30 Unhinged T-Shirts That People Just Had To Take A Pic Of, As Shared On This Instagram Page

At the time of writing, the ‘Chaotic Shirts’ page had 62.2k followers on Instagram. The founder of the project also runs an online store where they sell shirts with peculiar phrases on them. 

The entire point of the account is to make the internet laugh by showing everyone just how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to nonsensical shirt designs. And there’s a lot of laughter to be had here.

Sturgeon’s law tells us that 90% of everything created is going to be low quality (to put it politely), but these shirts are so bad, that they’re genuinely quite entertaining.

You start wondering whether the designers were self-aware and in on the joke or if they honestly thought their designs were something original and powerful. Whatever the case, it takes a lot of courage to wear some of these clothes. Like it or not, people are social animals, and most of us don’t want to be talked about behind our backs by complete strangers.

Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, but we feel that most beholders would agree that some things are objectively good and bad when it comes to design. Similarly, though someone might enjoy all the different flavors of chaos (in shirt form) featured in this list, it doesn’t mean that all designs are equal. They’re not!

You might not know which designs will be successful and net you a profit until you put them out there, but it’s usually clear which designers put in genuine effort and which ones are pumping out whatever. And customers can often intuitively tell what good design looks like (even if they might not know exactly what makes good design, well, good).

If you’re making a shirt with some sort of phrase or meme on it, you have to think about how fluently you’re transmitting the message.

Competent designers will consider things like the colors of the shirt and the words, the font and its size, the kerning (i.e. the spaces between the different characters), and what images they should (not) use. If the font’s too swirly/small/haphazard, nobody will be able to read your message. Similarly, if the colors don’t work together well, your shirt will have lost some of the impact that you hoped it would have. For instance, you may want to avoid plopping white words on a pale yellow background.

Nobody’s saying that you have to aim for ‘perfection’ with a simple T-shirt here, but your potential customers deserve your care, effort, and attention to detail. Proofreading your text and getting a second (and third!) person’s thoughts on your design before printing them can work wonders. You don't want to have sent a design for printing only to realize that it's full of glaringly obvious typos.

Aside from all the stylistic choices, you then have to consider what to actually write on the shirt. If you’re going for something witty, you could take the safest route, dad jokes, and go for some universally beloved (and bemoaned) corny and punny humor. Or you could go all out with random phrases, dark humor, and inside jokes. But whatever you do, make sure that your phrases are as brief and clear as possible—otherwise, your joke might lose its sting.

A while ago, comedy writer and author Ariane Sherine shared her thoughts on how to make hilarious shirts.

"They say 'brevity is the soul of wit' and they're right. Keep phrases short and snappy—the punchier and simpler, the better," the humor expert told Bored Panda during an interview. "But make sure you've included enough information for the joke to land.”

The comedy writer noted that limits (i.e. like the physical size of the shirt) can work to a comedian’s advantage and stops them from writing too much.

“Remember, with T-shirts, people generally have limited time to read them (for instance, if the person wearing the T-shirt is walking down the road) so the phrase needs to be short and have impact quickly," she said.

"Clean T-shirts shouldn't embarrass or offend anyone. Risque T-shirts might, so the ruder the T-shirt, the funnier the joke has to be to make up for it," she said.

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions in the comment section at the bottom of the article, Pandas. We'd love to hear which of these shirts confused you the most and which ones got a genuine giggle outta you. Were there any designs that you'd actually wear in public? We have a few favorites in mind, too.