The shirts are being ordered from American Apparel (AA for short) and the first run is being printed at a local tee shop called Storyville—they have a pretty great story! They’ll be printed on AA’s 100% cotton jersey tees with the design you see on the front, with the ‘Angel Strata Haiti Initiative’ bit on the back, just below the neck, as will be the standard for each Angel Strata shirt.

There are several other shirts already out there supporting the cause, but I honestly can’t say I’d wear any of them, and the margins some of them run off of is disappointingly low. Angel Strata aims to contribute to amazing causes, but just as well, provide a product that is desirable to the consumer who wishes to contribute.

If you are the type who doesn’t like a specific t-shirt design from Angel Strata—or perhaps someone who doesn’t wear tees at all—I am more than happy to supply a ‘Donate’ button to help you contribute to the cause without ordering a product.

A big thanks for Storyville for being so helpful and working out a good plan of action in terms of getting these first shirts printed. The sooner I can get them in and in certain peoples’ hands, the better! I’m feeling very bullish on this product and with this company.

If you like the design, or the idea, I encourage you to please share this with people you think may be interested in either a cool shirt or a great cause. Stay tuned for more, Angel Strata is just getting started!

As always, if you have any questions, ask away (find my contact information here).

I like to call this the difference between “Ready, Aim, Fire” and “Ready, Fire, Aim”.In the past, I would never “fire” before “aiming”. I knew all too well that the cleanup would take longer than the up-front planning would have.

Today, I’m not so sure. Just getting something done provides feedback you didn’t have before. That feedback could drastically change your plans.

How do you know when to Aim before Firing or Fire before Aiming? Use your best personal judgment. If Firing before Aiming doesn’t get you killed, it’s often the better alternative.

I learned this in producing my own site, Football Bio. It’s not online because I allowed myself to take too long getting it released, and by the time it was finally “perfected” I would see a shift in the trends and market demands making my previous, fleshed-out product obsolete.

This “Ready. Fire. Aim.” approach relates closely to what is called “satisficing.” Simply put, satisficing is approaching a problem or situation and resolving to make the decisions which feel the best, but take the least amount of time or resources to execute. As Wikipedia defines it:

Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.

This way, you can iterate more decisions from there and come to a better solution than if you spent all your time trying to solve the first problem perfectly from the start. Another similar approach is the Japanese philosophy of constant improvement, called “kaizen.”

Football Bio very well could have been obsolete from the start, but the point is that I took too long to figure this out. If I had released a simplified and narrowly focused version earlier, I would have either been embraced and been able to grow the site, or shooed away to turn to my next project sooner, saving me a fair amount of time and money.

This mentality relates to more than just business as well. Sometimes the potential outcomes of a situation may frighten you, or you may want to know every option that is in front of you, but this over-analysis blocks you from trusting what you feel is right. People who worry a lot tend to over-analyze things from what I’ve noticed.

It would greatly benefit anyone to learn how to be amazingly resilient rather than calculatingly perfect.

The iPod Shuffle in stainless steel.

If there is anything that would make me want to get an iPod aside from the iTouch or iPhone, the Shuffle in polished stainless steel would probably do the trick. It looks nice.

iStock wants you back. We’ve missed seeing you around our site — the world’s leading royalty-free stock destination. Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files.

Get back into the iStock groove today!
Come back to us by October 30, 2009 and we’ll give you 15% off 50 or more Pay-as-you-go credits. Enter promo code: M155U42

Sorry, iStockPhoto, but you’ve missed the mark a bit in several aspects. As cute and hard-to-resist-sympathizing-with as your email is, there are several things I think could be done better.

Know your role.

Using your site is not an enjoyable experience for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well designed and is comparatively easy to purchase stock photos from rather reliably and consistently. However, I use iStockPhoto as a business tool, not as my personal social loafing grounds. I do not enjoy looking at forced smiles and cheesy, generic scenes all day in their picturesque glory. I go in and get out as quickly as possible, and you do a great job at letting me do this.

To me, iStockPhoto is where I go when a client needs a picture and can’t be bothered to hire a professional photographer or eager young student for their own cause. Frankly, I don’t care if you miss me, so why not remind me of why you are useful to me rather than ask for some sort of second online rendezvous, oddly incentivized with 15% off $50 of credits when you can look at my history and know I never spend more than $30.

Stick to what you’re good at.

You sell stock photos. That’s your thing, you might say. So why not stick to selling me stock photos? Instead of playing to your users’ emotional side for a product that sells rather personality-less bland images (personal opinion), I think if you looked at users’ past purchase histories and suggested some new photos that have been uploaded under similar keywords to what they tend to buy, it would be more effective.

You could use similar but more relevant writing compared to what was in your email; maybe something like…

“Steven, we’ve noticed you haven’t logged on iStockPhoto in over a month. Here are some brand new photos we think you may be interested in using.”

It shows you care about the user’s needs and are willing to travel half way to the transaction point, putting up the effort to show me what I am most likely to need and make the purchase easy to happen. Which approach would you prefer be used with you?

Market individually.

I don’t spend $50 when I use iStockPhoto, and it should be simple enough for you to speculate that I probably would not like to today. Why not offer me a comparable discount for a $25 credit purchase, which I will be more inclined to bite on? Maybe a 10% off? The technology to market to each user individually is easy enough to implement.

