Here are some of the most recent dogs completed. Was looking forward to doing the Toy Story dog and all his slinky bits. This design has slowed due to competing priorities. The “iconic” designs are always for fun. So I’ll get to it again after other priorities wrap-up here.
]]>I supported X-Tools in their latest Kickstarter campaign, which introduced a kit enabling users to "burn" screens digitally directly from your laptop. Here's the first design (above) I've created with the intention of using with this innovative technology.
I have yet to focus on creating designs specifically for the celestial bodies within our Solar System. While I've incorporated plenty of illustrations of planets and moons into mission designs, they've never been the sole focus. To initiate a mini-series for this new project, I plan to craft some prints centered around my favorite celestial bodies, beginning with Io, the first major moon of Jupiter.
The video showcases the XTools D1 Pro in operation, which is noticeably SLOW, capturing a process that spanned approximately 1.25 hours. This could potentially be attributed to my learning curve with the device. It's possible that with more experience, I might discover that the settings for the screen-cutting process can be 4x quicker.
The video showcases the XTools D1 Pro in operation, which is noticeably SLOW, capturing a process that spanned approximately 1.25 hours. This could potentially be attributed to my learning curve with the device. It's possible that with more experience, I might discover that the settings for the screen-cutting process can be 4x quicker.
The image above displays only the red ink, which looks satisfactory on its own. However, I know I will have an issue with aligning the black ink with the left side of the halftone on the moon’s limb. Accurate registration will be nearly impossible. To address this, I plan to re-burn the screen so that the orange ink covers areas where the black can overprint.
I'll provide another update once each step proves successful. At that point, I intend to share details of the complete process, including these modifications made to the red plate.
]]>The Mule also kicks out all kinds of car decals including bumper stickers, front sticky decals, window clings, and custom vinyl lettering. See all the options for branding your ride here.
]]>On top of being lost to time, Apple discontinued System 9 months after we released it on CD. Rendering the interactive portion unlaunchable for Mac users almost from the very start.
It is about 95% a perfect rebuild of the original. Not at all to focus on the bad bits, but there are a few issues for those who may recall the original build.
But BRAVO to John Uleis for taking the time to bring back something I thought I may never see again.
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The influence is obvious when compared.
The thing I never loved about web design was how fleeting it was. Once a site was pulled down there was little chance anyone would ever see it again. Unless you took a trip in the Wayback Machine.
So it was nice to bring this back to life again. For me— it is a fun little link back to another life. When the internet was fun and so full of promise.
]]>Ever wondered what legendary stories from science fiction, horror and fantasy took place in your neck-of-the-woods? Maybe just curious exactly where those raiders finally put that Lost Ark into deep storage? This subtly distorted map of the 48 contiguous states does exactly that, and is aptly dubbed The Altered States of America (click the image for a better view). For this task, Chop Shop researched a large number of films, television shows, comics and more to discover not some these things were filmed or produced, but where according to the scripts and scenes these stories are supposed to have actually taken place.
What made this difficult is the lack of general information available on the internet for this specific type of information. Most databases will have plenty of details about where filming took place, but as everybody knows — that often has nothing to do with the location the story is actually set in. As an example, King Kong was mostly filmed on a set in California while it continues to this day to be one of the most iconic images in film history for the city of New York. Other locales were hard to pin down such as Stanley Kubrick’s legendary epic horror film The Shining. Most of the film wasn’t even shot in the USA but instead on EMI sound sets in England. Meanwhile, the opening aerial scenes of the hotel which is now so familiar to fans worldwide were shot at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge. On top of that, The Stanley Hotel located in Colorado is said to have been Stephen King’s inspiration for his Overlook Hotel and actually began writing the novel while staying there with his wife. In the end, the novel winds up providing the definitive location: the Colorado Rockies in the fictional town of Sidewinder.
The final tally for the resulting map comes to 136 illustrated references reaching back in time to the golden age of television and The Twilight Zone to references much more recent like The Walking Dead. Take a look at the full key image (click the image above) and see who your fictional neighbors are. The project was eventually screen printed after a successful Kickstarter campaign that was funded at 364% of the original goal. While that campaign ended in 2013, the resulting prints with more items added since can be purchased online from the Altered States store.
But here is a warning… If you live in the northeast, look out for martians — if you live in the south beware of zombies, but if you live on the west coast be ready for anything.
