I am starting a new feature where I write about tees I like. This will be in addition to other stuff, but I feel it will be relatively easy for me to post a picture of a tee I like, and briefly write about what I like about it and where you can get one. 

To kick things off, I'm going to start with one of my all-time favorite tees - I remember seeing this on the tee blog ADDICTEED (R.I.P.) back when it came out and being so impressed with its boldness and simplicity of communication.

"WRONG WAY" by ROCKWELL

(image ruthless stolen from a Polish webforum here)

If I get talking about t-shirts for more than five minutes, I will inevitably say 5-10 nice things about Piet Parra, the Dutch artist behind Rockwell (and tons of amazing fine art pieces and collaborations with brands like Stussy and Nike). I've been a fan of the guy for years (Yeah Dude is me really letting my love of his aesthetic show, though I feel like it's still Seibei enough to be a love letter rather than a ripoff), and his work embodies everything I aspire to in tee design: bold, unique, simple design that is done smartly and doesn't take itself too seriously. 

This was the first Parra tee I ever saw that I remember. I actually used to own it, but unfortunately left it at our apartment's laundry room the day Kate and I left California (I really hope it ended up with someone that appreciates it). I have what is probably a pretty evident interpretation of this piece, given away by its title - someone knowing they're going the wrong way, yet charging forward. Or maybe it's someone contemplating whether or not they're doing the right thing - either way, to communicate this so quickly with a one color graphic is amazing to me. It sticks with you. 

About a year ago, I saw Parra in conversation with Victor Moscoso at the SF MOMA (lovingly written up at Jeremy Riad's blog here), and it was fantastic. I really appreciate the way he approaches his work, and the way he interacts with his audience - he said that once you get to know your audience and once they get to know you, you can start making little in-jokes with them. Parra is as nice a guy as you'd expect, and he was very kind when I went up to him after the show and managed to spit out something about his work being a huge influence on me. 

Anyway, I should probably stop rambling while I'm ahead. I wonder if I'll be able to be this verbose when writing about any other tee? 

So, a few things:

1. Kate and I are married, and it's great.

2. If you missed it, the preorders have been slightly delayed due to my tee distributor (the company I buy my blank tees from to be sent to the printer to get made into SEIBEI tees) shorted my order slightly, but we're not sure by how much exactly (waiting for an exact count), and they can't start printing until it's sorted. UGGGGH

3. Kate and I are going up to the TORONTO COMIC ARTS FESTIVAL (TCAF) this weekend - in fact, we pushed the wedding up a week because of it. It's half a work trip for Telegraph - a lot of the artists we work with will be there as guests and exhibitors, and other artists we want to work with will be there - but it's also going to be a Fun-Ass Honeymoon, because a lot of friends we haven't seen in a while will be there. 

It's a beautiful world when your work friends and your real life friends overlap. Also, I'll get to finally meet a ton of people I've only been buds with on Twitter for a while, and introduce Kate to people who've only met me, and I can't wait. 

If you're gonna be there, this is roughly what we look like:

HEY! It's been a while. I'm writing to you from the front desk of Telegraph, two weeks before Kate and I are getting married, so I've been keeping busy. 

So, first things first - I put up a bunch of new tees for preorder (mainly because I find the standard "bell curve" of ordering tees has been less and less applicable for my fans, so I wanted to gauge sizes). You may notice that there is the "Sandwich Dino Classic" amongst them.

But wait - didn't I say I was getting rid of them? Oh, right, I did. I was all set to, but a few impassioned letters and a bit of time helped me figure out a better middle ground. 

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to keep coming out with new colorways for it a few times at a go and treating it like a new shirt. For now, I'm going to keep the "classic" colorway available of the Sandwich Dino available and in stock, and the same for I'm Fat Let's Party. I'll keep on the classics, because I can still give a nod to my beginnings while pressing forward with new design work. Does that sound okay?

I'm sorry for causing any of you distress. Sometimes a rough experience will shake even a veteran like me and make me consider drastic options when there's a better way to go about things. There was even a period where I was considering dropping ALL designs and renaming the brand, but I think I was just frustrated with myself and handling it the wrong way. Some things didn't go the way I'd hoped and it rattled me a little - like baking a cake for a party that didn't go well and wanting to smash everything in your kitchen before you throw yourself out the window (before my parents get too worried reading this, I live in a one story place and my kitchen's on the first floor, so I would've been fine). 

I overreacted, but the shakeup was just what I needed. After a lot of hard work and reflection and drawing (at least) a few hundred new designs (seriously), I think I've released my best batch of tees yet. Eight new designs, and four heavily demanded reprints (and I've even got new designs that weren't quite ready this go round that will be in the next batch). I think I've hit my stride and hopefully I can keep it up. I'm making the tees I want to make, and people are really responding well. This has been the most insane half week of online and wholesale orders, second only to the Kickstarter (which, to be fair, was a whole different beast). German language tee blog shirthunters said (if Google Translate is to be trusted, as my German hasn't been any good since 1999) that YEAH DUDE reminded them a bit of Rockwell by Parra (in a good way), my number one favorite tee designer (though I think the design is still very me with the portmanteau of hand and horse - can you call it a portmanteau if it's visual?), and Andy over at Hide Your Arms had some very nice things to say as well. 

Enough rambling. I'm really proud of all the work here, and I couldn't be happier that so many of you are into them, too. I have been out of the tee game way too long, between moving and opening up and running Telegraph with Kate and getting ready to GET MARRIED, so thank you for welcoming me back with OPEN ARMS. 

