Holiday Shipping

I've just put a note on our homepage stating that orders placed between December 20th & December 26th will ship on December 27th. We've sold quite a few of the Helvetica sweatshirts and are shipping them out this evening. Happy Holidays All.

New Post. New Product

IT HAS BEEN FAR TOO LONG since anything has been posted here. And how many blogs begin with these exact two sentences?

New product is on the site at last. We're happy to have some warmer weather wear on the site, just in time for last minute Holiday buyers. We've got sweatshirts sporting our Helvetica Neue Descending design. Comes in classic ash for now, we may be adding black soon.

We've been so busy with our design practice, the King Group, that TypograhphyShop activities have for too long been relegated to simply keeping up with orders. As I'm the chief designer, marketer, shirt bagger and stander in line at the Post Office, I've had to put off adding new designs.

But they truly are coming soon at last. Really.

George Lois meets Jeffrey Zeldman on TypographyShop

I'm pleased to announce that legendary adman George Lois and web pioneer Jeffrey Zeldman are coming on board with us. George has given me his permission to use my favorite quotation of his: "Great ideas can't be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested."

Jeffrey Zeldman, who helped launch TypographyShop into the blogosphere and beyond will soon be selling shirts with his iconic pixelated mug and the phrase "since 1995." No name, no url. Like Che, Jeffrey needs no branding.

George told me that he's had many an offer over the years to produce shirts or buttons with his witticisms on them, but never bit until now.

George's royalties from sales of the shirt will be going to the Herschel Levit scholarship fund at Pratt Institute, Lois' alma mater. The award is named for Lois' mentor. According to George he "threw me out of school by getting me my first job, designing for the great Reba Sochis. Six months later I got drafted and went to Korea – but it was worth it."

Jeffrey's a huge fan of Mr. Lois. I'm not sure if George has heard of Mr. Zeldman, but he will. I'm honored to have them both on board.

Welcome aboard boys.

Another hit on our hands.

It looks like our new "Across the Univers" shirt is going to be as successful as our first, "Helvetica Neue Descending a T-shirt." The Google alerts and the sales and the stats tell me people like it.

Several of our customers from the first offering have purchased the Univers shirt. What's embarrassing is that I'm running this business out of an Entourage (for Mac, of course) mailbox labyrinth, with nothing whatsoever resembling a database. Fortunately I did recognize several names and was able to say thanks again, good to see you back. But a few wrote back when I asked how they found us saying, "er, I bought the first one. Are you ever going to send us e-mails telling us about the new stuff?"

Likewise our PayPal cart must go. I'm aware that it can cost one sales and the antiquated record keeping systems and laborious mailing label drill are a nightmare.

Learning about the vagaries of e-mail law and best practices as well as proper html e-mail coding was a hurdle but we're finally about to write our customers, thank them for their loyalty and finally establish the yet to be named club of early responders.

We've got a contest going to name the club and will be giving away shirts to the winners and runners up. And most of all we want to vow to our customers and fans that we'll do a better job of keeping in touch.

My design firm got very busy at the same time TypographyShop was taking off. It took us awhile to get this second shirt up there. Much longer than we'd have liked. But good stuff is happening. We'll tell you more as soon as we can.

How Magazine blog gets the scoop

Megan Patrick at HOW magazine's blog was the first to post about our new Across the Univers shirt. I'd written her previously about our first shirt, and she replied that she had seen it all over the blogs and could I perhaps give her a scoop on the next one?

Two months later it's finally up and Megan's got a lovely piece up about it. Thanks Megan.

Now onto informing the rest of the world.

Across the Univers.

We've finally added a new shirt to the TypographyShop line. Across the Univers celebrates Adrian Frutiger's 1954 classic in an ode to a classic pop tune.

When your first shirt is such a hit you feel like the one hit wonder band, fearful that your next tune will be derided and compared to the last, or just might not live up to the beauty of the first.

