 |
Ross Zietz |
| Country USA |
| Company Threadless |
| Designation Art Director |
Speach title: Threadless: serious fun
Threadless is a global T-shirt phenomenon. Established in 2000, it has become one of the internet’s most creative and vibrant online communities, with over one million registered users. Threadless has become the posterboy for crowdsourcing, the economic model that taps the power and creativity of the community. Threadless works as an ongoing open design competition: users submit designs which are scored by members and the highest scoring designs are printed and then sold. Up to 2000 designs are submitted every week and over 100.000 T-shirts are printed every month.
Threadless has many fans among the people in the know, like the editors of wired, John Maeda and Seth Godin.
Threadless Art Director Ross Zietz presents at this year’s CCC the inside story of this great company with lots of fun video’s and he brings t-shirts too.
Bio
I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Both of my parents are photographers. I had a well documented childhood because of this. My parents dragged me to all the art openings they could. As much as I fought it, some of this art and culture must have stuck with me, and I am grateful to them for that.
During my pre-college years, I filled dozens of sketchbooks with pencil drawings of cars, basketball shoes, animals and super heroes. When college started, I hastily decided I wanted to be an architect. I stuck with this for about a week before I realized I did not enjoy math. So I switched to Graphic Design: the “sell out" of Art School culture.
I read a blurb about Threadless in Communication Arts while wasting time in a Barnes and Noble. I went home that night and made my first t-shirt design. It was horrible, but of course in my mind it was an amazing, original idea. There would be a heart (really shoddily vectored in Macromedia Freehand) printed on the sleeve of the shirt (thus, it would be a heart on your sleeve – ha, so bad). It deservedly tanked on the site. People destroyed me in the comments, which was awesome. It got me hooked. So then I wanted to prove to all these cleverly-named-faceless-wince-inducing commenter’s that I could do something they liked. So for the next two months I subbed 8 more designs. My scores were steadily climbing and my comments were becoming less and less hurtful. Then came my 9th sub: a running elephant on the front and a group of mice in pursuit on the back. It was not the prettiest design, but it was a clever enough use of the tee shirt medium, and it scored above a 3. This also was my first print. I was officially hooked. At this point I was spending more time on Threadless subs than on my school projects, which turned out not to be such a bad idea.
I graduated and started looking for an actual job. I applied to a couple ad agencies in New Orleans and was actually about to accept an offer when Jake posted a blog about Threadless looking to hire a multi-purpose worker. I filled out the hilariously casual online application for the heck of it. Jake replied a week later "We're really considering bringing you in – perhaps even full-time – half the week working for Threadless the other half doing design work for skinnyCorp." WOO HOO! I flew to Chicago a week after that on St. Patrick’s Day. I was "interviewed" at an Irish bar downtown. The river was dyed green. I met the whole crew - all 8 of them. In a strange way I was a bit Internet star struck. It was crazy to be able to put voices with their Internet photos. Everyone was nice. Not one bad egg. They laughed when I said "y'all" and I was offered a job the next day. I accepted on the stipulation that I would still be allowed to sub designs to the site. 5 years later, i'm now the Art Director at Threadless and looking forward to going to work each morning.