New Brookville T-Shirt art

Just finished up a new design for t-shirts for Brookville Roadster. The art was sketched digitally in Photoshop, then cleaned up by hand-building vector paths in Illustrator CS4. A lot of the detail work was done using AI CS4's new "Blob Brush" tool. The basic design will be printed on both black- and white shirts.

The Curse of the Cubicle

Two or three decades ago, different workers in different parts of any organization used different kinds of tools and devices to do their respective tasks. Accounting departments would use ledger books and adding machines. Customer Service and Sales primarily used telephones, ink pens, and perhaps typewriters. Art departments used X-Acto knives, tech pens, rubylith, waxers, and light boxes. And not only the tools were different. Each of these types of workers used different kinds of desks, filing systems, and even the lighting and flooring was typically different from one department to another. Each "department" was set up to be as feasibly optimal to get things done in an efficient manner.

Then came the computers.

Once we started getting all these beige boxes installed in our work areas, our work areas became increasingly installed on the beige boxes. As more and more tools have gone digital, we have lost sight of the fact that the tools themselves are still quite different from one another. You'd never expect your accounting staff to use Photoshop to crunch P&L statements, and you wouldn't ask the art department to edit images in Excel.

Funny to contrast with these thoughts with the attitudes of so many organizations to homogenize nearly everything in the workplace. I mean, these are all just computers, right? It's like the attitude is, "the numbers people are just better than others at doing numbers on the computer." Or, "The art people just know how to use their computers to make art." Now that our tangible tools have become software, we forget that different workers need totally different setups. And that we really are still using different tools to get different things done.

Nowadays, if you were to walk into nearly any American organization, you'd have a tough time telling the accounting department from customer service from the art department. They all have the same fluorescent lighting. They all have the same gray cubicles. They all have the same black-and-silver electric boxes on their desks. I often wonder if such environments do more to stifle creativity and productivity than we realize.