thoughts on t-shirt graphic design meta

I recently did an interview with a student, Samuel Connor, at a university in London talking about bootleg culture, and lately I've been thinking about the intellectualization of my own work, being torn between wanting to make 1.) research heavy, intellectual, 'smart-guy' graphics and 2.) stupid, off-the-cuff, under-designed, funny graphics. 

I've done a bit of reading on other people's thoughts on this same subject, namely writings by Boot-Boyz-Biz founder Kevin McCaughey, who was highly influential to me while I was in college studying design, the book "Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice"  by Ben Schwartz, also a good read, I admittedly skimmed many sections, and finally some writings by a newer designer I recently found that goes by 'TheBlankTraveler' on instagram.

I'm not sure if I have any more of a salient take or anything new to add to the conversation that these people haven't already written about, so if you're interested in this sort of niche topic, I would highly recommend looking into their works and writings.

A t-shirt is one of the most basic pieces of clothing. I don't think it's something anyone should commit a large amount of brain-bandwidth to. However, where the t-shirt differs from a poster or a painting, is that the wearer will usually take the message in a very serious way — personally. When you wear a t-shirt you are sort of taking custody of the message and design that's presented on it. I think this alone is a good case for making 'good design'. When you think about a t-shirt that way, are you obligated to create something that stands out from the exhausting amount of noisy and low-vibration art and design out there?

In the past 15 years or so, everyone has become extremely aware of what 'good design' is, and I think we're now moving into an era of 'bad design'. Everyone can design well now. The formula and the rules have made things so boring and stagnant that bad design has become a sort of comfort food for people (myself included). It's gotten to the point where marketing guys can devise a shade of yellow that perfectly triggers your hunger response and Disney engineered a shade of green that your brain is most likely to ignore. I think these sorts of blatant abuses of psychology are gross, indulgent, and manipulative. There's a sort of serenity about something that is poorly designed. The mask is cast off, and you can simply absorb the information thats haphazardly placed without feeling like there is some sort of precise mathematical formula guiding the design into the place most likely to convert you into a customer.

As with everything though, there is a balance. TheBlankTraveler noted in one of their blogs that people tend to mis-use some of the 'funnier' fonts, think default fonts like chancery, arial, or maybe even some of the meme-fonts of the past, like comic-sans, papyrus, etc. The joke is too on-the-nose. There is a certain balance and dance to creating something that is simultaneously stupid and captivating.

I hope to write more of my thoughts on this subject later, but as I noted earlier in this thought-cascade, I'm not sure if something as banal as a t-shirt design is really deserving of a whole lot of thought.