In 2004 I branded a Middle School girl's camp called Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I tried for an 80's New Wave feel since the graphic styles of the 80's had been resurfacing and it seemed appropriate for a fun girl's church camp. I also did one for the boys at the time called Boyz Will Be Boyz but that one had a distinctly different look and doesn't apply to this post.

Fast forward to 2007 when I started posting designs to sell on Zazzle. I was looking through my archives and came across this art which was probably not going to be used again and I decided to repurpose it on various merchandise starting with a tee. Some of the items are shown below including the shirt, a square button, coffee mug and iPhone 5 case.

**Various Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Merchandise**

By no means have I made a lot of money on any of these items as I only get 10% of the sale price but it's been fun to see them sell to people all over the world. It always surprises me when someone finds them and orders considering the massive amount of stuff to choose from on Zazzle. Here are some of the sales totals to date just for kicks. 34 Tee shirts, 295 Buttons, 4 mugs and 35 various other items. I consider my efforts toward these sales as a fun hobby and nothing more. If you think this looks fun and you are a creative person then maybe you should look through your old art that you are sure you own and that's collecting dust on your hard drive and give it a shot.

Last Christmas I had the idea of making my parents a special gift by adapting their favorite coffee brand and making it unique to them. I started with a photo that I had of them that just happened to be sitting on a shelf behind my desk chair. I drew from that photo a high contrast version of them. I tried to make it simple and logo-like with out getting too hung up on making it look like a knock-off of the siren image. I knew that once a black and white image of them was placed inside the iconic green ring that they would probably be really happy with it.

Here you can see the original photo and the final basket of goodies that I put together for them. I put aprons on them because it seemed appropriate and I added a hand and arm holding a cup of coffee to fill a weird space that was created at the bottom of the circle.

The most important part of the gift for me was the mugs which I had printed through Costco. I also thought it would be neat to give them a Christmas ornament with the logo on it which I sourced through Zazzle. The rest of the items where modified by me to add to the overall effect. I bought candy and coffee that had similar packaging colors and added the logo to the labels. I also printed the logo on a card that I wrote in.

Below are my parents opening the basket. They thought at first glance that it was a basket of Starbucks stuff and then were very surprised to see that it was actually them on the items. It was fun to see them open it.