Oh, and sorry for not keeping this updated. Writing this article in particular has felt quite nice (and I've even written a few blog posts that I haven't published yet, when I vowed over the winter to get better at blogging), so I will do my best to keep it up. It's a rainy day here in Charlottesville, which means very few people will come by the gallery (it's on a pedestrian mall that gets tons of traffic in good weather and very little traffic if it even drizzles), so MAYBE I'LL EVEN WRITE ANOTHER ENTRY TODAY just to try and keep the momentum going. 

Thanks again for everything. 

So! On Friday, March 1st, Kate and I are opening Telegraph, a new art gallery and shop, in our town of Charlottesville, VA. Our monthly gallery shows will feature limited edition screen printed posters, commissioned exclusively by Telegraph, by awesome artists from all over the world. 

I announced this on Twitter and Facebook the other day, but I figured I could talk about it a bit more at length here.

First off: I'm still going to be SEIBEI. I'm currently adding a couple of designs to a lineup of eight new designs that are already finished, and I'm going to put the best five or six up for preorder soon. It's actually my years of work as SEIBEI that led to us opening this gallery - I had always dreamed of opening a little shop or gallery on my own when we moved back to Charlottesville, and with Kate by my side we can make this something bigger than the both of us. 

Charlottesville has always had a vibrant art scene, but we feel that we'll be bringing something new and exciting to the table. Over the years of living in New York and California, we visited a lot of amazing galleries, and we want to bring that fun gallery setting back to our hometown. As Seibei, I've met so many amazing artists over the years, and Kate has an amazing eye (and a degree in Art History, to boot), and I think we'll be a welcome new facet of the Charlottesville community. We're going to make the kind of place I always wished we'd had back when I was in school here. 

Our first show, MONSTROUS, opens March 1st, and features a group of great artists, many of whom I've met out on the road, and some that I'll hopefully get to meet in person soon. In no particular order, they are - Rebecca Adams, Ze Jian Shen, Dustin Harbin, Bob Motown, Brian Maclaskey, KC Green, Michael DeForge, Mia Schwartz, Niv Bavarsky, Zack Soto, Jason Fischer, and Philip Tseng. I've seen all of the pieces (some have already been printed, and the others will be printed soon), and it's a really exciting mix. We gave the artists pretty free reign and have been well rewarded. 

Each print will be available instore and online March 1st in editions of 95, and are being printed by our friends at Industry Print Shop in Austin, TX - their prints are amazing and they've been SUPER patient with us as we slowly learn the particulars of how art is prepared for poster printing versus t-shirt printing. Depending on how their schedule and our schedule lines up, we may have to split the work between them and another shop down the road (they print an overwhelming amount of stuff for SXSW, so their schedule's already jam packed), but for now these dudes are doing the job and doing it damn well. 

Alright - back to work for me!

It's been a long, fun ride, but it's time to get rid of the Sandwich Dinosaur (and all offshoots, like the Taco Dinosaur). The above picture is from early 2006, when I'd really just started doing SEIBEI. A lot of things have changed, but I kept reprinting these designs in different colors because people kept buying them, and I realized late last year that I didn't like them at all anymore. 

So, once all current stock is sold, that's it. I'm not one to say "never" that often, so someday maybe we'll do some throwback reprints for a limited time or something, but I don't see it happening anytime soon, if ever. 

I'm sure a lot of you are bummed out, and it's probably going to dry up some of my oldest and dearest wholesale accounts (who can flip dinosaur designs pretty regularly, it seems), but it's time for us to move on to new things. 

So! This new site has been a long time in the making, and for a while it wasn't even going to be called SEIBEI. 

SEIBEI has been my pseudonym for years, and it probably always will be, but I'd considered changing the name of the brand to reflect that it's more about making stuff with my friends, rather than just me. Also, I thought it might be nice to have a brand name that people know how to spell or pronounce. I designed logos, made a whole new website (which became this site), and everything. The names I was toying around with were WORST FRIENDS, THE WORST FRIENDS, and WORST FRIENDS FOREVER, which is what I'd always wanted to name an art crew, if I ever formed one. I registered a gang of domain names and social media stuff to this effect (maybe I'll use them for something someday). 

This idea came about while hanging out with Kate and our friend Brian Maclaskey of Squid Ink Kollective about how I'd felt in kind of a rut lately, how I wanted to break out of the constant cycle of reprinting old SEIBEI designs like the Sandwich Dinosaur simply because they kept selling, and how I wanted to just do some new, terrible designs. I had the idea to just do a separate site from SEIBEI and give it a go. Something about starting over was appealing to me, considering how many mistakes I'd made over the years. 

I began work on the new, secret site as soon as we got settled in Virginia and got to work on new designs (many of which will be up on here soon). 

Two main things made me decide to keep everything as SEIBEI: some kind words/pep talks from internet friends about what the brand name SEIBEI meant to them, and putting together an "Archive" section, which I'd been meaning to do for years. 

Going through old hard drives and digging around online to find old designs (there are currently about 75 designs in the archive now, with alternate colorways and redraws grouped together, but there are still plenty that need to be found or recreated entirely) gave me an opportunity to look over basically every photoshoot we've done over the years and dig through tons of SEIBEI history, and shit, it felt great. It's easy to forget how much stuff you've done, sometimes. 

That also led me to create the background for the site, which completely cemented my resolve. There are a lot of you out there that have supported this for a long time, so why change the name when all I really need is to change up the designs in the shop and refresh the website. Let's move forward together. 

SO. SEIBEI FOREVER, DUDE.