]]>We started shopping around for a solution, but most retail print storage is made for production needs. They have many shelves, but are designed for just a few prints at a time. Not fifty or one hundred fifty. Then we saw Linnmon at Ikea and it was the perfect size, a few inches larger than our biggest prints in both length and width. Now we only needed to figure out how to stack them with just a few inches between each one.
Lots of people use pipe fittings to do custom furniture. We knew we would need short .5" pipe stock and the cuffs that would fit those. We always like to first check with our local hardware stores, but few had all black stock and even fewer had .5" flange cuffs smaller than 3" at full width. As usual, Amazon did and we purchased these pre-threaded connector 10 packs and this 2.5" wide pipe flange 20 packs.
Attaching the flanges to the bottom of Linnmon is fairly straightforward. Pre-drill the tops and using short wood screws, drill them in with the drill set to very low torque. Then thread the pipe and flange for the next top.
The only tricky part is screwing in the next top with the previous one already attached. Again, pre-drilling the screw holes will make this work go quicker. A flexible drill attachment would be best to do this job in order to set the screws in straight, but a longe extender as shown here will do despite needing to screw them in at a slight angle. You cannot screw in the back third hole, but that is not a problem as this is only be for low-impact storage needs and will not used as a work or lunch desk.
In the end, we stacked it five deep, and it looks like this from below. The table tops are actually made of particle board, but the guts are corrugated cardboard! Which explains why it very lightweight and why the tops are only $9 each.
Here is what it looks like in use. The best part is that the full-price is only around $180 and took maybe 3 hours to complete!
]]>We are also offering three new prints in our new Typography Shop which the creator, Patrick King, calls the Love Story Series. Each one features a cloud of love song lyrics from the biggest hits of the ‘60s, ’70s and ’80s. There are even some screen print versions of each still available but in a very short supply. If you prefer screened to archival digital, better grab one asap!
]]>Launched back in 2008 by Patrick King who wanted to create a destination on the web for typographic gear and themes addressing the design and advertising industry. Today we are proud to announce that Typography Shop is the newest member of the Chop Shop family of stores. We are opening with the three best-selling tees from their catalog Make the Logo Bigger, Well Kerned, and The Sans Tee.
]]>This month’s Space-T of the Month Club is very typographic! Our partner Icarus Interstellar is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to accomplishing interstellar flight by the year 2100. They just completed their third bi-annual Starship Congress at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. This year’s keynote speakers included the founder of Momentus Space and our own Mat Kaplan of The Planetary Society.
]]>We added a new print to our collection which we have dubbed, “Worlds Only”. Featuring the global art for eight planets, eight moons, three dwarf planets and one star. Based on our Planetary Blocks project, now taking pre-orders.
]]>We updated our “Spacecraft Only poster for a whole new look and added another eight missions. Based on our Planetary Blocks project, now taking pre-orders.
]]>This month’s Space-T of the Month Club is featuring our classic design Above Earth, which features 23 historic missions in Earth orbit. A timeline follows the missions in a spiral starting with Sputnik in 1957 and ending with the Dragon capsule, scheduled to have its first crewed test mission in 2020!
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As seen above, the actual samples compared to the mock-up we made with Illustrator and Photoshop in March is pretty close. The biggest changes were intentional, such as the browns going more red—although now Ganymede and Callisto seem too red. But we may still tweak a few things without going back to having samples sent.
Just for fun. Here are some other images:
There are a few new items we dropped into the catalog over the last few weeks including; the Icarus Interstellar brand ID on a transparent vinyl, a LightSail necklace from The Planetary Society, and a print version of our Drake Equation design for SETI Institute.
]]>The next New Frontiers class mission has been selected and it is called “Dragonfly”! The first mission to return to Titan (moon of Saturn) since the Cassini/Huygens probe landed on its surface in 2005.
Dragonfly is a dual-quadcopter and will fly for much larger distances than we are used to seeing with traditional rovers. As for the destination, Titan will provide some amazing aerial views and scientific discoveries with its methane/ethane rain, rivers, lakes and oceans. It should be quite an alien encounter on a world likes of which humanity has never seen before especially in such a dramatic fashion.
The mission launch is planned for 2026 with arrival at Titan in 2034.
There are not any Dragonfly mission posters… yet, but there are Saturn related items in our catalog. Especially our Saturn Tee which features a small Titan perched below the quote, “Something incredible is waiting to be known”.
