Cleaning House with a Soapbox and a Broom

Carol Wyndham owns the building I rent an apartment in. That will be changing very soon, as Heather and I are moving to Seattle, but that’s beside the point.

Carol also knows I’m an Eagle Scout. What’s more, she seems to have a slightly skewed view of what this means. I don’t help myself any in this case; typically, once she invokes the Title, I respond as one would expect an Eagle to according to the situation on cue. This, I suppose, only reinforces her misconception. Let me explain.

She called me about three weeks ago and asked if I’d done a Good Turn (© BSA) yet that day.

“Huh?”

“Oh, I told my friend I knew an Eagle Scout who could help him!”, she sang cheerfully.

Turns out she knew a guy running a political campaign. He needed a logo for his supporters to rally around. He’s also a staunch supporter of a local character who calls herself “Granny D” who runs around the state (or at least walks, literally) with a broom. The broom apparently symbolizes “cleaning up government”. Don’t ask me to explain it much more than that. While I am in fact an Eagle Scout, I can’t honestly say I pay a whole lot of attention to local politics. I know the general story, and for me, that’s enough.

So this Alex fellow knows Carol, and Carol knows a graphic designer with a Boy Scout Responsibility Guilt Button.

Hey, at least she steered Alex towards a trained professional.

Then Carol mentioned that Alex had no budget to speak of. They needed to find a designer who could work pro-bono. Someone like a generous, intelligent, socially responsible do-gooder with a full compliment of design software and the skills to use them properly. Ahh, now I see why the Eagle Title was invoked...

I caved.

With Heather and I on the verge of spending scads of cash on moving (and conveniently, now that Carol was on the phone, it seemed a good time to tell her we’d be leaving the apartment), normally I’d have started talking fees and usage rights. Unfortunately, she’d appealed to the Scout. On the upside, it would give me an interesting portfolio piece, which I’d need to beef up the book for the inevitable interviews in Seattle.

She needs a favor from an Eagle Scout. She asks said Eagle Scout. Eagle Scout responds in heroic fashion. Somebody’s got to eventually explain to this woman that Eagle Scouts are not actually superheroes with hotlines. It just won’t be me.

Three weeks later, it’s today.

I get an email from Alex showing a reasonable quote from an online sticker vendor. He’s got prices, he seems to have a producer lined up for the items, he just needs a logo to go on them. I’ve yet to so much as sketch anything.

Bad Eagle.

So I sit down with pencil and paper. I’d thought here and there about how to approach the “assignment”, but this was the first physical evidence. Five minutes later I’ve decided that all but one of those ideas are absolute crap. Straight on to the computer, I fire up Illustrator and grab the Wacom tablet.

(For the uninitiated, a Wacom is like that awesome light pen they use with the computers on CSI, except that it’s real. It’s still awesome though.)

An hour later I’ve fleshed out something very close to a final logo concept. Then I take a job interview phone call, welcome my wife home from work, “assist” her with grocery shopping – mostly restraining urges to make up embarrassing jingles for various food items out loud in the store – and eat a bunch of chicken and mac-and-cheese. After all that, I find time to finish the logo and email it out. Three weeks to plan a mark that will represent a socio-political message that Alex has spent years refining...

And I wait until the last minute, call an audible, and windmill-slam a solid, useable image onto the screen in one evening.

I am an awful Eagle Scout.

Here’s the best part. As I’m about to click the “send” button, it occurs to me that I really like this mark. I also really like this website called Threadless.com. They take submissions from artists and designers and put the best ones on t-shirts. Then they sell the t-shirts to cool people. I have a Threadless shirt; therefore I am a cool person.

I actually considered keeping the mark for myself and sending it to Threadless. Who knows what I’d have sent to Alex?



In the end, I did the right thing. Alex got his mark, and he liked it a lot. Said it wasn’t anything like what he’d had brewing in his own head, and yet was very cool and on target with his goals.



So here it is, the broom for his soapbox.

My sister would be proud, though I’m relatively certain that she sees a slightly different meaning in what this mark is all about. That’s okay, I suppose; part of the purpose of this sort of logo is just to get people to latch on instantly, regardless of their reason for latching on. This mark has nothing at all to do with environmentally concious cleaning products, though I’d put money on it that Alex is far more for eco-safe-detergent than he is against it.

I could send you to his site at this point, but I won’t. See, I’m not in this to support one political agenda over another. I did it because it presented a new challenge, something to wrap my head and my design programs around. I did it because my portfolio needed something fresh, new and unlike its prior contents. And I did it because a woman who has been kind to Heather and myself asked me for a favor from an Eagle Scout.



But maybe I’ll still try to talk Alex into sending the logo in to Threadless...