Why there are no magpies on these shirts

There is a particular shape that haunts you if you sit down to design a shirt about Newcastle. It is a magpie wearing sunglasses. It might be holding a pint. Sometimes it is shouting at another magpie. The drawing is the same drawing every time, because there is only one drawing of that magpie, and every souvenir shop on the same stretch of street has ordered the same wholesale pack of the same six designs from the same warehouse in the Midlands.

We started with a list of things we would not do, before we started a list of things we would. Magpies in sunglasses was the first one. So were lions, three of them or otherwise. So was Ant and Dec. So were those half-and-half stag-and-hen-do shirts that look like a Photoshop beginner course exit exam. We did not want to make anything that would make somebody from here flinch in the window.

What is left when you take all of that out is a thinner brief than you think it is. You cannot put the Tyne Bridge on it, because the Tyne Bridge is on everything, including drink mats, fridge magnets, and one particular wall in St James. You cannot put Geordie phrases on it, not because they are not great, but because once you put them in a serif on a tee they read as something a stag party would buy on a Thursday and regret on a Friday.

The way we ended up working was to write the shirt before we drew it. What is this shirt about, in one sentence, with no joke. If the sentence held up (would we say it to a stranger in the Cumberland and not get a funny look back), we drew it. If the sentence fell over, we binned it. Most of them fell over.

The six that made the first run are the ones whose sentences held up. They are not the funniest. They are the ones that sit closest to how people from here actually talk, which is not the loud bit. The loud bit is what gets sold in shop windows. The quiet bit is what we wear at home. That was the brief, in the end.

We will probably draw a magpie one day. It will not be wearing sunglasses. It will not be holding a pint. It will probably be doing nothing at all, which is, in fairness, what magpies mostly do.