Making Things I Like

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TLDR Summary:
After 13 years of designing websites and mobile applications, I’ve decided to return to my roots and create (and sell) things by hand at my new site, Stay Vigilant. It’s going to feature posters, t-shirts and other design artifacts. I’m starting slow, but in the coming year I’ll be adding new creations, day-by-day, month-by-month.
One of the first projects I’m featuring on my storefront is the poster series I was able to successfully fund through Kickstarter earlier this year, Bicycles For Our Minds.
If you don’t see something you like, sign up for the SV newsletter (it’s in the righthand column) and I’ll let you know when I post new pieces.
Extended Chunk:
Long ago, in an analogue galaxy far, far away I was a fine art major with a concentration in graphic design. Figure Drawing. Photography. Painting. Print Making. Book Binding. The trunk of my car and the floor of my bedroom included: sketchbooks, x-acto knives, linoleum blocks, gouache, cardboard, stretcher bars, conté crayons, Canvas, card stock, tracing paper, charcoal, oil paint, acrylic paint. Almost every piece of clothing I owned had an ink or paint stain on it.
Back in these days, I stretched (and gessoed) my own canvases to paint on. I developed my own film from the Pentax K-1000 I shot photos with. I cut my own mat board and mounted my design work onto it with spray mount. I wasn’t always happy with my work, but there was a great satisfaction in creating things by hand.
When I brought my wife (then girlfriend) to my parents house for the first time 12 years ago, she saw painting and drawing hung on the walls. She asked me who made them. I told her I did. She was surprised, because even back then, she knew me as a guy who designed websites. Who did things on an RGB screen.
I don’t think she’s surprised by my new venture. She’s caught me sniffing the bindings of hardcover books at bookstores on numerous occasions. The first time, she didn’t know what to think. She probably thought I was doing some weird drug. I had to explain to her I loved the smell of paper and ink. Maybe it transports me back to happy time in college. A time when I decided what I wanted to make and for whom.
Well, there’s no reason I can’t start doing it again.

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