My What A Huge Hard Drive You Have

I knew that because of the tshirt you are wearing. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise. sorry.
New design done for Rowdy Tease

clipped from www.cafepress.com

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Watching the news about some hooligan Alaskan kids who went looking for danger by unfurling a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner during a school event. Those darn kids! Buy 'em nice shoes and send 'em to school and all they want to do is start trouble and keep the lawyers fat and happy.

Seems the case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that the school administration was justified in handing out spankings. Take that you little rabble-rousers.

Anyway, I love the banner, especially the duck tape font employed. Decided that it must be made into a t-shirt. I lifted the words from the hoodlum's actual banner, cleaned it up, and laid it onto an actual Aramaic scroll that I found in the garage.

This shirt is available at Cafepress, but we would warn you not to wear this shirt around Juneau-Douglas High School. Not unless you want to spend some quality time in detention.

All-Electric Tee

Hard to believe now, but not that long ago there were still some folks who hadn't bought into this whole "electricity" concept. These Luddites would ask, "Why should I wire the barn for electricity when the kerosene lamps work just fine?" or "Why should I switch to electric heat when I got this big pile of coal?"
This is a shirt we've just worked up for RetroRanger at Cafepress. The "Live Better Electrically" campaign ran from 1956 to the late 1960s and was funded by some of the big electric manufacturers of the time...GE, Admiral, Phillips and Westinghouse. Ads appeared in national magazines extolling the wonders of electricity. And how about this...Ronald Reagan was the official TV spokeperson...a far cry from the wimp guy electricity is stuck with now. Big Ron could kick propane-guy's butt in a heartbeat.
Another aspect of the campaign was the "Medallion Home" plaques that homebuilders attached to all-electric new construction throughout the sixties. The 3-inch round brass-colored plaques used this same design and allowed homeowners to proudly proclaim that they were on the cutting edge of room lighting and bacon-frying technology.
I especially like this graphic because of the human figures. I don't know when these mod streamlined people made their first appearance, but I'd have to figure this logo was pretty early use. Just this morning I saw this man and woman on the restroom signs at Shopko. Yes, I did say hi.

Everlasting Gin-Joints

Anybody involved in the creative process has got to see the importance of copyrights and its cousins...trademarks and patents. Copyrights protect the interests of the authors and creators by granting them a temporary monopoly, or ownership of exclusive rights for a specified length of time. That's cool.
What fries my bacon are the Copyright Fascists, usually immortal corporations, that hold tightly their ages-old copyrights with iron fists. Remember when the Disney people were suing a children's day-care center for painting Snow White designs on the walls. People like that are just dick-heads.Here's a t-shirt design I worked up for the Band Geek Section on my Retro Ranger Cafepress store.

This design lasted about 45 minutes on Cafepress before it got the boot. Unfortunately, Cafepress doesn't explain why a design gets tossed. Let's see, could be Warner Brothers, they probably hold the copyright on the movie "Casablanca" that the underlying art comes from. Suppose there could be an Ingrid Bergman estate protecting use of her image, same for Bogie.
But let's get real...this movie came out in 1942 and is embedded so deeply in the American culture that to exercise absolute control over every image seems heavy-handed. No skin off my nose, it was a good exercise in design and I'll just move on to something else.

Hey, Let's Go Water Skiing

Its almost that time, almost warm enough to go water skiing, or wakeboarding if you prefer. Got to thinking about summer fun and put together a design for Retro Ranger at Cafepress.

Back in the early 1950s the Center of the Water Skiing World was Cypress Gardens, Florida, and Dick Pope Jr was the King of the Water Skiers. Besides competing and promoting the sport he manufactured the best skis of the day in his Cypress Gardens Skis factory. I think the shirt design came out pretty good, especially since all I had to work from was a rather small picture of a ski decal: