Thoreau t-shirt

Typography I drew for a t-shirt. The text “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts” is something I’m a firm believer in. The text is quoted from Henry David Thoreau’s (my hero) wonderful book Walden; or Life in the Woods.

To defend the simplicity of how the word “thoughts” is illustrated (as someone once commented that the word should be illustrated more vividly than just adding some colors), I wanted it to look simple as the quote encourage the reader to get rid of belongings and go back to the basics; the simple life. At the same time even thoughts have their limitations (according to Immanuel Kant), and even if we find ourselves having some fantastic thoughts we often fail to get them across because we lack the medium, the words or the audience. Therefore it felt right to illustrate “thoughts” with the limitations it has, even though that may be a pessimistic approach. I would of course love to think of thoughts as limitless and that there is no stop to where we can go with our minds, but we should be realistic and portray things as they are rather than building a false fantasy image.

The colors represents the whole spectre of thoughts; we all use our power to think differently and different colors have different meanings, like the color blue is steadfastness, green is growth, red is revolution, and so forth. But no matter what you spend your thoughts thinking about, it is more important to be pursuing new thoughts rather than pursuing new objects and things.