Tag: design
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Fifty years of the Z80
The Z80 is 50 this July (2026). My history briefly crossed with this chip when I was young. But now it’s a popular design of mine.
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Ideas always welcome
Not all design ideas are mine. One source is direct requests. Do you have a chip, board, or component you’d like to see hand-illustrated on a shirt?
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Roundup of top designs – but now as mugs!
I’ve been doing a wee monthly roundup of my most popular designs (last two February and March). This month is slightly different. One of the rules of thumb when building an Etsy store is to stick to a single product type, say, in my case, shirts, or tightly related types, say, shirts and hoodies. Then…
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Most popular designs of March 2026
OK. So last month I talked about the most popular designs of February. I liked the post so much, decided to do it again this month (and let’s see if I can continue it). This past month, there was some movement in the rankings, and, again, some that surprised me. SID month – againMy designs…
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Whence creativity?
I have experience in media-driven businesses: I ran a corporate blog for a global juggernaut, was a writer for magazines and websites, and have always been adjacent to marketing types who like to tap into my writing and video expertise. Therefore, I went into Grey and Slate with full awareness of the hunger the business…
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Most popular designs of February 2026
I was checking out the stats from the shop to see what were the most popular shirts in the store. As in January, most of the top shirts had a hand-drawn element to them. Tho the line up this month was slightly different from January. I think part of this was due to an ad…
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Celebrating women inventors on International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is celebrated on 08 March. In honor of the day, I want to share the story behind my “Women Inventors” section of my store. Same old storyWhen I started my store, I wanted to do shirts with famous quotes cheekily remixed for makers. For example, Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am”…
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My illustration process: standing on the shoulders of giants
I’ve been struggling to define my process for creating hand-drawn designs. I feel it is more than just ‘tracing,’ in the boring, mindless sense. As I have shared before, I do my hand-drawn designs on an iPad Pro, with an Apple Pencil, in Adobe Fresco. I look for visually interesting images from all sorts of…
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My first sales event on Grey and Slate, Haberdashers!
My first sales event on Grey and Slate™! All shirts 25% off thru 02 Dec for Etsy’s Black Friday promo. Hand-drawn circuits and maker references (NE555, op-amps, vintage chips). Help me hit 20 sales before year-end. Please share this with folks who like shirts designed for hardware nerds. 🙏 For context:I’ve been posting a new design…
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Why do ‘How-to’ Biz YouTubers think everyone can do what they do and succeed?
I’ve been on a tear these last few months, building up my Etsy store of expressive shirts for makers. Part of the journey has been learning about Etsy, Print on Demand, and design trends. So I spend a lot of time learning from folks on YouTube. One thing that occasionally pops up: some YouTuber shares their…