Hola, I'd like to tell you about my online business, creating smartassed designs and products and selling them online. I use a variety of POD (Print On Demand) vendors to create and sell t-shirts, ceramics, prints, photos, and what-not. It started out as fun, but now it's turned into something more, and it's really a lot of fun. My first design was something making fun of the florida gator football team, back around the time that the US invaded Iraq and had that wacky information director on television all of the time. He was ALWAYS wrong, even to the point of denying things that were on camera behind him. A total flake.
I made a spoof of that about a Florida State victory of the hated gators and sold the hell out of them. Too bad I had zero markup on all of the products. It was just for fun, but that would have been quite a little beer money haul. Oh well, lesson learned.
I didn't do anything else with the shop for over a year until I got another inspiration, insulting the U. I sold a few of those, got roughed up by the collegiate licensing folks, and learned a very valuable lesson. Stay away from school trademarks. That's worked out pretty well for me.
I still do sports related stuff, but I also have added a long line of stuff pointing directly at sarcasm and smartassery. Those are my strengths, so why not gear my designs toward something that I really understand.
I began using primarily PhotoShop to do all of my work, but I've moved directly to Adobe Illustrator and that's about all I use any longer. What a great piece of software to use for vector art and t-shirt design. It's made me much better at my actual job, as a designer for the State of Florida.
So, I think that I'll begin to post designs and their inspirations here and see how that works out. I have found that simple is better, and that's not making me happy. I want to do some art, and put it on productss. Luckily folks buy the simple stuff and give me the freedom to do the art thing when I get the urge.