pointed and deliberate, turning the pumpkin’s mouth into a bite. The orange is flat and saturated, the kind of orange that reads as […]
The first thing I notice is the hand. Not the words—those come later, in the same blunt register as a wet-floor sign or a fire-door notice—but the hand, a flat silhouette with a diagonal bar struck through it, the universal grammar of prohibition. It sits inside a yellow caution triangle, the kind of triangle that […]
The museum inside the concession Start with the building, because the building tells you what kind of institution this was. The Museu do Dundo was founded in 1936 in the north-east of Angola, inside the concession of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola—Diamang—the company that held the exclusive right to prospect for diamonds across the […]
The shirt says TWEEDLE DUM in a distressed, heavy-set face, and beneath it, smaller but still loud, I’M WITH DEE. A right-pointing arrow sits between the two lines, or beside them, depending on how you read the stack. The arrow is the whole joke and the whole problem. It aims at a person who is […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The cat is not impressed. That is the first thing the Greetings Huzz cat shirt tells you, and it tells you before you have finished reading the words. An orange tabby sits at the center of the print with a deadpan expression, a backwards […]