Limited run and numbered letter press prints for as low as $6 and $14 for starters. Many tees off up to 50%. View our most recent Chop Shop newsletter in your browser here. Join the Chop Shop mailing list here.
“The Altered States of America” is Chop Shop’s take on the US map via a theme that’s near and dear to our hearts: sci-fi, horror, and fantasy. This is an illustrated map populated with the legendary events and characters from popular sci-fi, horror, and fantasy film, TV, comics and legends. The screen printed version is available here and a more affordable digital version is also available. If you are looking for something more local we also have a version for each of the four regions of the United States’ Northeast, Midwest, South and West.
Our Above Earth and Beyond Earth t-shirt designs have gone tattoo thanks to the terrific Tattly. One set includes 2 full sets of all 8 icons which include the Apollo L.E.M., Apollo 8 docking, The Hubble Space Telescope, The International Space Station, Gemini Spacewalk, Voyager, Space Shuttle and the Mars Curiosity Rover. Get a set now at chopshopstore. Read More…
This summer, the wife and I loaded up the boys and spent a week of our summer vacation at Disney World, an event which (for my wife) should never be attempted without matching family t-shirts. Fortunately, I really like her a lot… AND we are both designers.
We crafted a family crest thats part Disney and NYC, laden with as many references that we could fit. The shield supporter on the left is Mufasa (of The Lion King fame), and opposite him is Patience, one of the NY Public Library lions. Had to include Mickey ears and Lady Liberty’s crown, and everything is positioned atop the public transportation for each location.
There is nothing like kicking of a week of vacation by jamming 40+ hours of late night design/production into the days before. Worth every minute when you see the smiling kids sporting the designs they helped art direct.
We published a longer post containing more information about the process (we used a desktop die-cutting machine), as well as more detailed photos over at twoplus.us.
As some of you may already know, we have been arranging the icons from the most popular science fiction, fantasy and horror for some time now into various compositions that usually get printed on tshirts. We may return to this tradition again one day, but wanted to try something a bit different this year. So we decided to Kickstart an illustrated a map of the USA featuring some of the greatest scenes from pop-culture history. Examples to include: the iconic scene of “King Kong” atop New York’s Empire State Building, the final scream scene of “Body Snatchers” outside San Francisco’s City Hall, or the unforgettable scene of a devastated Statue of Liberty on a NJ beach, just to name but a few.
A while back we posted about a great new product by the online friend of all designers known as Swiss-Miss. Tattly sells beautifully designed temporary tattoos to parents, kids, adult-kids and to anyone else who needs them. As a parent, I was always well aware of how hard it was to find cool temporary tattoos for kids unless they liked fairies, dinosaurs or skulls. Those days are over and now Chopping Block has it’s very own Tattly in the shape of the Space Shuttle.
The art is a detail taken from our “Above Earth” t-shirt and poster design. Get some now for a mere $5 for a set of two.
Our Chop Cards are ideal for making your mobile dreams come true!
We just got another batch of mobile design index cards back from the printer. Now you too can brainstorm like a pro with one hundred spot-color mobile device frames printed on high quality bright white index cards. Stockpile them for yourself or share them with a team. Pen, pencil, horizontal or vertical, with a handful of these bad boys you are ready to design the crazy future of mobile design!
Our team is often asked to mastermind and deliver new UX design solutions, or fix existing ones. A task which always entails lots of potential options, fresh ideas and rapid ideation. When the various bits (sections, platforms, navigation, etc..) of an interactive project are rapidly shifting, sketchbooks & notepads can not always keep up. Project discovery with index cards allow us to seamlessly explore design, user flows, application scale and more. It enables a team to challenge conventions or refine goals by shifting/swapping cards around until things feel right.
We believe that every creative idea worth discussing should be drawn. Experience has proven that a few hours of drawing & prototyping interactive applications can save days (if not weeks) development and testing.
If you really want to be an overachiever, our friends at Woomoo Inc. have created a genius app called POPapp that turns your Chop Card sketches into clickable mobile prototypes. Together we are combining the future and the past all for the price of $7.50 and a free app!
Over the past two years The Chopping Block has been working with the National Constitution Center on a few projects centered around electoral politics. While we were toiling over the presidential battle royale, the rest of the NCC team installed and opened “American Spirits”, an incredibly beautiful exhibit on the American experiment with prohibition (also known as the 18th amendment).
You don’t have to be a fan of alcohol or history to enjoy this exhibit, there is plenty there for designerds as well. Shown above are three of five panels from “Wayne Wheeler’s Amazing Amendment Machine”, a highlight of the exhibit that is something of a cross between sculpture, animation, information design with just a touch of a Rube Goldberg. While the machine is not our brainchild, we did get to assist in the design of “Choose Your Words” and the “High-striker” panels (above images center and right).
When it comes to writing the CSS for a big, complicated page, CSS Grid Systems are an invaluable tool. You get consistency across your code and speed in writing the CSS. There are plenty of options out there already, such as 960.gs, Blue Print, and Susy.
However, using a third-party grid system isn’t always the right choice. If the situation requires you to be concerned about file size, a third-party system might add more CSS than is warranted. And sometimes other grid systems may not match your exact requirements for number of columns or gutter size (especially if the design you are building isn’t based on a consistent grid).
Building your own grid system can be a pain as much of the code is repetitive, just minor changes to class names and percentages. However, with a simple loop in SASS, you can avoid the grunt work and quickly have a grid system that matches your requirements and adds little weight to your final stylesheet.
After the success of last year’s “weFab” celebrating the history and music of The Beatles, we couldn’t resist doing one for the Fab Six of comedy. Our new “It’s Tee” features seventy-seven symbols that represent the comic genius of Monty Python. Several depicting some of the best-loved moments in their three films with a large majority dedicated to their “Flying Circus” television program that ran from 1969 to 1974.
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