Bento Beach

Coming up with something neat is not enough. Especially if it's digital. For some ideas they are easier to move from the digital world to the physical. In this project I maintain an overview of the lessons learned from working with different products and techniques.
There are no links to a shop or anything like it on this page, so don't worry about being sold something.

I started looking into physical products in 2019 because somebody asked me if they could order one of my graphic designs on a mug. I was stunned and got curious. After figuring that out I started to look into the wider world of publishing. Stay tuned for more and don't be shy if you want to buy my work on something I haven't figured out how to make/get made yet.

Posters are a fun thing to work on. My approach to them has been to use them to collect individual graphics and put them into different layouts and arrangements. There is something soothing about this approach. Like butterfly or stamp collecting. And nothing beats the "oh wow" when you see your work for the first time professionally printed in front of you.

I started looking into playing cards as another way to share collections of graphics in new way. It's a very different feeling from creating a poster. For a poster you can always make up for having more or less pieces. A card set is less forgiving. If you don't have enough you don't have a full deck. And if you have too many you need to hunker down and figure out which one made the cut.

That's a sure way to get the message out. On graphic at a time. There are many places that can help you get your work front and centre on a t-shirt. But if you don't want it to look like somebody ironed on a A4/letter page to the front of the shirt you got to figure out how to work with the process. Oh and don't forget that the shirt has a color that may be different from the background you originally created your work on. Color contrast on a shirt can make or break any graphic.

I found that mugs are great for getting your graphics out. It takes a bit to figure out how to design a graphic that "works" on a rounded surface, but when you do it's great. On top of that there are a host of different printing techniques that will create different effects and come with different lifetimes in a dishwasher. Ask me how I know and how many mugs there are in my cupboard.