From the course: Von Glitschka: The Making of an Illustrative Designer

T-shirts and fast design

(soft music) - Fast forward back to where we were you're at your first couple jobs and how are you feeling about your career. Were you purely designing, illustrating? - In the art department, we had clients like Target and Jay Jacobs, all these big retailers. It was the type of sportswear company where they'd come to us and say we have a warehouse of 5,000 dozen of this garment and we need to get rid of it. And so we'd come up with a line to utilize their stock and kind of sell it out. - That's cool. - And they would let us figure out what kind of thing we're going to do. So I came up with a category of designs called beach logos, and it was kind of inspired by Crazy Shirts. They do a lot of that kind of stuff. I think the first one I did was Jonah's Beach Club, and it's a surfer and he's stuck in a whale, and that was the design motif. And it was just one color, black, and at the time it was yellow, or green, or pink, and those sold really well. It was a fun job, but I worked a lot of overtime and never got paid for it. So that taught me a lot about what's kosher and what isn't, in regards to what an employer expects of you. It was a good learning experience. Screenprint, obviously is all before anybody is doing anything on the computer so everything was hand-drawn, and inked, and they had vacuum tables where we'd shape the film and process it. - So you know what Rubylith is and all that stuff. - Yeah we used to take the Rubylith tubes and duct tape them and then have jousting fights in our chairs. (laughter) It was fun. It's a great place to work. I remember, one year for Christmas, they called us down to the warehouse. They had this meat truck backed into the warehouse. The president did his little spiel and then they gave everybody a frozen turkey. Well all the production had gone home and it was like 3:30, but they wouldn't let the art department go home. So we go back upstairs to the art department, we have the frozen turkeys. What do we do with our turkey? (laughter) And so of course we start messing around with them, we start doing curling down the hall with them. (laughs) - Oh that's fantastic, yeah. - I'd say my next favorite job was... I worked at Upper Deck. Growing up I collected trading cards, so it was kind of coming full circle. And I started there in '97, and worked there almost till the very end of 2000. I was on their... Well, I started on their baseball team and did all the Major League Baseball product lines. I went from a really small boutique design firm in Oregon, where I was just one of their staff senior designers, and we were expected to do everything. Tight deadlines, really fast turn arounds. And then I go to this art department at Upper Deck, and they have these master schedules printed out on 11 by 17 excel files, and it's like a roll-out plan. It gives you two months of when you have to hit your dates. And I kind of like that, but they were really slow. It's like, I could get an entire set done in a week. And the other... It's just how fast I worked. I wasn't accelerating anything. And so because of that, they started... Okay, you're done with baseball, work on basketball, and football, and hockey, and then I get special assignments and stuff. The owner owned a Learjet company, so I ended up doing his ad campaign one year because of that. - Did you get near a Learjet? (laughs) - Yeah, I wish. (laughter) that would've been fun. No. But I did get... They bought a Babe Ruth bat, at Sotheby's, for $25,000. And then they were going to cut it up, and so I made sure we did a photoshoot to document the piece of history. I wanted to use it on the back of the cards, so when somebody got a card with a piece of the Babe Ruth bat, they'd see the actual bat it came from. That was fun, because I got to design that. It was like the first in the industry, and the VP liked it so much he gave me one. - Oh, come on. - Yeah, so that's in my office still. I still have that. (crowd cheering) - Did you do any other Babe Ruth projects or any other similar type? - Yeah, we did what were called signature cards. And so we would take historical signatures, real signatures, but obviously the people had been dead for 40, 50 years. For Babe Ruth, we contacted the people that managed his estate, and we purchased 200 canceled checks or 250 canceled checks from his estate. And I remember when those showed up they were in a Ziploc bag, in a FedEx envelope. And we just sat around the desk, me and three or four other guys, just going through the checks. It was like a day in the life of Babe Ruth.

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