Off the 'Cuff » design

Sketch Artists Needed!

Chris Mathieson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:40:15 +0000

In the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring new and interesting things into our gift shop; the dusty brandy snifters, golf shirts and ashtrays have made way for items that appeal to the audience coming into our shop. You really seem to like the “Fisticup” mugs, “Fuzz” scarves and “Murder Ink” notepads!

Our next task? Improve our selection of clothing. Sure, our “Sinner” shirts and “VanJail” sweats are fun, but our t-shirt designs are mostly… lame. We tried to come up with some ideas on our own, but it was somewhat less than successful.

So, help us! From now until July30, 2010 we want you to submit your ideas to our tshirt design contest. (We’ve even put together some great prizes to help motivate you.)

Here’s the details:

We’re looking for at least one winning design, but will accept more winners if the rumours of your collective awesomeness are to be believed.

Our ideal design will promote our little museum in an artistic, clever and creative way–it could be directly police (or police history) related, it could be about forensic science or even about our creepy building that used to be the city morgue. Let your imagination run with it.

Once you’ve submitted your design, promote it! Popular vote will play a HUGE role in deciding which idea wins. After the popular vote determines the finalists, our jury will pick the design(s) we’re actually going to produce for the shop. The final decision will be based on which design(s) will be easiest to print, which is the most creative and which best reflects the character of the museum.

What’s in it for you? Fame and glory, of course. Plus, the designers of most popular t-shirts will get to pick a prize from the prize pool, starting with the most popular designs and going until we run out of prizes. Everyone who submitted a winning (printed) design will get some shirts with their own design on them.

A big thank-you to everyone at Strutta for making their awesome contest platform available to us! Also, thanks to the Vancouver Attractions Group, Blue Olive Photography, Miss604.com, Axiom Salon & Spa, The Listel Hotel, the Vancouver Trolley Company and MightyUgly.com for fantastic prizes and great support.

We can’t tell you how excited we are for this contest…

Girls and Guns?

Chris Mathieson — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:48:48 +0000

A few months ago, we received a donation of a bunch of items from the Vancouver Police Revolver Club, including a number of trophies and patches. One of those patches struck us as particularly awesome and so we’ve decided to make a t-shirt out of it. The first run of shirts will be women-only, but there are a number of other designs that we might end up using for men’s designs down the road.

What do you think? Would you buy a t-shirt with this design? (If so, please comment…)

“You Won’t Come Out The Same”

Chris Mathieson — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:12:36 +0000

It appears that the draft artwork that Cosette did for us last spring has finally been posted online. Here are the three ads that mocked up for us and you can visit this site to see what some of the commentary has been on this potential campaign.Generally positive reaction, which is nice to see, with some useful feedback. We still don’t know when/how we’re going to deploy this artwork, however.

There’s been some activity on a few blogs about this, including:

So, what do you think? Do you like these ads? Should we use them somehow? Should we use the idea in a different way, maybe?