A record sheet for an animal who behaves badly

A ruled grid, six rows down the left, seven days across the top. SLEPT. ATE. BARKED AT POST. SAT ON LAPTOP. IGNORED NAME. CAME WHEN CALLED. Ticks and crosses fill the cells, drawn by hand. The last row is crosses, every single day. One cell, out on its own, is circled in orange.

There's no title anywhere on the shirt. It doesn't need one.

Why does the chart have no title?

Because a real record sheet doesn't label itself, and that absence is what makes this one read as genuine rather than staged.

Clinical and behavioural logs exist to be read by whoever already knows what they're for — the person filling them in, or the person they hand it to. Nobody writing an actual week's tally of a dog's habits stops to write "BEHAVIOUR CHART" across the top, because the form of the thing already says what it is. Adding a title would be explaining a joke to the one audience who doesn't need it explained, and flattening it into a poster for everybody else. Leaving it out is the whole design decision this shirt rests on.

Why does a row of crosses land harder than a sentence would?

Because the chart refuses to editorialise, and a reader has to do the work of finding the joke themselves.

Seven crosses under CAME WHEN CALLED state a fact in the exact format the fact would actually take if somebody really were keeping this record. There's no adjective, no complaint, no exclamation — just the same flat tick-or-cross the other rows use, applied consistently to a subject that turns out to be consistently disobedient. The comedy is entirely in the reader connecting seven identical marks to seven identical mornings of being ignored. A caption saying "never comes when called" would be funnier to write and much less funny to read.

How should the six rows be chosen?

By mixing what's true, what's mildly unflattering, and one row that's a complete write-off.

A chart of six virtues reads as a puppy fan-club poster. A chart of six vices reads as bitter. The version that works sits somewhere in between: a couple of ordinary, neutral facts (SLEPT, ATE), a couple of specific, slightly embarrassing habits that are true of one particular animal (BARKED AT POST, SAT ON LAPTOP), and one row that's simply lost, entirely crosses, no ambiguity. The specific habits are what make it about this animal rather than a generic naughty-pet joke — the same reasoning that makes a coat pattern more particular than a breed name.

The circled cell is the one incident

A single circled cell, off in the corner of the grid somewhere, works because a chart otherwise made of routine ticks and crosses treats one day differently on purpose. It's the equivalent of a margin note in a real logbook — something happened on that day that the format doesn't have room to explain, and the circle is doing all the pointing. What that day actually was stays with whoever owns the animal; the shirt only needs to mark that it existed.

Does this only work for dogs?

No — any animal with a documented weekly rhythm fits the same grid.

A cat's chart runs differently (KNOCKED SOMETHING OFF SHELF, SLEPT ON KEYBOARD, MADE EYE CONTACT THEN LEFT), and so does a rabbit's or a parrot's. The row labels are the only thing that changes between species. The mechanism — a plain ruled form, ticks and crosses, one row that's entirely one mark — travels to whatever animal is actually being tracked.

Isn't this basically the same as a clinical vet chart?

The format is borrowed from the same tradition, but the content and the joke are the opposite.

A veterinary record exists to be accurate and useful to a professional reading it later, and that version is covered on its own terms. This chart borrows the visual grammar — the ruling, the rows, the daily columns — and points it at behaviour nobody would actually need to track, which is exactly where the joke lives. The two shirts share a look and nothing else.

Whose format is a chart like this?

Nobody's. A ruled grid with rows and columns is a basic administrative shape, not a design any institution owns, and the specific rows are drawn from the animal's own week.

Does it print well?

Yes, and cleanly — a grid of ticks and crosses is close to the simplest artwork this material can carry.

Straight ruling and flat marks hold up at any size, and the row labels are the one part that benefits from being set larger than a real chart's handwriting, since small type is what fills in first on fabric. One ink is enough for the whole grid; the circled cell in a second colour is the only place a second ink earns its keep. Dust blue, oatmeal and pale grey all read as the right kind of clipboard-adjacent background for this.

How do I get one made?

Describe the animal at JustOG — the six habits worth tracking, and which one gets the circle. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Seven crosses in a row, and no heading above the grid to say what any of it means.