Nothing quite like waiting for something to arrive in the mail.

Coming home, the walk up the street, thinking: today. I don't know why I turn into such a little kid, and for something I myself ordered, but I do. I love the anticipation, even to the point of tracking this order, #056067410049639, via the FedEx tracking site.

An order picked up in Chicago, and then sent from Chicago to Ft. Worth and back again, I had to wonder... [via the workings of my conspiracy-theory laden mind, I thought: did the U.S. Postal Service, in congress with the Universe, ship a Chicago-to-Chicago order to Texas simply to make me writhe, or did they wish to drive the Ground-Rate price home? (nice little pun, wasn't that). Or maybe they were so capricious and adoring of world-experience that they felt my order needed to travel in order to truly arrive; this theory almost feels like wisdom, and my little head is cocked in wonder as I sit before you.]

Anyhow, my order arrived and I am pleased. I was pleased even before I opened the package, but nervous and felt that maybe I understand nothing about design, maybe I'm just yet another semi-writer taking an imaging class. And maybe that is still true, but the pleasure I got from pouring these buttons from their bag is not to be denied.

Sometimes it's good to just make something.



So, the story of these is that I made the one with the fish, as I mentioned before, and my friend (one of the best), lh, designed the other. He sent me the basic design and font, but I had to redo it in Illustrator, and hope I approximated the font he wanted. Because... I think his button is brilliant. I wanted to get a version to go along with it: "I'm not racist--all my best friends are straight." And then we could hawk them across the free world, and set up a dynamic of friendship between.

I like the way my button looks too. And it was so very easy - if you're interested, here is where I had the button-making outsourced - Busy Beaver Buttons - and their rates are entirely reasonable. Between me and lh, we're each paying $22.50 for 50-each color-printed 1.5" buttons. Not bad, not bad at all. And although they did fuck-up and ship the order instead of keeping it until I could pick the buttons up, they also called me several times to talk about some of the difficulties my design might create on the press, and helped me slightly and only slightly modify it so it would look good. Which is very nice of them, ain't it?

Anyhow, a pretty good project to do in a class. No doubt.