]]>Shown above is an artist rendering of Asteroid 2019 OK. This errant asteroid is estimated to be about 187-427 feet in size and is moving at around 55,000 miles per hour. What makes it sepcial is that it zipped by us at about 1/5 the distance between the the Earth and the Moon and did so without warning. While it did not pose an extinction-level threat to life, it is something that astronomers like to classify as a “city-killer asteroid”.
Earth defense is a serious threat our world. While the type of collision that killed the dinosaurs is unlikely— it is still possible. Help raise awareness with our KickAsteroid collection from The Planetary Society, including sticker sets, pins, patches and a print that highlights four historic impacts and three types of missions to stop a killer in its path. While you are at it, why not also support the Society’s Earth Defense Program.
]]>Flight controllers deployed LightSail 2’s sails last week! “…we successfully set sail on beams of sunlight,” said Bill Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society. “Thanks to our team and our tens of thousands of supporters around the world, the dream started by The Planetary Society’s founders more than 4 decades ago has taken flight.” Preliminary data shows LightSail 2 is already recieving the gentle push from the Sun which will eventually push the spacecraft into higher Earth orbit.
After the big launch at the end of June, a few LightSail 2 variants were only available as backorders. Now everything is back in stock and you can get all the LightSail related swag you like and we will ship it out to you while LightSail 2 is still flying high overhead.
]]>All the science included on our project was reviewed first by Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor at The Planetary Society. In many cases, some of this information was almost common knowledge for someone with Emily’s background. But even something as simple as size sometimes required double-checking for bodies recently explored such as Pluto or Ceres.
The interiors side of the blocks is where we are breaking some new ground. To gather this data required going to several sources for the most recent theories. I would even go out on a limb and say this set of blocks may be the only source where you can find up-to-date information on the interiors of all the major planetary bodies of our Solar System.
For an amazing deep dive into how all this information was gathered look at Emily’s post on her amazing Planetary Blog from May 1. Everything is outlined including scientific sources, how we selected the missions featured, and even how we chose these twenty bodies as the best representatives of the Solar System. She even reviews what the set might look like if it included 40 worlds!
]]>Yes we love Pluto, too, but why do we put all the focus on these particular eight bodies simply because they orbit the Sun? With all due respect to Copernicus, we would like to propose a whole new way of looking at our local celestial neighborhood…
Introducing the 20 WORLDS of Planetary Blocks! Okay, so it's technically 19 worlds and a star, but we really like round numbers.
Amazingly, our Solar System has many worlds. We define a world as any place in the universe that is so impressive it beckons humans to explore it. We have collected 20 intriguing bodies from our local celestial neighborhood and transferred them onto 1.75" toy blocks! Our set includes eight planets, eight moons, three dwarf planets, and one star.
Secure your set of Planetary Blocks now.
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If you are planning (or attending) a Yuri’s Night event this weekend and you want to provide swag for a number of guests — this is the link for you.
]]>We can offer practically wholesale rates when you buy in bulk. Any combination you choose will provide one soft-enameled 1.25" pin, and one embroidered 3" patch (not shown), but then select the number of 3.5" stickers and 1.25" temp tattoos you think you will need (5-50 of either or both). A 25% to 65% savings depending on your quantity.
Order now and we will deliver all party packs in the US before April 12.
]]>Just select the value you want and we will send you the custom code. It is that easy. Below are the values you can select from and some examples of gift combinations your recipient can choose from:
By my brother James Romer (https://www.facebook.com/ArrrggghhhInk/)
]]>Launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, it was the beep heard 'round the world. Sputnik was the first artificial Earth satellite and now it is also November’s Monthly Space Tee. Join the club by October 25th and it will be the first to arrive with your subscription.
]]>There is a new campaign running on Indiegogo to reboot our Robotic Spacecraft Screen Print Series and we added a perk exclusive to previous supporters. A 46% discount featuring products that may have not have been available to most of our backers as they hadn’t been created yet!
This is the opportunity for you to get that other mission print you’ve always wanted. When you do, we will also be sending your choice of mission tee, the Voyager Grand Tour sticker sheet and two Voyager hard enameled pins. All for the price of just the print plus shipping! There is even a referral program to get even more free merch for just tweeting and posting.
]]>Order before August 20 and your first tee will be Something Incredible. Our first tee to feature the gem of the solar system Saturn!
Ladies, please do check the size chart because those sizes do run small.
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