CTJ Designs “Building a Life Out of Words” Book Cover
Just finished my first ever paying book cover design! It’s nice when dead presidents can validate your meager attempts at art. Thanks to Shawn Smucker for giving me a chance. It was a pleasure, despite the fact that it took me around 30 hours to create from start to finish. I began by creating fonts out of...
Santa’s Naughty & Nice List for Me and My Twitter Friends
I wanted to give a shout-out to my Twitter friends simply because we are all involved in an ongoing effort to take over the world, to connect with infinite others, to write endlessly, to broadcast (or podcast), and to sharpen one another like so many infomercial knives that can cut through shoes. In light of...
Buying You, Selling Me: Love Commodified
Note: I recently found this piece I wrote in late 2006, only a month before I began dating Becki, the woman who would become my wife. I thought it was a reasonably worthwhile piece of writing considering it was penned – er, keyed – by my then 28-year-old self. This may seem like a strange...
Nobody Wants to Be the Stinky Kid: CTJ Creates Planetary Recycling Poster for Allen Press, Inc.
I created the above poster (click on it to enlarge it) for Allen Press, Inc., my place of employment here in Lawrence, KS. First, I sketched the shapes and facial expressions for each planet. Then I used GIMP, a freeware raster graphics alternative to Adobe Photoshop, to “ink” the images. The whole project took me...
Boys Have Wieners and Girls Have Hamburger Buns
You would think we’d know we’re having a girl because the sonogram technician said, “You’re having a girl!” But no. That’s not what happened. When the sonogram feed focused on our child’s nether regions, Becki, being the knowledgeable medical practitioner she is, looked at the screen and said, “Hamburger buns! There’s the hamburger buns! It’s...
BABY JOHNSTON’S SEX AND NAME REVEALED!!!
In the video below, we reveal what we are having. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (What, did you think we’d just tell you without making you work for it?) We created the video on Becki’s iPad with an app called “Puppet Pals.” Thanks to WritRams for pointing its existence out to us! All voices by...