41/52: Empty Tomb

3/31/18 • 1 min read

This post was originally posted on April 1, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Exit only

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 41.

I love Easter Sunday. The sunrise service. The hymns. The special music. The flowers. But most of all, I love the joy and the excitement. After the reflection of the Lenten season and Holy Week, we celebrate — we rejoice — that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.

The release date for this week’s shirt falls on Easter. The stone is rolled back and our savior exits the tomb.

You can purchase Empty Tomb on my Threadless store.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

40/52: Kudzu Palace

3/23/18 • 2 min read

This post was originally posted on March 24, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

No one ever wants to eat there…

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 40.

When I was little, we lived in Stanley, North Carolina. Every so often on the weekend, we’d make the trek over to Gastonia to have dinner, go shopping or catch a movie. We’d drive along a road where every tree seemed to be covered in kudzu. If you aren’t familiar with kudzu, it’s a vine that grows relatively uncontrolled across the southeastern United States. It’s legendarily impossible to kill.

At some point on the trip, my dad would ask us where we wanted to eat. He’d give us three options, but the third option was always “Kudzu Palace.” Kudzu Palace didn’t exist, of course, but every time, my siblings and I would yell “Not Kudzu Palace!”

Now that I have kids, I often offer up Kudzu Palace as a dining option. Surprisingly, they never pick it either.

When I started this project, I actually planned to do a bunch of fake restaurants and brands. Kudzu Palace was one of the original ideas from my first set of sketches. The project has taken a different direction and the designs have been more conceptual, but I’m glad I finally got around to creating a shirt for my favorite fictional restaurant. Now, I’m wondering what’s on the menu.

You can purchase “Kudzu Palace” from my Threadless store.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

39/52: God and Science

3/17/18 • 2 min read

This post was originally posted on March 18, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

You can believe in both.

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 39.

I recently read an article by Don Lincoln, a physicist at Fermilab* describing a potential new discovery that sheds light — pun intended — on the formation of the universe. But what struck me about the article is his discussion of what happened after the Big Bang, how the universe expanded and formed planets and stars.

For some reason, science advocates and religious advocates are diametrically opposed these days. If you believe in basic scientific principles, some people assume that you don’t believe in God. And if you are Christian, some people assume that you believe that science is a hoax and the earth is only 6,000 years old.

But I’ve never felt my faith in God and my belief in science have been at odds with one another. I believe in evolution, climate change and vaccination. I also believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. I feel that modern science is just one of the tools that God has given us to experience and understand his creation. I can believe in God while accepting that the Earth formed in more than 6 days.

In short, I believe in both God and science. And this week’s shirt is a rather direct statement of that belief. Of course, the shirt is only available in shades of gray…

You can buy “God and Science” on my Threadless store.

* I grew up in Batavia, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago and the location of Fermilab. I took many a field trip to the particle accelerator in our neighborhood.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

38/52: The Evolution of Storage

3/10/18 • 3 min read

This post was originally posted on March 11, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Everything is in the cloud now.

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 38.

My first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, actually used cassette tapes for data storage. We upgraded to a Commodore 64 and it used a 5.25 inch floppy. So did the TRS-80 at school and the IBM PC at my dad’s office. When I got to high school, the 5.25 in drives gave way to 3.5 inch floppies. And while I was in college, the 3.5 inch floppy was replaced by a Iomega Zip drive that held an “amazing” 100 MB. Zip drives were popular until writeable CD-ROM drives became commonplace. Writeable DVDs seemed to be the natural next step, but USB thumb drives were cheaper and more convenient. Now, everything pretty much lives in the cloud.

There were — of course — storage devices that never caught on… I remember 44 MB and 88 MB SyQuest Drives. Iomega had a 1 GB Jaz Drive and introduced a 250 MB Zip drive to capitalize on the success on the 100 MB Zip Drive. Portable hard drives are still popular with people who need a lot of storage, but USB thumb drives are getting cheaper and increasing in capacity. Writable Blu-ray discs are expensive and take forever to burn.

I’ve watched computer storage evolve over the last 30+ years and now, we’ve reached a point where everything is in the cloud and there is very little reason to have physical media at all. There’s a part of me that misses carrying around all my files and projects and a collection of Zip disks, but I won’t miss the fear of losing a disk or having one fail catastrophically. Now, all my files are available to me on pretty much any device at pretty much any time.

This week’s shirt, “The Evolution of Storage” is a look back to the changes of how we store our important files and projects. Starting with 1.2 MB and spanning to the now seemingly infinite cloud.

You can purchase “The Evolution of Storage” on my Threadless store.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

37/52: Pens and Pencils

3/3/18 • 2 min read

This post was originally posted on March 4, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

It matters what you write with…

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 37.

Several years ago, I was looking for new podcasts to listen to. I was regularly listening to Upgrade with Jason Snell and Myke Hurley and Myke mentioned that he had another podcast, The Pen Addict. An entire podcast on pens? I was curious and so I downloaded an episode to check it out. It didn’t take long before I had a collection of different writing utensils, inks, bags and sketchbooks.

I’ve mentioned before how uncomfortable I am with my handwriting and writing in general, but with better tools, writing was far more enjoyable. I really like writing with a fountain pen. Choosing the ink and the right nib style. Cleaning and taking care of them. I love the feel of drawing with a good mechanical pencil. I adore sharpening a wooden pencil and getting a perfect point.

Most people don’t think about what they write with. They use the pen in the office supply cabinet or whatever happens to be laying around the house. The last wooden pencil they used was a cheap #2 in elementary school. There is nothing wrong with that approach, but I believe the experience of writing changes when you use a good pen or pencil.

One of my earliest sketches for this shirt-a-week project was a short, fat pencil and I refined it into this shirt, Pens and Pencils. I’m going to the Atlanta Pen Show in April and figured I’d release the shirt now so I can order one and wear it to the show.

You can buy Pens and Pencils at my Threadless store.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.

36/52: Lucky

2/24/18 • 2 min read

This post was originally posted on February 25, 2018 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

My lucky streaked started with a Commodore 64 game

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 36.

I was in 6th grade and had saved my paper route money to buy “California Games” for my Commodore 64. I opened the box in the car on the drive home to look at the instructions and found a scratch off game card. Scratch off three circles and if they match, you win that prize. I scratched off three circles and they matched. I shouted in a mix of confusion and joy… “I won a jet ski! What’s a jet ski?” My mom didn’t believe me — and since she was driving, she got my older brother to take a look. He confirmed that I had, indeed, won a jet ski.

And that started one heck of a lucky streak. Over a couple of decades, I won a bunch of stuff… radio contests, door prize drawings, golf clubs, an iPod, season tickets for minor league hockey, software, a watch, a framed print and more. For a number of years, every time there was a door prize, I knew I was going to win it.* It was fun, although occasionally embarrassing. The streak seems to have ended a number of years ago, but I always wonder if the streak will ever kick back in.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day and my own crazy luck, I wanted to create a “lucky” shirt. And since my beloved Commodore 64 had lovely eight bit graphics, I figured a pixelated pot of gold was the perfect tribute to my amazing lucky streak.

You can buy Lucky at my Threadless store.

*Everyone asks if I ever won the lottery. I have not. Some odds are too impossible.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He’s currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year.