Per request, the International Organization of Cynics, Ne’er-Do-Wells, and Misanthropes has re-opened their Cafe Press store. Don’t forget to join!

I designed this logo many years ago for a friend. At the time, I was working as a designer for the region’s largest provider of labor-union identity goods, and this design is a sort of in-joke based on the many, many serious designs I produced for local labor unions over that several year period. I still see many of these designs in circulation today and I am really pretty proud of this work. To date, it appears to be my longest-lasting contribution to Northwest society. When I was a kid, I was deeply fascinated by logos in general and the logos of labor unions and military units in particular. To me, these appeared to be survivals of a heraldic tradition that was otherwise lost.

While the actual ties of these insignia to genuine medieval heraldry is at best debatable, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to characterize the insignia as used as such. Believing this allowed me to be pretty effective, I think, in designing, redesigning and rehabilitating the logos that these labor organizations use to express a shorthand visual identity.

The personal highlight of this came in 1999, on the first day of the WTO protests, when a huge labor march coincided with the less-disciplined activists to produce a crowd of over a hundred thousand in downtown Seattle’s streets. Many, probably most, of the labor union locals that were present that day were from the Pacific Northwest, and almost every one of them was wearing jackets or hats or carrying banners or signs with art that I had created. Thousands of people, using the art I had made for them in the way I had hoped to see it used. I’m grateful for the rare privilege of actually observing this in person.

This week, we have been so swamped at work that we have actually shipped a higher volume of orders than we did at the peak of Christmas. Apparently, this bolus is not limited to our retail traffic.

On Wednesday, a freelance gig came in on the answering machine – I’m still evaluating the labor requirements versus my free time before committing. Any readers out there with current downtime and agency production experience coding HTML, please drop a line in case I need to pass. It’s not a hard job, but may require more time than I have available. You will need to have Photoshop and Dreamweaver and Fireworks and should have experience creating HTML under an art director or within an advertising and design agency as a production person. If you haven’t in the past, this is most definitely not the job to learn on.

The other gig is an experienced developer position at a well-known local house that provides varying levels of end-user with real estate tools. The toolkit was specifically identified as ‘open-source’ and name-checked PHP, MySQL, etc., etc. It’s a gig that’s too dev-oriented for my skillset, but surely there are candidates out there reading this.

Naturally, this is also the week that the third issue of the magazine is in planning. Most happily, my editor and I knocked out the content definition stuff in about twenty minutes on Tuesday night.

Additionally, I call your attention once again to the Siffblog, which is ginning up. The contributors over there last year had a great time and I know I very much enjoyed reading the blog. A group blog about a film festival the size of SIFF might be expected to provide some amusement.

Finally, I jimmied the header link set, my sidebar, and this blog’s about page to more effectively reflect my current range of activities.

Emergent Chaos: Help! Mac Project Management Software: More bloggery on the PM tip. seems as though this man has climbed the mountain afore me. I certainly hope he has found resolution.