Illustrated Aphorisms

Well, actually, the selling part is true enough. The real impetus for my store came from a combination of two things:

1) Unemployment
2) A Maxim magazine article I found online:

MAKE MORE MONEY AT WORK!
How to work a second job from the comfort of your crappy office.

This article described several freelance-type jobs you could do at your desk while pretending to do your real job. The one that caught my eye was "E-Commerce Jockey."

Brilliant T-shirt idea? Download a free trial of Photoshop, use your office scanner to create a design, and enlist cafepress.com or zazzle.com to print the goods.

I read this and thought, "What's not to like?" Though lacking an employer whose time and resources I could poach, I did have a slightly antiquated version of Photoshop, and ideas for T-shirt designs have been floating in and out of my head for years. The time was right. Or as right as it was ever going to be. If there were sites like CafePress or Zazzle that would take care of the dreary administrative stuff like printing, inventory management, and shipping, I would be free to handle the creative end.

The article also said pay would range from "pennies to gold bullion." Naturally, the first half of that equation left no trace of an impression on me. Most definitely and assuredly I was going to make gold bullion. Indeed, a fantasy soon took hold that flocks of customers would darken the sky the moment I hung up a shingle, eager to transform themselves into mobile billboards in exchange for the chance to parade around in images universally recognized as Works of Creative Genius.

~*~

Along with talent, aptitude, and connections, such delusional self-confidence is essential to the success of small business owners!

Alas, I have only two of the four. Worse yet, I have an opposing tendency: Curmudgeon Attitude. It leads me to pose questions that stop me in my tracks, such as, "does anyone in America really need more merchandise?" The implicit answer is, of course, "no." There probably isn't a more self-defeating line of thought a small business owner/operator can take.

But one might as well ask, "does the world really need another song? Another movie? Another web site? Another book? Another baby?" The implicit answer is again "no," and yet people persist in creating more music, movies, web sites, books, and babies. Unless you got religion, there is no why or wherefore to existence. We're just here. Therefore even if the world doesn't need more t-shirts, it's damn well going to get them.

And it damn well is going to get mine. Which it DOES need, even if it doesn't know that yet.

I wish I could say the clouds parted, a blinding light shone forth, and a deep resonant voice spoke words that shook me to the very core of my being, when the time came to decide on a name for my shop. In fact I was sitting in my beat up office chair looking at an empty field box on my computer monitor and realizing I'd given no thought at all to this rather essential detail. "Something Illustrated, or Illustrated Something," I hastily decided.

The first variation on that theme to pop into my head was Illustrated Oddities. I even designed some logos around it:

Notwithstanding what I said earlier about delusional self-confidence, there was no way I could escape the reality this name and the logos I'd come up with to support it were lame.

It was back to the drawing board.*

Since I'd spent a lot of time searching for suitable one line jokes**, I settled on Illustrated Aphorisms next. This may not seem to you like a big improvement, or even a tiny sliver of an improvement, but it was enough to satisfy me for the nonce. I turned to punching up my logo.


The second attempt was better, if only because I went at it with some actual ideas about what might be visually interesting. That the logo should include the letters "I" and "A" was obvious enough. Why not have a paint brush that sort of looks like an "i"? And then, have this brush lay across a tent-shaped swoosh to form an "A"? And then, set both of those inside a nearly closed circle apparently traced by the brush? Like so:


Finally, I wanted a customized banner for my store; according to the CafePress forums, most serious shop owners have them, and I am nothing if not serious. The concept isn't complicated. They generally start with a long rectangle. For mine I chose to add a gradient shading from mid blue to light blue, a set of letters that cast a shadow, another that are sort of like slanted tiles, and my logo at the left end. Maybe it's not as snazzy as an animated GIF, but it says everything it needs to say cleanly and simply.

* Drawing boards were these big square things kind of like a table, except tilted at a 45 degree angle. Designers used to use them to draw pictures before personal computers and Photoshop.

** A suitable one line joke has to be funny as I reckon funny, and just as important, lend itself to a visual interpretation. Not enough of them do both for my purposes.

Having read this far, you already know I have some ambivalence about The Imperative to Consume. If it wasn't for the opportunity to create and manipulate images I would not now be doing what I'm doing. Which is kind of odd, because I never previously had much interest in the graphic arts. It's good that, having arrived at middle age, I'm still discovering things I didn't know about myself.

But enough about me. Let's talk about my designs!

This was the first one I attempted. Ironically, it really was aimed at the edification and all around betterment of humanity. Sort of. My inspiration came from an NPR radio documentary on human evolution and why our particular branch of hominids became smarter than all the others. The important thing was that we, that is our species, originated in Africa before spreading everywhere else. Everything that makes us what we are --our capacities for language, abstract reasoning, and innovation-- was baked and tested first in Africa. Meaning we are essentially all Africans.

But as much as I was moved to create it, I'm no longer sure it makes for a good t-shirt image. It works better as a poster. I wrote a lens about this design, which you can read if you [Click Here]

This was my second design. It is much more in line with the approach I prefer to take when Edifying and Bettering humanity. Like "All Africans," it was inspired by something I heard on a radio program. You can read more about that at a lens I wrote describing the creation of "Bury Me Face Down." Just [Click Here]

This was my third design. I got the slogan a few years ago from a snarky but entirely fitting post on a music fan message board; someone used it to dis a ranting idjit who really needed to practice shutting up. When the t-shirt bug bit me, I remembered that post and decided there were bound to a lot of other situations when it would apply, ranting idjits being rather thick on the ground these days.

