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Interview with JRIOT - February 24, 2008

Owens: http://www.cafepress.com/jriot has some fantastic t-shirts tell me a little about your store. 

JRIOT: Well it’s an online store where you can browse through images that I came up with and thought were funny. Hopefully if you think they’re funny too, you’ll buy some of them. Most of the art work I have done myself. However, some of it has been a collaborative effort with Steven R. Owens from right here at studio-owens.com. The images in the store are available in a wide variety of shirt styles as well as many shirt colors, so even if you want the same images as your friends you can get different shirts so you won’t look like clones.

Owens: What got you into making T-Shirts in the first place?

JRIOT: I was taking a summer camp administration class. One of the things you have to do way before summer is design and order t-shirts for the campers and staff. went with the camp director I was learning from, to the screen printing place, and I saw him and a graphic designer create about five different shirt and hat designs in like 20 minutes. Seeing that blew me away. So in the fall after all my summer camp classes were done, I went back to the graphic designer at the screen printing place and I told him an idea and we picked a font and made my first 12 JRIOT t-shirts. Back then all my ideas were just text.

Owens: When did you start making T-shirts?

JRIOT: In 2003 back in college, So I guess some time this fall I should celebrate five years of JRIOT.

Owens: There are a ton of options for doing an online store. Why did you choose CafePress?

JRIOT: Cafepress manages the printing, shipping, billing, and web hosting. With Cafepress, I can focus on the images, and the advertising. I get to do what I love and not have to worry about all the little details that normally accompany running a business.

Owens: "At least you won't be naked!" is a fantastic slogan. How do you come up with your ideas?

JRIOT: I honestly can’t remember how that started but it’s true. Everyone should wear JRIOT t-shirts cause even if you don’t think the arts any good and the jokes aren’t that funny, at least you won’t be naked.

Owens: What are some of your biggest inspirations?

JRIOT: Socializing, when I’m hanging out with people and I say something, and everyone laughs, I try to figure out how to put that funny thing down on a t-shirt.

Owens: Every artist has some kind of unique creative process that they go through when creating their projects. What is your creative process?

JRIOT: Well when I get an Idea I try to write it down or email it to myself or tell other people to remind me about my idea later. I try to never draw out an idea right away. I find that if I let something float around in my brain for a while I’ll keep improving on the idea until I think it’s ready to become an image. Sometimes the image on a shirt is not at all what the original idea was that first inspired it. Then when I’ve spent a while working on the image, I like to show it to two to three people, and pay attention to their reactions and suggestions. Then I’ll obsessively hammer away at the image for a while until I think it’s perfect before I put it online.

Owens: Why do people call you JRIOT?

JRIOT: Well JRIOT stands for “Jay’s Random Ideas On T-shirts”. So the name pretty much sums up the company. I’m Jay, I have random ideas, and I feel that I need to express those ideas on the chests of other people with t-shirts. I’m not sure why people call me JRIOT I guess it’s more fun to say then just Jay.

Owens: Tell me a little about http://jriot.deviantart.com, and your wire art.

JRIOT: Back in College I took a jewelry class one summer. A few years later I was looking around Surplus City, a local non-chain hardware store. I saw some wire and some jewelers pliers and remembered enjoying working with those two things in my jewelry class. I took them home and started making stick figures I kept working with the wire now I make uniformly shaped vases, even a left shoe. I’ve realized that having wire around can be just as handy if not more so than carrying duct tape around to fix things.

Owens: Tell me a little about "The Commune" on your Drunk duck comic site http://user.drunkduck.com/JRIOT.

JRIOT: That reminds me I’ve been slacking off on my updates since I’ve been back in my home town planning my wedding. As I mentioned before, in the past I did work with summer camps. I realized that as much as I liked playing with the kids, my best memories are of just the staff a group of about thirty of my peers living out where there’s lots of trees and no paved roads working side by side. “The Commune” is based on what would happen if in 11 years after growing up and getting real jobs, everyone on the camp staff put all their money together and bought some land and started a commune.