A while back I designed a T-shirt based on the theme of love for a contest on Threadless.com, which I called LOVE IS BLIND. You can see the original submission here. And if I had written this blog a year ago, that would be the end of the story, because it didn’t win the contest. But that’s not the end of the story.
Today Threadless and Gap Inc. announced a new partnership to sell a special line of tees in Gap stores. And I’m very excited to announce that LOVE IS BLIND has been chosen to be included in the women’s line!
I’m really psyched to be able to share this, partly because it’s been such a long time coming. I was contacted at the beginning of August last year and informed that one of my designs was being considered for this opportunity, and sworn to secrecy for 180 days while deliberations were being made. In late January I was informed my design had been chosen, but still wasn’t allowed to share until the official launch. So I’ve been sitting on this news for quite a while. It’s been hard!
As a designer, it’s always nice to see something you create become something tangible. And to have that thing be produced on any kind of a large scale is pretty exciting. In a way, I think I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around the idea of being able to see something I designed at home on my computer, made real, sitting on a shelf in a store in the mall.
I want to say a big thank you to the awesome people at Threadless and Gap for giving me this opportunity. I hope the design will spark conversation and maybe even change thinking. Thanks for reading. Now go buy a T-shirt! :)
Click here to see LOVE IS BLIND at gap.com.
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3 months ago)
One of my recent projects has been to transform one of the rooms in our house into a home office. I’ve been working from home, so I wanted to have a clean, organized, yet fun place in which to do that. I’ve never really had my own workspace, so it’s been a fun process.
First, I took everything out and repainted. Thanks to my wife, Carrie, and my lil’ sis, Alexa, for helping me with that. The room used to be a youthful baby blue. Now it’s a neutral grey, which may not be very exciting, but is a good color to have behind a monitor.
Next I put in some shelves and storage. You really can’t have enough storage in your office. Especially when you have desks with no drawers. I also introduced some color to the room by putting up a few pieces of artwork. Carrie made the piece of art pictured above. It’s a quote by one of my favorite artists, Saul Bass, in purple, because I read somewhere that purple can inspire creativity.
I put up a whiteboard for to-do lists and various brainstorming, mind mapping exercises. It really brings together the whole “office” theme.
And here’s Carrie’s little desk. She sewed the curtains, as well. So that’s my new office space. Modest, but comfy. It’ll probably undergo some more changes here and there, but I like it. It’s a good place for me to work, think, and create.
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3 months ago)
A handful of months ago I completely redesigned my portfolio site, giving it a much needed upgrade and making it the first truly designed website I have ever put together. My previous sites had all used frames, or flash, or both. Ugh. The new site is better looking, better built, and easier to use. It’s also the first site I’ve ever worked on for longer than a week. So I was pretty excited when it went live. But as excited as I was then (I already can’t remember when that was), I am even more excited to announce that it is now responsive.
According to Ethan Marcotte in his book on the subject, responsive design is composed of three distinct parts: a flexible grid, flexible images, and media queries. And I am really psyched to be able to say that I have achieved that. Now, having said that, I realize what a huge nerd I am.
Now, I will be the first to admit that the site isn’t perfect. There’s a lot of tweaking and troubleshooting that will be happening over the coming days, weeks, months. My code is a little sloppy, and there are a lot of defined pixels in my stylesheet. That’s mainly because converting pixels to percentages and ems is a time consuming and mathematical process, and I’m impatient and don’t like math.
So, bottom line: If you see something wonky in my site, or just something that could be better, shoot me an email. I welcome feedback. Thanks for visiting!
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4 months ago)
Recently I had the pleasure of working on a fun little project with a couple of friends. Dan and Jen got married, and one of the many little cool things they did, besides hold the ceremony on a nature reserve, was to bottle their own wine for service at their reception. And they asked me to design some custom labels for them. They had a general idea of what they wanted and their color scheme, but gave me free license to do whatever I liked. I had a really great time working with these guys.
Here are the bottles, nice and neatly arranged. I’m hoping to post some better closeup shots in my portfolio soon, but for now, here’s a bit of detail I shared on dribbble. Congrats, Dan and Jen!
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7 months ago)
