I love the sea. I do not surf, dive, or sail. But I can stand on the sand and watch the waves, and something in me settles.
The closest I can get to describing it is that everything suddenly feels simple.
I wanted to put that feeling on fabric.
One line
One Wave is a fine wave motif on the chest. A line curves like a wave, and then it stops. That is the design.
I kept coming back to the idea that a design is finished when there is nothing left to take away. One Wave gets very close to that point. There is no sentence to read and no question printed underneath it. The shape suggests the sea without needing to name it.
That restraint is the part I like. If I kept adding things to explain the feeling, I would lose the simplicity that made me want to draw it in the first place.
Why it belongs to Blacksunset
It is easy to associate Blacksunset with words. What If It’s Not a T-Shirt?, No Time For Bullshit, What Ever: those designs speak in sentences and phrases.
One Wave does not speak, but I am trying to do something similar with it. A small amount of information can leave room for a larger thought or feeling. & So? uses punctuation. One Wave takes it down to a line.
Presence Is Louder Than Noise puts the idea of presence into words. With One Wave, I wanted to see what happens when I leave the words out entirely.
For the days without a slogan
Sometimes you want a graphic rather than a statement. That does not mean the choice has to be empty. You might recognize a place in the curve, or simply like the way it sits on the shirt.
On the original product page, the photographs showed a couple wearing the design together. I liked how naturally that worked. The motif is simple enough for two people to wear without making them look as if they have been given a script.
There is no big conclusion to add here. It began with standing on a beach and looking at the water.
One wave was enough.
Anti, the guy who makes these shirts