Black Friday 2019

During the month of November I’m usually scrambling away getting as many new designs uploaded as possible in-time for Christmas and, more specifically, Black Friday. Unsurprisingly my biggest sales figures come during the November to January period, and having new designs ready to go seems like an annual tradition now. This year I haven’t quite produced as many as I’d like and even my self-marketing on social media has been slightly nonexistent.  This comes down to being just too darn busy with life, and completing other projects such as bathroom decorating.

I do have two new designs to show you none the less. While the Summer seems like many moons ago now we’ve hit the cold, dark wet months of Autumn, we did managed to binge our way through quite a few Korean dramas. One of which included Strongest Deliveryman.  It wasn’t my favourite, but it had the typical charm and ridiculousness you’d come to expect from any K-drama. It was also the easiest one to base a t-shirt design on.

My second design is once again based on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. Arguably one of the best and most memorable quotes from that film came from Michelangelo, Waiting for his pizza delivery guy (hey, there’s a theme here) and telling Donnie that wise men say “Forgiveness is Divine, but never pay full price for late pizza”. This of course relates to a price promise the likes of Pizzahut and Dominos had where if your pizza took more than 30 minutes to get to you, they’d give you a discount. I don’t think they still uphold to this policy anymore (not in the UK at least) but I guess takeaway delivery is no longer a new concept and with plenty of competition, there’s a better chance you’ll look good against “the others” as they are just as likely to f**k up too.

Both designs are on my usual platforms, while Strongest Deliveryman can also be found on Amazon.

Click here to be taken to my website’s t-shirt page.

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Summer is over

Summer feels like it’s pretty much over now that schools have returned, it’s much darker when my alarm goes off and my shorts don’t feel like they will be seen again until 2020.

Before the summer holidays started, I (almost) had two new t-shirt designs to unleash.  Unfortunately I got really busy flying off to East Asia and then managing several major projects at work, and so here I am in September telling you about them.

I Love you, 1000

I started selling t-shirts on RedBubble back in the summer of 2015.  Initially I only uploaded a few designs and it took a good few weeks for my first sale to come through, but when it did I felt quite proud and pleased, and then I was overcome by blind panic in case the design actually looked rubbish when printed (I must stress that I go through my final PNG files with a fine tooth-comb, so quality at my end if guaranteed).  Around Christmas time that year, my sales were definitely on the increase and so I decided to focus much more of my spare time coming up with new designs.

New designs round-up – June 2019

Welcome, welcome, welcome.  Summer feels like it might be finally here (in the UK at least) and so I’m attempting to push as many new designs out as possible before flying off to Asia for a bit.

Based on that opening sentence, you’d expect me to now give you a list of new designs.  Alas I only have one, but I do have other bits of good news too. Firstly, I have reached over 1,000 sales on my RedBubble store.  I will dedicate a post about this very soon. Secondly, the Cartoon Network have granted me an official license to sell my Samurai Jack design at RedBubble.  This is very exciting because I’m now classed as an official fanart seller and my design is protected!

New Designs Round-up – May 2019

Three new t-shirt designs have recently been uploaded onto my Redbubble and Teepublic stores.  First up we have a new design for my gaming category. Anyone that owned an N64 will no doubt be familiar with the 64DD; an external hardware add-on that would allow you to play games on a disk drive format, which had a larger memory capacity compared to the N64’s game cartridges.  I remember getting monthly updates on the 64DD progress courtesy of the Official UK Nintendo magazine and each month it was looking bleaker and bleaker. The 64DD did eventually get released, but only in Japan were it flopped and consequently was quickly forgotten by Nintendo. To this day I still think that was a shame, so to celebrate I created a design that showed exactly how the 64DD would have worked.  Firstly, the 64DD would have plugged directly into the bottom of the N64 console. Then the N64 RAM expansion Pack would have been required (this add-on did make it to us, largely because some games actually needed it in order to work), and a special N64 cartridge that allowed for the N64 to connect to the internet could be inserted into the cartridge slot. And finally the 64 disk drives themselves would slot into the front.  All very neat and tidy, and when you see one in action on Youtube, it’ll make you still want one. You could, of course, settle for my t-shirt instead.

New Website, open now

My website has had a very new lick of paint, and I’m very pleased to say that it is now dry.  Please do take the time to have a look:

www.themattskilton.com

I always try and do a complete overhaul of my website every 2-3 years.  Last time I was desperate to have some parallaxing on my homepage, which worked great on desktop browsers but just did nothing on mobile devices.  Given that the majority of people that visit my site are now on mobile platforms (thank you google analytics), I decided to give parallaxing a rest and instead go for the more minimal approach, with a strong focus on hero images instead.

It took a little longer than expected to put it altogether, largely because I was constantly encountering small issues, literally one after the other, that needed plenty of research to iron out.  The site is far more complex than any of my former efforts, and it’s amazing to see how web design has developed through the years and what can be done with HTML5, CCS3, and plenty of other scripts and plug-ins to boot.  One decision made was to really strip back on the amount of text that I had.  The downside to this, of course, is that it hinders your SEO credentials. And so that’s largely why I’ve set-up this blog too, which will act as my voice and give me an excuse to go into greater details about my latest work and any other opinions I care to share.

I’m pleased with how the sites turned out, and even more pleased with how it seems to function across all platforms.  If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share.  Hopefully I won’t need to write another blog like this for another 2-3 years.