It Takes a Village
As a guerrilla public service announcement, we rely on lots of help from all of you to get our message out. It takes a village to save the world. So we’d like to take a moment and highlight one of those “villagers” who have helped These Come From Trees along the way.
When we first started TCFT, it was quite the bare bones enterprise. See the original sticker design above. A little clip art and a little bit of text, and we were off to the printer. Not.Pretty. But sometimes you just have to work with what you have, and hope you improve and evolve as you go, so that’s what we did. Fortunately as our message picked up steam and traveled across the U.S. and internationally. We picked up some fans. In particular, we picked up a fan in Australia by the name of Guy Paterson, who happened to be a graphic designer.
Guy loved the idea of the sticker, but as a designer, was not so enamored of the original design. He reached out to us way back in 2007 to offer his help with a sticker redesign. Here’s his original email to us:
Hi Pete,
I came across your blog the other day, brilliant idea. Really like it.
Coincidentally, it’s a case of right time right place for an idea I’d had too. I’ve recently started a blog called Brand Boggler, and one of the ideas I’ve had is something called “Random Acts of Designess”, where designers do random acts of design for an unsuspecting cause they’d like to help.
More importantly though, I wanted to help you, so have done some work on your sticker for you to improve it’s standout and message – self explanatory really. I hope you don’t think this rude, and if you don’t like what I’ve done then no problem, just ignore it. If you do like it, I can easily send you the artwork or make some amendments, whatever you like really.
You can find out more about me and my blog here: http://www.brandboggler.com
Hope you like the sticker, and look forward to hearing from you.
Guy Paterson
Obviously we took him up on the offer. The sticker you see now is the very one he ended up designing for us. We have no doubt that Guy’s design has helped immensely in the acceptance of the sticker by major universities, public schools, and businesses around the world. We owe him, and the environment, owes him a huge round of applause and our immense gratitude.
Note: Guy, like most people after the early 00’s, stopped blogging, but you can find him here on LinkedIn.