breast impressions

The painted bust of Bones Patrol for the Denver Roller Dolls “Bout Against Breast Cancer” charity auction…

more information on the fundraiser HERE

more information on breastImpressions HERE

in our own backyard design contest

::blowing the dust off::

::ahem::

hello.

crowdspring has a contest going on right now for in our own backyard. the monetary reward = zero. so, why participate? i’m not going to explain… i’ll just repost the contest and pass the info along… i’m sure you can figure it out for yourself.

Give Back

Give Back is our community’s way of helping worthy non-profit and charity causes. Creatives have agreed that for these special projects, no monetary awards will be given. crowdSPRING will waive its fees and will assist the organizations with posting their project. We will collaborate together to help those less fortunate. Give Back projects will work just like standard projects, including contracts, wrap-up, notifications, etc. To help the learning process along in these projects, we will encourage creatives to collaborate and to provide constructive feedback to each other.
We will find ways to recognize creatives whose work is selected. Among other things, we will write in our blog about the project and the winning creative, the work will appear on a Hall of Fame type page that we are developing (this page will display winning designs), and we will look for ways to profile the winning creative(s) on our home page.
We’ll ask the winning creatives in Give Back projects to propose other worthy non-profits and charities that can benefit from this effort. We hope that in this small way, we can help non-profits and charities around the world.

Creative brief

It’s been 40 years since the idealism of Robert F. Kennedy and the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty” placed economic injustice at the heart of American political and social discourse. Since then poverty has fallen off the national agenda, and for decades the poor in America have been mostly invisible.

Today, the issue of poverty is again poised to emerge at the center of our national conversation. We have an idealistic new president who has known poverty and who has committed to working on the critical issues that are expanding poverty’s ranks. And, in stark contrast to the indifference of mainstream media, there is a renewed spirit of civic engagement, particularly among young people, in the United States today. Within this framework we find ourselves at a moment in American history when addressing poverty, particularly as it affects children, can once again be incorporated into mainstream priorities. After decades of inattention and even backlash directed at those of lesser means, our collective conscience is finally ripe for change.

In Our Own Backyard is an organization of photojournalists committed to the cause of social justice in the United States. Our inaugural project is a multimedia examination of the daily struggles of impoverished Americans: a comprehensive and innovative campaign that will affect the way the general public and policymakers think about poverty in America.

We believe that increasing awareness about poverty is a critical prelude to building support for initiatives that can create lasting impact in the lives of disadvantaged people. Visual story-telling is unique in its power to achieve that awareness, and it can foster empathy for those living in poverty in a way that text and statistics alone cannot.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT US:

We’re a non-profit 501(c)3 organization composed of photojournalists who are among the most recognized in our profession. Many have devoted their entire professional lives to documenting the lives of poor people and those who suffer injustice. A few are younger and more committed to the newer ‘personal vision’ esthetic, but most of us are classically trained and very content oriented. All of us want to use our skill to renew public awareness about domestic poverty. We believe that change doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that the failure of poverty to gain traction with the public is partially a result of the lack of visibility for the issue, partly a result of inaccurate or incomplete stereotypes about who poor people really are and the obstacles they face, and partly a result of a defeatist belief that poverty is insoluble. We intend to use the transformative power of visual journalism — still photography, multi-media and video — to address those misconceptions.

HERE IS WHAT WE NEED:

A great logo, simple yet dynamic, contemporary yet classic. Simple, right? LOL
Unless we want to change the color scheme on our website: http://inourownbackyard.us/ we should probably have a logo that works well with that color scheme.

OUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS:

We want this campaign to resonate across the broadest spectrum of people possible. I know that’s not particularly helpful, and, if you held a gun to my head I’d have to say our hope for change lies primarily with younger people: middle school, high-school and college students. They are the children of Obama, just as we were the children of Kennedy. Thirty years of Reaganism has left people my age disheartened and people 25-45 disengaged. (I would say disillusioned but that’s not possible, because for the most part they never had any illusions.) We want people to dream again of a more just society…with criteria for success greater than “Are you better off than you were four years ago?’

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okay… so, there it is. go HERE if you are interested in participating.

strangely stolen.

i search the internet every once in awhile for “asyrum” to see what sites are linking to my products so that i can put them in the “playing tag” section. in doing so, i just found the weirdest thing yet…

someone stole my asyrum ouija board image from my business cards and it looks like they glued it to a domino and put it on a necklace. weird.

anyhow, it’s on ebay… it’s too silly for me to worry about getting a creative license or anything… check it:

another funny part about this is that the seller wrote the description saying:

“The Mystic Oracle”

This image is from an actual Asyrum Ouija Board. The pendant is a vintage plastic domino, that is hand glazed with a glass like finish. The Aanraku bail is silver plated, and the FREE 17 inch chain is a silver tone metal ball chain.
Thank you for viewing my auction.☺

but, there is no such thing as an “asyrum ouija board” — ha. i just couldn’t use the word “ouija” in my design because it’s copyrighted.

silly.