These concepts are all just me thinking out loud. I mean no ill will toward iStockPhoto and am a past and, most likely, future customer. If you agree or disagree, let me know in the comments with your thoughts and opinions!

The Luck Factor

If you are reading this blog post, you are most likely more “lucky” than your average person. I’ll explain why, with the help of research done by Richard Wiseman as he reveals in his book The Luck Factor and recent article published in Telegraph from the UK.

According to Wiseman, “unlucky” people are not more naturally inclined to have bad things happen to them, just as “lucky” people don’t just magically have more great things happen. It may seem that way, but it all boils down to social conditioning and your attitude.

One major attitude people characterized as being lucky display is that they look at the big picture in everything they do; always glancing at what seems interesting and biting on things that tantalize them. In contrast, unlucky people have a tendency to zero in on one detail and focus heavily there, dwelling on the outcome it provides. In effect, this causes them to miss out on the great opportunities that come by while they are concentrating so heavily on what they are so convinced must be most important.

In one experiment, Wiseman planted a specific number of photographs in a newspaper and asked both types of people (those who considered themselves to be “lucky” or “unlucky”) to count how many were hidden within the pages. It took the unlucky people an average of 2 minutes while only 2 seconds for the lucky group.

Why?

Because on the second page in a major headline he wrote “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The unlucky people focused so heavily on the task at hand—rather than approaching the situation more openly—that they missed the message completely, as well as a second one further in which offered £250 if they stopped counting to redeem their prize.

Wiseman’s research has determined that unlucky people are generally more tense and that anxiety works against one’s ability to notice the unexpected. He also noted that lucky people tend to exhibit four main characteristics that seem to create the luck they experience:

1. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities
2. They make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition
3. They create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations
4. They adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good

The good news is that Wiseman has also proven that you can train yourself to be lucky. Lucky people can become luckier, and unlucky people can catch up to those who seem to have better experiences.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

So just as I say in the intro, congratulations!

You are out there exposing yourself to new ideas and opportunities—you are a self-made lucky person.

I cannot encourage enough that you read Wiseman’s article and move on to his book to help bring yourself better fortunes and a better attitude about life. Your friends and family will notice it, and more importantly you will too.

So stay positive, keep your eyes open, and good luck!

Every designer strives to take the complexities of a solid design and make them manageable for the client, to make the resource files for a client’s brand so simple to edit that the client could even do it on his or her own. Be it designing everything so they can create new packaging with just 2-3 clicks or designing a t-shirt in 5 minutes.

Right?

The problem I ran into today was that in my effort to make the creative process as simple and easy as possible for my client, I feel like I designed myself out of work. By that I mean the materials I designed acted as tools that were so simple to manipulate, the client could take his vision for the company and create some amazing things on his own.

This is actually the best thing for this young company—letting its creative C.E.O. directly influence the product development and perfect every menu and every product label. It hurts me because as he gets deeply involved with articulating his passion directly into the designs, I lose my value as the designer. I am no longer the filter between his mind and the medium…

The cost of good design is that I am no longer needed.

I just got my shipment of new shirts in today—yes, I bought them—and they turned out great, to my surprise. After seeing the quality the old screen printer provided, I knew Bryan was looking to completely revamp Anticlothes’ line up. The new shirts have large screen prints, even and precise ink work, and the choice of shirt colors is much better than previous shirts Anticlothes featured.

Possessions, by Anticlothes

Deep Sleep, by Anticlothes

Follow the Stars, by Anticlothes

Community Service, by Anticlothes

One thing Bryan does very well is bringing the slight attitude of his shirts—as if they were characters themselves—into the packaging. Each shirt has tag with the AC seal over one side and a silly quote on the reverse, from the mouth of the shirt it’s stuck to. Mine read:

Ill pick on other items in your closet.

Please wear twice a week, I suffer from closetphobia.

In addition to these tags, I was even surprised by the character of the receipt. Not only was there a ‘Thanks!’ handwritten onto the page, but I also noticed how each receipt has a quote from previous customers in the header. It’s great to see how the brand has such personality and is willing to share the input it receives with everyone, as well as give customers a chance to be heard and published.

When I was a kid, my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.

— Customer Arielle, California, USA

All in all, I think Anticlothes has some great things going for it now. Better shirts than before. A more fun attitude than before. …And a more interesting business model than before, capable of growing and really drawing on its users’ interactions. Good work Bryan!

Do you think Anticlothes feels like it will continue to grow? If not, why?

I’ve been working on smaller details with Angel Strata while I’d been waiting to get internet installed, and Dan and I have some good ideas cooked up already to build together. Come August 2010, you will see a lot of growth from us both, personally and business-wise.

Totally looking forward to it!

For all those curious: Legacy on the Lake

The logo is very symbolic towards the name and the idea behind Angel Strata. The reason I wanted to start Angel Strata is to give people a chance at life they otherwise would not have had, and to help heal the world; both literally and metaphorically speaking.

The tree symbolizes this life-giving aspect of the brand, and the round shape represents Earth. Moving upward from the bottom, you see the tree rooted firmly in the ground; then the clouds higher up, going through the sky, wrapping themselves around the world; and finally into the highest stratum in the sky, the stars—abstractly speaking, the heavens, or ‘angel strata.’

Previous logo version.

Tell me what you think! Is it powerful enough as a logo? Are there any changes you would prefer to see made?