You can read more about it in [This Lens]. I wrote it to describe the incident that gave me the idea, and the process of creating the design itself.

This was my fourth design. There was no special inspiration for it. I searched a number of web sites for one line jokes that I liked, and recognized "Eat Right, Stay Fit, Die Anyway" had potential. This, the original version, was very spare. Just the three silhouette figures with plain text captions above them.




Some months later I did some further experiments. The end result (for now) was a version that enlarged the text and used fonts I thought suitably related to good nutrition, fitness, and death. The three figures remained as they were.

This was my fifth design. Like the preceeding, it's a two-fer. The original, cartoonish cityscape in distress came first...








...followed some months later by a striped down version. My intent the second time was to have the text graphically represent Chaos! Panic! and Pandemonium! as well as spell them.

A lens I wrote describes the process of creating both. You can read about it if you [Click Here].

This was my sixth design, and one of the last I generated during an intensive burst of activity from February to March of 2008. I really liked the quote, but in using it kind of violated my rule about preferring those that lend themselves to visual representation. "Money Buys Happiness" doesn't really. Best I could think of was a portrait of a shabby looking guy pleading with the world for the big break he already knows won't do him much good.

Although I'm fond of it, I haven't promoted it very hard. Lately however I've come across other phrases I could easily imagine this character using, so we might be seeing more of him.

This was my seventh design. Although I had the first version done by the end of March, it has undergone a number of revisions since. I suspect that like "All Africans," it might work better as a poster than a t-shirt.

I spent a good chunk of April 2008 beating this into shape. The early versions simply spelled out "Money Talks! ...Mine Just Says Goodbye" in fake greenbacks. Later versions --and the one I prefer-- has the cash flying from an open wallet like a swarm of bats.

[This Lens] describes the creation of the design. It remains among my favorites even though it's not selling at all.

While preliminary work on this began in March 2008, I didn't get really hard into it until May 2008 because I thought In Deep didn't have as much sales potential. So of course it has sold more than those I decided to work on first.




The first version was a cartoon. I've never been entirely satisfied with it, although it's still available at my store. The proportions of the face aren't right. Yet.







Rather than try to fix it, I went ahead with a plan to have the aphorism serve duty as both text and graphic (which I used again in the revised version of Chaos! Panic! Pandemonium!). As you can see, the words are shaped like a head, which is half submerged in... well, the blue one is clearly water, and the brown one could be mud or could be something else.

Another find from a search for one liners. Other versions of the image have more boxes, and/or split the design so that half is on the front and half on the back of a shirt. It always (usually) gets a laugh.

If you like this design, I would ask a favor of you:
Vote for it at T-Shirt Countdown. [VOTE FOR MY T-SHIRT!]

A one liner that jumped to the head of my work que in Aug. 2008, because I wanted to do further experiments with letters that function as both text and design element. The heads were not part of it originally, but I decided there needed to be something in the middle. Laugh At Me, along with In Deep, are as close as I want to get to a words-only design.

This is the blue version. There are also variants in red and green.

And another from the one liner slush pile. My original conception had a whole group of people staring blankly at a personal computer system with question marks hovering above their heads. It was soon clear that approach had nothing much going for it. Too little action. Having one poor sod staring blankly at the catastrophe he just caused is visually funnier. And since most of us have done something like it, closer to reality.

My first stab at a holiday-themed design. I did it in both male and female versions. This one sold the best, but on ornaments, not as t-shirts. Holiday humor --whatever the exact holiday-- has never appealed to me. I suppose if people are buying it I'll have to reconsider.

My second stab at a holiday design. You'll note it's just a tweak of Chaos! Panic! Pandemonium! with Santa standing in for the yellow smiley. Didn't sell at all. But that was probably because I only got around to introducing it a week before Christmas.

My second attempt at a Valentine's Day design (The first isn't available right now). I was aiming for something affectionate and threatening. Judging by the reaction it gets, the latter impression comes through more strongly than the former. Dunno why.

Holiday knick-knacks and other stuff being so popular, I decided to try something for St. Patrick's Day. Other than that it would include a shamrock and beer, I didn't have a clear idea what the design ought to be. So what you see here is what comes from noodling around for half a day (plus two or three more for refining and tweaking). Not bad, but a bit generic.

Inspired by my first attempt at a St. Patrick's Day design, I decided to try again. This design was the result. Needless to say, it is extremely rude. But the public deserves to know where green beer really comes from.

I was going to stay away from politics; political debates used to be one of my great passions, but now I mostly find all the axe grinding that comes with them tiresome. And then the governor of my state went and did something so blitheringly stupid --even for him-- I couldn't leave it alone: he tried to sell Barack Obama's US senate after Obama won the 2008 presidential election. No need for a funny slogan. The actions of Rod "The Fraud" Blagojevich (blah-GOY-eh-vich) speak for themselves.

He'll look good in an orange jumpsuit.

Wouldn't you know, it seemed like only a few days had passed since the feds arrested Rod "The Fraud" when another story topped it. Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, inadvertently created what will be among the defining images of our lamentable 43rd president. And thus I did my second political design in less than a month.

Who knows, maybe I'll do more of them. Maybe not. It isn't a priority.