June 24th, 2009 by Trevor

This week was the 100th derby over at shirt.woot.  They chose to go with “mystery”, which was not only the theme of the derby, but also the way the site was run.  They replaced the names of all of the submitters with “****” so that people would have to vote for their favorite designs, rather than their favorite designers.  It was a great idea in theory, but the users found a way to uncover the hidden names, so a lot of people were found out anyways.  I usually submit under “noisdois”, but to avoid detection (and to really play up the “mystery” theme), I made another account that would say “nicetry” every time you tried to peek at the artist’s name.

Before this derby even started I asked Kris Robinson if he wanted to collaborate on a piece.  We threw around a couple of ideas, and this was the design we chose to go with (here is the other idea we could have gone with.  I haven’t yet decided if we went with the right one).  He did the line work (flawlessly, I might add), and I did the coloring.  I chose to go with orange for a couple of reaons:

1.  The orange shirt color is rarely picked for printing.  The only one in the reckoning right now is “The Cake is a Liar”, which ironically has been around longer than any other shirt on the list.  I’d love to win a design with a color that is not chosen very often, just to shake things up a little

2.  It really was my favorite color for this design.  I tried it with a couple of different colors (green and blue to be specific), and though they looked pretty good, it didn’t quite pack the punch that this orange color gives it.

Anyways, it’s been a real pleasure working with Kris to finish this design.  He’s a good man, and an incredible artist.  I learned a lot, and I’ve also learned that I’ve got a lot to learn :/

Check out his website.

June 23rd, 2009 by Trevor

I originally made this design for the contest over at Meu World.  It got enough support to get second place, which made me $250!  The contest ended at the end of may, but they haven’t quite taken it down yet (they’re being a tad slow to update their website) so you can still go on and vote, but it won’t do any good.

So I’ve decided, since enough people liked this one, to submit it to Cameesa.  I’ve never done a sub there before, and I don’t know how well it’ll do there, but I figured I might as well give it a shot.  Cameesa works a little differently than other t-shirt websites, so I’ve posted the tutorial here.

I had to change the colors a little bit to make it work with their templates, but I still like it.  I hope you do too!

June 17th, 2009 by Trevor

I have decided to re-submit this design to a different website.  It was suggested to me that I submit it to springleap.com, so I did.  It’s not doing to bad right now, I think it has potential to print.  If you like it, please hop on over and vote on it!

June 17th, 2009 by Trevor

Hey guys!  As you can see I decided to spice up the home page a little bit.  Every time you click the refresh button it’s going to randomly draw out one of several pre-loaded images to put as the background.  I decided that the old one was just a little bit too dry (though I did like the marquee idea.  That was good while it lasted .

I’m also glad to say that I finally got ADOBE photoshop.  I’ve been using Corel photo-paint for years now, and didn’t know the difference between the two until I finally got Adobe version and noticed how much better it really is.  My computer isn’t the fastest thing on the block (2ghz processor, 2 gigs of ram… I don’t remember how good my video card is at the moment), but it’s able to handle these programs pretty well.  The thing that I notcied is that Adobe is better at using the resources of the compter than Corel.  Some might argue as to why that is, and that on THEIR machine Corel is faster, but on mine Corel takes forever to load filters, and sometimes it just crashes altogether.  So if you’re going for speed and efficiency, Adobe is the way to go.  I’m sold

Okay, after reading that last paragraph I feel like I’m not giving Corel enough credit.  Corel really is awesome, and it’s much cheaper than the Adobe stuff.  I bought the Corel 12 Graphics Suite for $100 (as a student, mind you), and the Adobe equivalent was about $350-$400.  Honestly, the two programs are about 80% similar in terms of capabilities, and some might say that the Corel stuff is a little more user-friendly.  And if you have a fast computer, you might not even notice a difference in the speed of the two.  The biggest problem is that people won’t look at you seriously if you put on your resume that you know how to use Corel Photo-Paint and Draw as opposed to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The industry standard is Adobe.  Period.  If you don’t know Adobe, you don’t know anything.  Goodbye.

Gimp is just ridiculously slow on my computer.  I understand that it’s made for linux users, but it would be nice if it would work just as well on a computer that is owned by a non-computer programmer.  At least it’s free :/

Lastly,  my Joy shirt is still up for sale, and the good people over at the goodjoe sent me a coupon code to get 10% for anybody who’s buying for the first time.  This one actually printed quite nicely; I’m impressed with the quality of the halftones.

Here’s the discount code:  fa2d5d71b15b

June 14th, 2009 by Trevor

I have submitted a design at shirt.woot.com called “Photosynthesis”.  It seems to be doing pretty well right now, and any help to push it along would be much apreciated.

I actually thought of this design while I was sitting in my biology class.  I was playing with different ideas, like “Sun Bathing” (a sun taking a bath), and different “eclipse” ideas, but nothing was really speaking to me.  Then I started looking around for ideas, and found myself in the classroom, where we had just learned about photosynthesis.  I don’t really know why this the first thing that I thought of when that happened, but here it is:

June 13th, 2009 by Trevor

Looks like the people over at TShirtReview.com liked my Joy shirt enough that they decided to blog about it!

http://www.tshirtreview.com/?p=776

I hope that Goodjoe continues to get good publicity and grow, because they really are an incredible group of people.  I’ve been contacting Nathan and Jourdan (the founders and owners of Goodjoe) since I first learned of the site, and they are some of the greatest, most selfless people I know.  They are pushing to inspire change, a cause that is worthy of our support.  :D