As we're only going to be adding a shirt at a time to this line it's been difficult to choose among the dozens of ideas in the typographyshop ideas folder. Many celebrate type, educate the public about type, about design. Some slogans I'm dying to get out there include the all time favorite "and where did you go to art school?" and the wonderful George Lois quotation: "Great Ideas Can't be Tested. Only Mediocre Ideas Can be Tested." But I should probably ask George first.

I feel that there's a market for designers and other creative pros to express their frustration in a witty, pithy fashion. It's always a question though, of sounding angry. Hopefully they'll come across as funny first. And true second.

JAI GURU DE VA OM

A new day, a new blog.

JUST OVER A MONTH AGO, TypographyShop was born on a whim and actually took off. Really took off. I'd spent nearly three years on a political t-shirt venture that even I was questioning the wisdom of continuing. My own political passions were waning and certainly the nation's boredom with it all was obvious. The few that cared gave up long ago, choosing to wait out the current administration like a forfeited football game.

I learned a lot about e-commerce in those three years, though I didn't apply the knowledge well. My market was fractured across a number of issues we addressed and like the Democrat (sic) party there was no single water cooler at which I could reach my constituency.

Then one day, I put up a shirt that had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with type. Typography. The most ubiquitous of typefaces, Helvetica. Helvetica Neue to be precise.

Progresswear was only one of many ideas I'd considered for t-shirt lines. We also own The Wisconsin Store and will soon be releasing our first tees there. As a designer in love with type since early childhood (my father worked at a newspaper) I had always longed to do purely typographic work for type's sake. I had a dozen or so sketches for shirts about typography as well as some clever slogans that I felt might sell well among my fellow practitioners.

I ran the Helvetica Neue Descending a t-shirt by a dozen or so designers of my acquaintance here in Philadelphia. I believe I got one or two responses. A few days later I ran them by Jeffrey Zeldman. He immediately responded saying that he loved it and would take ten. I was torn between two designs, Jeffrey chose the one we went with.

I put the shirt on Progresswear, sent Jeffrey the link and within what seemed like minutes we sold our first shirt. By the end of the day we'd sold 27. A letter from a potential buyer who wasn't too pleased with Progresswear's politics made me see that I had to remove it immediately from that site. Unfortunate as I'd sold 6 Progresswear shirts that day - a rarity - to designers who did indeed dig our politics.

I'd had a half dozen names picked out that were available domains and quickly settled on typographyshop.com. We threw up a quickie site. Designed a logo in 5 minutes - which is still up there - and redirected the Progresswear traffic to typographyshop.

The first day's trafffic started with Zeldman putting a simple link in his twitter stream, his facebook page and on zeldman.com. Or was it some other tagging site? In what seemed like minutes Josh Spear posted it. NewsDesigner.com was next. By the end of the day over a dozen design blogs had featured our first offering.

Within a couple of days the esteemed I Love Typography featured us. I'd made the acquaintance of a dozen or so t-shirt bloggers in the Progresswear years and a few of them were happy to oblige as well. But it was the designers who drove it. Who bought it. The experience of reading comments on posts by buyers who didn't even know each other, gleefully awaiting the arrival of their shirts was a delight I'd never experienced.

After 30+ years of grinding out work for clients, to further their bottom line or tell their story, I was finally creating something that brought people joy. I don't believe I could say that about a single project of my career. Although the men and women I've made wealthier via my marketing chops might disagree.

Within two weeks we'd sold nearly 200 shirts. I was experiencing a rare moment of being swamped with real work for my design firm and the looming shipment of 200 shirts that weren't even printed yet. I decided to pull back on promotion until we got the first shirts out and I was over the hump of delivering creative on two websites, a logo, posters, billboards, and writing an ad campaign as well as acting as a project consultant on my hometown's Create Uptown Racine initiative.

The worst of the deluge is over and I'm most anxious to get back to concentrating on typographyshop. New product is on its way today. If anyone's actually reading this, thanks for stopping by.

cheers

Patrick King