spoil

Well here it is my first charity project. Like most people I have been shocked and upset by the scale of the ‘Horizon Deepwater Oil Spill Disaster’ on the Gulf coast. I know it’s not the current hot topic that it was but there is still a huge amount of clearing up to do and to have any hope of putting things right we need to keep rising funds.

As soon as I heard about it I reacted in a very Graphic designer sort of way and drew a logo in a notebook. I just had a very clear image of the word ‘spoil’ with the oil part running down the page. It would have stayed in my notebook if a friend hadn’t seen it and pushed me to take the idea further. A reusable shopping bag just seems like the right place to home the design being a green item in it’s own right. It’s always hard to judge your own work and I realize this is quite down beat compared to my usual designs but I hope it captures how a lot of us feel about the disaster. As I look at the awful pictures of spreading oil and helpless wildlife fighting to survive I can’t believe we have done this to our already fragile ocean.

125 canvas long handle tote shopper bags have to hand screen-printed right here in New Zealand and that’s it, all I’m making so it’s a limited item. I’m giving 100% of my profits (around $5.50US - $10nz from every bag sold) to Oxfam’s Gulf Oil Spill Fund. I’ve also putting a high res file on Flickr (just follow this link) so if you want to use the design to rise money for the fund in anyway (making tees, badges, posters, anything you like) to rise money for Oxfam you can, all I ask is that you give all the profits that you make to the charity. I’m trusting that people will do the right thing, I figure it can rise more money this way than I can alone from my small part time business. If this goes well I’ll run a new charity project I along the same lines every six months. If this catches your imagination please blog, facebook or tweet it forward. Thank you Colleen x.