Force 18′s Funny T-shirt Blog

Every so often we would like to talk about one of our classic T-shirt designs.  This month’s featured design is our exclusive Spot the Ninja T-shirt.

Sometime in 2008 the boss came in, looking all angry, and yelled at the design team “Give me a T-shirt with a damn Ninja on it!”  Then he went to the pub for the rest of the afternoon, probably.  Soon afterwards, the majority of the designers had fallen asleep again, but one trainee, still in his probationary period, stayed awake and began to formulate what would eventually become our Spot the Ninja design.

Spot the Ninja

The poor trainee spent much of the afternoon on Google and other search engines (although not Bing, because that didn’t exist back then), meticulously researching the rich history of the Ninja, the covert mercenaries from Japan.  He came to realise that if you were to spot a Ninja, then you would most likely be very nearly dead.  Taking out his standard-issue Force 18 crayons and safety scissors, the trainee set to work, creating rough stickmen figures and aligning them on a grid.  Across the top of the design he scrawled “Spot the Ninja”.  He sat back and admired his work, knowing that any one of the stickmen could be the Ninja and slowly realised that he had created an unsolvable puzzle.

Then the trainee hit upon his masterstroke.  He removed one of the stickmen from the design.  With that one simple move he had created the ultimate trap.  He knew that anyone who looked at the design would instinctively think that the Ninja was in the gap left by the missing figure.

Force 18's Spot the Ninja T-shirt

When the senior designers awoke from their slumber they were truly envious of the deceptively simple design that the trainee had created.  The Spot the Ninja T-shirt was put into production immediately and everyone in the design team was allowed to go home early for the day.  And they all lived happily ever after…

So there it is, the story of how our Spot the Ninja T-shirt was created, and it remains one of our most original and funniest T-shirt designs.

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