The lettering is almost an afterthought. On the dark shirt, four lowercase letters and a period sit dead center, small enough that you have to be close to read them. meh. No animal. No slogan. No exclamation point. The period does the work of a closed door. That scale is the argument. A shirt that…

The shirt reads LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW, and the words wrap around four smiling root vegetables — carrot, radish, beet, and onion — drawn with their roots visible in soil. The lettering circles the group. The vegetables face outward, each one complete down to the taproot. It is a…

The rectangle is black-and-white speckled, like the cover of a composition notebook you’d buy for a dollar at a drugstore in August. A dark binding strip runs down the left edge. Inside the white ruled label, the word COMPOSITION sits at the top, and beneath it, an outlined ghost and a pumpkin. That’s the whole…

The shirt shows four letters and a period. Large, bold, white, lowercase: meh. No illustration, no animal, no second line of smaller text to explain the joke. The word sits on a dark ground and takes up most of the chest. That is the whole design. I keep looking at the period. A period is…

The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in warning-sign lettering, with a yellow caution triangle and a crossed-out hand. The hand is the part I keep returning to. A crossed-out hand is not a symbol for don’t talk to me. It is a symbol for do not make contact. There is a difference, and…