With PHCA‘s annual meeting (the Building Carbon Zero California 2015 conference) and the commencement of the Daily Acts‘ permaculture design course both looming this week, Tara and I have found ourselves thinking that we should have some sort of card or something to hand people who might be interested in reading the Ol’ Gimpy Blog. So, with the rain lately, other delays in getting the project underway and a bout with the common cold, I’ve had a bit of down time to work up some dumb stuff in Photoshop… please note that examples of this work will be shown below, so fair warning (and sincere apologies to those of you with a discerning eye for quality design).
Or, more accurately, not in Photoshop. Because I’m cheap, and like to be able to buy things and then use them, I don’t want to pay my monthly Creative Cloud vig in order to use their tools when I have some dumb stuff to make. Since it turns out that there’s a pair of applications that purport to have roughly similar capabilities called Affinity Photo and Affinity Design , I figured doing something for the ranch would be a good project to get familiar with them.
Even though they are not a complete replacement for the Adobe creative suite, I am reasonably happy with both tools, and will be using them in the future for my graphic design and photo editing needs (such as they are).
I was going to bore you all with the story behind the various elements I used (for instance, the pattern in the shield is stolen directly from the kitchen table!), but decided against it in the interest of keeping things snappy. Anyhow, the first thing I thought of was sort of a coat of arms-ish thing that I could plaster onto business cards in order to annoy friends, acquaintances and potential blog followers :
Next, I made up a business card using it… and with the exception of a certain Tara-mandated change to the text, this is what we ended up using:
Tara liked the Gimpy crest and now wants to make t-shirts, so I made another little nubbin for the shirt. I think it might be considered a bit crass right now, but with a little bit of editing this might work:
UPDATE: Tara has created a GDR Zazzle store so you can join us in buying overpriced Gimpy Dog-branded merchandise!
the gimpy dog ranch 
In the unlikely event that you do want to get your own Gimpy Dog Ranch merch, I just saw that there is a promotion for “today only” you can get 50% off your t-shirt or sticker order using code ZAZCRAZYFIVE. Ugh, I feel like I’ve just spammed my own blog. But the pricing which we are forced to use for these items is pretty expensive, so don’t pay full price if you don’t have to!
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