T-Shirt Inspiration

My coworkers inspire me. Many of them are involved in some great design and art outside of the office.

Love Rachel's style, on a t-shirt
More of Rachel's designs



If you love t-shirt design here are some other great websites to submit your design to or be inspired by.

SpringLeap

Threadless

Shirt Woot

Teextile

DesignByHumans

RiptApparel

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Uninspired vs. Inspired

Corporate design vs. breakfast design

Component standards vs. simple things of beauty

Executives vs. artists who blog

A cubicle vs. a studio with a view

Pixels vs. home, paper, scissors

Ergonomic chair vs. front porches

Coworker vs. talented photographer

Swiss design vs. sew colorful

Big budgets vs. art esprit

Room 394 vs. this happy place

Microwave lunches vs. Pioneer Woman cooking

Sidebars, banners, link colors vs. circles, birds and pastels

Your inspiration is my inspiration. Thanks Jill.

3 Things

There are three things that take time:

1. Making friends
2. Raising children
3. Creative work

There is no rushing through.

I have to remind myself.

These are the things that bring the most meaning to our lives...lasting relationships, our families and the creative work of our minds and hands.

And they are worth the time and effort.

Wise words repeat in my head. "Do not labor for that which cannot satisfy."

In the workplace, hoping to build a quick relationship in order to "leverage" that relationship, is phony and easily spotted. Be genuine and caring.

At home, rushing kids from place to place, through meals and into bed, will bring regret and missed moments of joy and contentment. Let chores and "me"-dia time go.

In creative work, meeting a deadline with something slapped together in short burst between meetings, will never satisfy you or the client or the audience. Don't over promise.

Take the time.

Strengths

"You cannot be anything you want to be—but you can be a lot more of who you already are."

"When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists."

Focusing on strengths rather than "opportunity areas" in the workplace, and as a way of managing or leading, makes so much sense to me. It just feels right.

I've been reading StrengthsFinder 2.0, and Strengths Based Leadership in the last few days.

Their research proves that feeling out. People who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general, according to the Gallup organization.

"If you focus on people's weaknesses they lose confidence."

When you are not able to use your strengths at work, you are six times less likely to be engaged in your job. You are more likely to dread going to work, to treat others poorly, to achieve less on a daily basis, and to have fewer creative moments.

Not good for a designer, right?

I recommend taking the assessment and having a candid discussion with your employer about where you can begin using your strengths every day.

At the very least it will validate what you've already known and give you permission to stop trying to be more of something you aren't.

“All Meanings Depend on the Key of Interpretation”

So said George Eliot, of poetry.

Since I like to look for meaning in everything, I find it interesting to think that meaning can change based on new findings, a key, or a change in context.

Lately I’ve been reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, my new favorite author.

In Proust he looks at authors and artists (Whitman, Eliot, Proust, Cézanne) who knew and expressed truths about man, the brain, and science long before 20th century science. The science of their time, perhaps, forced them to look inward for the truth. They tried to understand the mind and were “most accurate, because they most explicitly anticipated our science...this art endures, as wise and resonant as ever.”

George Eliot in Middlemarch wrote “we are a process and an unfolding.” Only until recently biology held that the brain was a genetically governed robot, a set of cells that did not divide, unlike every other cell in our body.

Neurogenesis Is Born
Through a series of experiments misintrepreted or ignored, this belief held firmly. But in 1989 new observations began to alter these scientific “facts”.

Elizabeth Gould at Rockfeller University, discovered that chronic stress was devastating to rat brain neurons, but that the brain healed itself when the stress was removed. Over the next 8 years she painstakingly quantified her findings in rats and monkeys.

The science of neurogensis was born. “The textbooks were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself,” Lehrer writes.

Now here is where it gets interesting to me.

“The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens,” Lehrer writes.

“High levels of stress can decrease the number of new cells [regenerating]; so can being low in a dominance hierarchy.” But when changing to living in an enriched environment, adult brains recover rapidly.

The implications are worth pondering. Think of the repression of women in a dominance hierarchy, think of slavery, think of those who live in poverty, think of good zoos and bads zoos, think of stark work environments, think of isolated young mothers, and so on.

How we think about these situations now has new meaning. And there are further implications to growth and happiness.

A New Key
The ramifications are profound and just now, in the last 10 years are being explored.

For example, scientists have discovered that antidepressants work by stimulating neurogenesis, implying that depression is ultimately caused by a decrease in the amount of new neurons, and not by a lack of serotonin.

We have a new key for intepretation.

Newborn brain cells make us happy.

Again ponder the implications, we need to be ever learning, seeking to enrich our environments for ourselves and our children, making workplaces more about cooperation and less about dominance, and excising stress from our routines and helping others to bring about these changes.

Learn something lately
As Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, the “mind [is] as active as phosphorus.”

“Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis,” Jonah Lehrer points out, “ensures that we are never done with our changes.”

Ellen

More reading:
Antidepressant action in mice, NIH
The Science of Prozac