MANVIL

We’re almost finishing up the new year in the office, and we’re pretty stoked with how it all came out overall.

This year has been a relatively successful one: The office is still paid for, the heat is still on, and the clients have been great to work with. Projects, have been rewarding and we think they all look good. (We’re biased after all)

So for the year’s culmination we are putting together a fun shirt that we feel sort of sums up our efforts FOR 2011. MANVIL’s “Hang Loose and No Make A” tee is an homage to our home, Hawaii, and if there were such a thing as a battle cry for our office, this is it. We must admit it’s rather a contradiction to call it our battle cry. Screaming is a huge part of “Making A” and is therefor, about as far from “Hanging Loose” as one can get. (Take it up with the boss)

We’ll send these tees to clients, and to family, and if there are any left over perhaps they can be bought, for a price. (Say $15.) Sorry, we’re only making them in Large and Extra-large sizes. If the interest is heavy, perhaps we can make another run further down the road.

mele kalikimaka a e hau’oli makahiki hou! Bring on 2012!

It takes a lot of things to start out in business on your own. Passion, a skill-set, and a client base; the faith that you can move forward each day towards the goal of making things work out for the betterment of your business and your trade; and you have to have a belief that things will work out alright.

A well travelled business owner we know once said “You’ll meet and asshole every day of your life.” and an even wiser sage added to that “make sure it’s not the guy/girl in the mirror.”

With this in mind the graphic displayed is that of a client MANVIL did work for. A client who asked MANVIL to vectorize their drawing. The client later said they loved the finished graphic, and then they took our artwork (the JPEG with a watermark below) and paid an on-line company to vectorize the JPEG. She then refused to pay MANVIL for the work done.

MANVIL made nothing, and although that sucks fiscally, it doesn’t suck all the way.

We got into graphics at MANVIL to make things look better, and looking at the original images provided to us by the client, the final MANVIL graphic is a success. The matching hemisphere lines, subtle thinning on the lower highlight and curiously notched upper and lower apices are balanced in comparison to the preliminary drawing. We think it looks as it should: solid and refined. We even like the design, which is too bad, because we’re not so thrilled with the client right now.

Suffice it to say, the image the former client paid somebody else to vectorize was poorly transferred to their website. It subsequently pixilated badly on their packaging as well, which is too bad, because we’d have made sure that would have looked great. And we like to see our paying client’s succeed.

Karma, she is a fickle mistress.

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