On Friday, I went to Nation Printing Corp in Queens for a press check for the next big project to come out of None — this years annual update for Immigration Equality. I’m really excited about the project and the press check went very well. Andrew Prieto, president of Nation, is a perfect host and fantastic to work with, I hope to be able to bring him more business down the line.

Above is a small peek at the printer sheet from the cover. More about the project and additional photos to come with the final product. Thought I’d give you a little taste of this very exciting project.

Yesterday, was the first march on LGBT March on Washington in 16 years, my long-time association with and creating a brand for Immigration Equality made us the best dressed team in the entire march. Our red-clad army, waving our placards were a sight to behold. Two hundred strong in a sea of people 150,000 strong. We made a huge impression on the crowd. It was a great way to cap an exciting year of growth for Immigration Equality, including the opening of a DC office.

It’s kind of an amazing feeling to be surrounded by your work — especially in a situation as powerful as seeing hundreds of thousands of your LGBT brothers, sisters, and allies march from the White to the Capitol. Now I know the appeal of mass merchandising.

More pictures of favorite details and the entire set is at my Flickr.

CMI Management does outsourcing and management consulting for government and private industry. Their focus is on their superior staff managing your superior staff. The business is people. The previous website needed a thorough overall, building on their professionalism to market their services up against much bigger (and better known) brands. It was a crucial time, right before they were up for submitting for a major GSA contract. All of their capabilities were lost in a dated site design.

I art directed a clearer, visually clean website, bringing in a new bright color palette, writing headline copy, and suggesting new custom photography of their employees. The result? An open contemporary look that positions CMI as the service-oriented, major player that they are.

Immigration Equality faced a dilemma: the annual gala awards event at the end of their most successful year in the middle of the worst recession since WWII. How to celebrate the success and a new office in Washington, while containing costs?

Understated elegance always works.

A single metallic silver, on brown uncoated paper. Delicious, like a fine box of candy. To underscore that Immigration Equality’s work is a partnership between the organization and its supporters — I wrote a simple message: "Together, we succeed. Together, we celebrate."

Success, the piece turned out beautifully. And the gala was the biggest one yet — attendance and donations wildly exceeded expectations.

Tonight we are offering a two-for-one special: setting up a themed t-shirt shop at Skreened and self-testing your own advice. So welcome to another night at Idea Bar, please free to use anything that seems interesting.

I recently created a store at Skreened.com for what I’m calling The 1974 T-Shirt Project. It’s built around my conversations on Twitter, where I’m @xtopher1974, where I refer refer to my parter as Mr. NO. Throw in liberal amounts of self doubt and BINGO! a project was born.

There’s a serious side here too. Mr. NO and I have been partners for 8 years. We are a binational couple. Under current immigration law, we are not recognized as a family. We struggle and have spent long stretches apart. It’s a difficult situation, but I’m using the 1974 T-Shirt Project to highlight the work of Immigration Equality and to pledge 20% of my commission at Skreened to their work.

But (and here’s the two-for-one), this is also a test. I’m testing promotion through social channels and using the print on demand services of Skreened (and their ethical business model). These kind of tests help me to give the best advice I can to my cash-strapped, nonprofit clients. I like the freedom of print on demand. It costs me (or you) nothing to establish the store, letting me put all the effort into hatching the idea and promoting it.

Testing an idea on myself is reasoning behind creating this site on WordPress . I wanted to know if could I make a portfolio site to my standards wrapped around a template system. And if I could, could I recommend the same to a client? Like a small nonprofit in its infancy? So far as with Skreened, the answer is yes.

The Idea Bar: The Idea Bar grew out of my fascination with the artist Harrell Fletcher and the brain dumps of ideas that he used to litter his site. This manifested as a performance installation, 2,003 Ideas for Future Projects. Recently while reading Rohit Bhargava, I came across his IdeaBar posts and the concept of open source idea sharing, inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project. Like Rohit, I say take and use these ideas, just please link back to me or the specific Idea Bar post that inspired you.

It’s fun to use (so it doesn’t feel like one more thing I can’t keep up with) and I don’t obsess over formatting different kinds of posts as Tumblr makes some of those decisions for me. I’m sure there tech purists that want infinite amount of control.

To me though, what has made the internet revolution over the last decade is easy to use broadcast tools built on web standards. Tumblr may be too limited for some, but that’s it’s genius. That’s what makes Twitter and Facebook so successful as well. Limits.

After using Tumblr to do play around with a visual shopping shopping list of sorts, called I want candy, I started a group blog of imagery and inspiration with my friend David, called Trumpery. And then decided that my project Inaudible Nonsense needed to come out of its dormant period.

It’s now on Tumblr as well. Please do follow along.

Bantu does secure corporate and government messaging, the previous website needed a thorough overall, cleaning up the presentation and better messaging. Secure SMS is indispensability of SMS in critical operations. All of that was lost in a dated site design.

I art directed a cleaner, visually clean website, putting the focus on the logo and the strong imagery paired with copy that I wrote. The result? A cleaner, open contemporary look that positions Bantu as forward looking and relevant.

SOS Children’s Villages is the world’s largest children’s charity. Beginning in 1949 and continuing through today, they’ve built model villages around the globe to provide loving and safe homes for the world’s orphaned and abandoned children.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with the USA division, developing marketing materials for print and the web. In the fall, they asked me to help the devise a 60th anniversary logo. We followed that with a special edition of their quarterly newsletter, commemorating all six decades with extensive photos, articles and special features.

Everyone at SOS is enormously happy with the anniversary newsletter, I’ll be doing the next one too.

The very first congressional hearing for binational couples! Then a fine write-up in the New York Times. Then the first inclusion of LGBT families in a comprehensive immigration reform bill!

An historic week, a week of firsts and Immigration Equality’s biggest week ever.

I was there during planning to make sure that Immigration Equality made a big splash with it’s electronic communications. I devised a brand around history — borrowing typographically from the printed word and mixing with liberal amounts of ImEq’s red — and then walked the volunteer team through coding and debugging to get a splash page, and inside banners integrated into the website. Praise came in the form of increased media attention, increased donations and compliments on Immigration Equality’s use of electronic media.

Together we took an historical moment and made history.