Cafepress is having a sale on their yellow messenger bags, which I've been eyeing for a long time, so I designed & ordered one on Monday night. While I was at it, I did a bumper sticker that says "I am your traffic jam entertainment," which I've been wanting since I heard of an art car driver who had one. Coincidentally they had a sale on journals from your own store, so I made one of those too, using a VRT image. I'm really interested in seeing how that one turns out. If it looks nice, I might do some VRT products for general sale.
I pestered poor Georg with fiddly questions all night, like "Should these three bubbles go here or there?" and "Which of these colors do you like better, the purple and grey or the blue on blue? The purple? You're sure? It's not too purple?" and "Is this typeface hard to read from a distance?"
When I asked him whether he agreed that I should eliminate the dot over the i in entertainment on the bumper sticker, he gently pointed out that it was, in fact, only a bumper sticker. To which I replied that I would pay this much attention to detail on a project for a client, and shouldn't I go to the same effort for myself? Of course the main difference is that I generally work on client projects during the day, when I have to make these decisions on my own and can't bother him about them.
I offered to make something for him too, so it wouldn't all be about me, but he didn't want anything. I think sometimes it's hard to choose something from Cafepress because it's so open-ended. "Do you want a T-shirt?" "What would it say on it?" "Anything at all. Anything you want." It's kind of hard to come up with something on the spur of the moment.
2 Comments
One difference between a bumper sticker for yourself and something for a client is that you don't have to get it right before release if it's for your own use. You can change the design, print a new one, and put it on your car.
I recently did a player aid chart for a game I enjoy and posted it to the Boardgamegeek web site/file repository. I've revised it twice since then. Knowing that I could revise and repost it was terrifically liberating; I might have tweaked and twiddled it endlessly and never gotten around to posting it if I thought I had to get it right the first time.
That's true, and I do love the ability to endlessly revise something like a website. But since I'm paying for this cafepress stuff, I want to get it right the first time if possible. Although the bumper sticker wouldn't be expensive to have reprinted, the messenger bag would.