Love the detail of this gorgeous design!
Made in the Now Mother Hen Flies the Coop
Goodbyes are always tough. When our Jean - project officer and mother hen of MITN - told us she wanted to cross the goal of traveling the world off her to-do list – devastation hit our office.
As sad as this news makes us, we’ve only got ourselves to blame — all the worldly affairs Jean pecked through each morning helped make up her mind. Yet this isn’t a time to run around like headless chooks — it’s a time to be excited about her journey.
Jean plans to make her nest in the UK, Europe and South America, and today is our beloved friend’s last day with MITN. How do you thank the talented lady who’s been here since the get-go? Having brooded and brooded, we hit upon the perfect idea. As a thank you, a farewell and a good luck, today’s tee is dedicated to Jean (a true genie). We’ll miss you here at MITN. Cock-a-doodle-do!
200 designs = plenty of blood sweat and tees
Way back when, we started planning how we’d celebrate our 200th tee.
Perhaps we could commission a custom design for the occasion?
“Perfect, perfect” - heads nodded in agreement.
There was a risk though.
What if something major happens on February 2nd? What if there’s another Fukushima?
Ha! What are the chances, we thought.
So we set to work. Justin Overell took the 200th tee and hand painted up our proud, defiant rooster.
But you know what they say… pride comes before a fall.
And as luck would have it, our 200th tribute tee, has fallen in the same 24 hours as the business and social worlds buzz with news of Facebook’s IPO release.
To quote a few reputable sources:
“On Wednesday, Facebook filed the prospectus for its initial public offering. The social giant seeks to raise $5 billion in initial funding. That’s in line with some of the largest IPOs in technology history” - Wired.com
“The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.” - The New York Times
“Facebook, whose meteoric rise spawned an Oscar-winning film and captivated Wall Street, today named Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter on the IPO, while reporting a 24-fold increase in sales over the past four years to $3.71 billion in 2011.” - Bloomberg
But that’s the name of the game.
We win some, we lose some, and every 24 hours, there’s a tee to show for it.
Got the travel bug?
Gold Coast residents can soothe their travel yearnings at the opening of Max Duff’s art & photography exhibition ‘Max Explores’.
Stop by The Cave tomorrow night from 7pm, where Max’s photos and artworks will ease your travel-troubled minds. 1/2243 Gold Coast Highway, Nobby Beach.
Food doom. Energy gloom.
Today’s story kind of took the wind out of our sails.
Here’s the gist of it: Our population is booming. We won’t have enough food to feed ourselves. We won’t have enough energy to power our communities. In the west, we waste food and energy. In developing countries, they can barely get enough.
Cue a collection of infographics that are enough to scare the pants off the most nonchalant 4WD driver. This collection shows, in many dazzling formats, how much food is wasted in western (but predominantly US) society. Yikes.
Moving onto the energy and resources agenda… it’s a similar story. This one illustrates our dependence on oil and highlights the pros and cons of other potential energy sources. This beautiful example from GOOD shows how much energy in the US is wasted (presumably through processing, transportation, etc).
It’s enough to make you run for the hills, determined to live a life of simple subsistence, foraging for nuts and berries.
But take heart dear readers. While the UN’s report rings alarm bells, consider these positive points…
- You read the article. You know about the issue. And so do a lot of other people, and governments, and businesses, and communities. Knowledge is power, and we’re lucky that we can access this information, because it means we can act on it - whether that’s by supporting grocers who, in turn, support sustainable agriculture practices; or even just by switching off your gosh-darned lights when you’re not in the room.
- Necessity is the mother of invention. The pressure caused by this sticky situation will spur businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals to devise more clever, more efficient and more sustainable ways we can create and use food and fuel. I’ve been reading Richard Branson’s Screw Business as Usual this week - and, love him or hate him, he has a point: doing good is good for business. And to be successful in the future, businesses must do good - as clearly, our circumstances are demanding it.
So there you have it. And now, as we all know you can’t think of clever solutions to global problems on an empty stomach, it’s time for some lunch.
One of the downsides to producing a news-inspired tee every 24 hours is it prevents us from following stories as they build up momentum. Sometimes a story will develop over days and weeks, and occasionally they reach a crescendo well after the initial news broke (the News of the World scandal is a great example of this). So when one of our stories gathers up speed, we’ll use this blog to post the latest updates for those of you interested in the topic at hand.
Last week our design for Wednesday’s shirt #178 was inspired by a NY Times story regarding the high percentage of childhood malnutrition in India. Apparently, up to 42% of the country’s children under the age of 5 are suffering malnutrition, despite a growing GDP and an extensive government food subsidy program.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh weighed in on the issue, declaring: “The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame”.
After the NY Times piece went live, The Atlantic (a fantastic source for news analysis) published a follow-up article on Friday 13 January. Author Marion Nestle pointed readers towards an additional NY Times article published on January 12, stating bluntly: “Ending malnutrition is a matter of political will. If India wanted to address childhood malnutrition in any serious way, it could.”
Nestle would know - take a look at her CV boilerplate:
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health (the department she chaired from 1988-2003) and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley.
So how does Nestle propose India tackles its malnutrition? For a start, by:
- promoting breastfeeding
- educating and empowering women
- constructing toilets
- cleaning up water supplies
- eradicating worms, and
- reducing income inequality
With corruption rife in India, rolling out successful programs to address this checklist is likely to be challenging. But instead of focusing on the challenge, perhaps India should think about the potential for growth and prosperity that resides in those 4 out of 10 hungry kids.
To keep up to date with this story, we suggest following the writers of each of the articles through Twitter. Journalist for the New York Times, Jim Yardley can be found here, and Professor Marion Nestle can be followed here.
Colour is one of those parts of life that’s so common, so everyday, that we don’t give it a passing thought. To us, it’s elemental, like light or heat.
Today’s tee celebrates Tango Tangerine, a poppy, creamy tango-orange hue crowned the Colour of the Year 2012 by Pantone, the world’s best known colour guide authority.
But is a colour - something so common it’s found in our garbage, on tax office forms, in supermarkets - worthy of celebration?
Designers the world over will no doubt support the occasion. All those years studying the colour wheel instil a respect for hue, value and saturation; for balancing complementary colours; or selecting colourways that leave the required impression with the viewer. Trustworthy and steeped in knowledge? Try a navy blue. Soothing, calm, fresh? Go for a gentle sage green.
If the emotive power of colour doesn’t sway your vote, consider the intricate science that allows us to even see it. As this video filmed in Edinburgh Zoo explains, we’re lucky we can see colour.
While insects and brightly coloured fish have much better colour vision than we do (bees even use colour to find flowers), most mammals have dichromatic vision, meaning they only see in black and white.
Lucky for us we have trichromatic vision. Thanks to the ‘cone cells’ in our eyes, we can process wavelengths of colour.
Incidentally, in November last year Pantone released PANTONE: A Color (sic) History of the 20th Century, described by Brainpickings’ Maria Popova as a book that “explores 100 years of the evolution of color’s sociocultural footprint through over 200 works of art, advertisements, industrial design products, fashion trends, and other aesthetic ephemera, thoughtfully examined in the context of their respective epoch”.
Sociocultural footprint indeed - every memory we have is linked to colour. So whether or not Tango Tangerine features in your colour memory banks (does anyone remember this crayola factory visit from Sesame Street??), we think colour deserves a celebration every day of the year.