FDA Approves Depressant for the Annoyingly Cheerful

“we have to erase the stigma attached with getting chirpy people help. real medical help. do you know what it’s like to be around these people? it’s pretty fucking annoying.”

emo piñata

i love the idea of an emo piñata. love it. so, ever since i heard it on the iPhone commercial, i’ve wanted to see a design of it. a couple of months later i finally got around to looking around for one. surprisingly, there was only one design that i could find out there and it wasn’t all that great… so, i decided to make my own. check it:

if i get the inkling to work on this design again, i think i’ll make a break in it with either broken hearts or candy hearts falling out and a line of kids that stretch around the bottom of the shirt to half way around the back waiting to take their swings. yup… i rarely come back to things, but you never know…

obamicon.me : i love generators

so there’s a new generator out there that will mimic shepard fairey’s “obey” poster campaign style. in particular, it is modeled after the obama version which is so popular these days. anyhow… to check it out and obamicon yourself, click HERE…

i wasted a little too much time having fun with this… check ‘em:

my asyrum version… monkey loves slurpee.

i LOVE generators.

valentine’s day design contest by spreadshirt

yup. it’s that time of year… time for designs with hearts.

spreadshirt is partnering with crowdSPRING.com, an online design community, in sponsoring a Valentine’s Day Design contest.

there are two $500 prizes up for grabs… not too bad.

here is what you need to do:

• go to crowdSPRING.com to find out more about the contest
• create valentine’s day themed vector designs

the deadline for submissions is january 15th, 2009.

if you’re selected as a winner, spreadshirt will purchase your design for $500.

(as a hint, don’t waste your time submitting any cynical designs. i did that and so did a couple of others… it’s not what spreadshirt’s going for. love=good is more of their angle… meh.)

featured designer on wordans.com

i hadn’t checked in with my wordans account in a couple of weeks, but when i did i found a nice surprise… i’m the featured designer right now. what does that mean? well, i’m on their homepage… great exposure. plus, if someone clicks on the “top 25 designers” link, i’m listed right on top.

i am pretty new to wordans so i am unsure on how long designers are featured for, but it’s pretty cool for now… =)

buy a stranger a cup of coffee

i just got done updating my spreadsheet for 2008’s earnings and have began doing the research on how to file taxes when you’re a self-employed graphic designer. when your income is coming from multiple sources, let me tell you something… be organized ahead of time. i can account for every penny i’ve made this year because of a simple excel spreadsheet. i could not imagine having to put together all of that information at the end of the year in comparison to just keeping track of it as you go.

anyhow…

this post really isn’t about taxes.

after crunching my numbers, i went around checking my balances in different places and found a few dollars sitting in my paypal account that i hadn’t yet transferred to my bank. i remembered that when i had money in my paypal that i had been meaning to buy a cup of coffee for a guy named ben.

who is ben?

ben is a graphic designer that runs benblogged.com where he gives away unique, quality vectors for any use… and i have definitely used them. last march, i had sent him a link to one of my stores showing him some of the ways i used his vectors and thanked him for letting his licenses remain open for royalty-free commercial use. he even wrote an entry about it HERE. so… yea… he includes this image link to buy him a cup of coffee on his sidebar:

…i thought that was a pretty fun way of interacting with viewers, even if they never actually do it. at the time, i was pretty broke. but, i always kept in mind that when i had some money i’d buy him a cup of coffee. 9 months later… i did. ha.

the graphic design community is smaller than you’d think. you put some time into it and you’ll start noticing the same users all over the place, the same free resources used by everyone and the diversity of designs put out using those free resources. it’s definitely interesting. anyhow, go check out benblogged.com… he’s got some great skull, wing and heraldry sets… plus a lot of other randomness.

hmm… now it’s time to get my own cup of coffee up in here. i’m on a little hiatus from drinking, but don’t be surprised if my little coffee cup graphic someday changes to “buy asyrum a shot” … =)

cheers.

2008

2008! …Professional Greys Business Card, a customizable business card template. I offer it in several colors, but for some reason the grey one is everyone’s favorite. It’s clean, sophisticated and feeding me… check it…

…happy new year. =)