Many of you know that I’ve been working with the CEO of ChoiceShirts, Matt Cohen, on a number of initiatives for quite a while. Our most recent partnership has produced something that I’ve talked about doing “right” for quite a while, making a really easy way to put the contents of tweet on a t-shirt.

Why on earth would we do that? Well, a few reasons:

• Matt and I, like many of you, really love Twitter. Like, really love Twitter. I <3 you Twitter.
• Matt and I, like many of you, really love t-shirts. Just last week, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks said to me at DreamIT’s funding day, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you NOT wearing a t-shirt”. It was an off day, what can I say.
• Twitter is a really great channel for collecting funny, inspirational, or memorable one-liners. More and more often, we heard from others or thought ourselves, “that tweet would make a great shirt”.
• We wanted to try out some new tools in the ChoiceShirts design studio toolkit, as well as make a case for how we can build out new ones. ChoiceTweets is one of what we hope are many prototypes to showcase new and fun ways to get your content onto a t-shirt. A new vehicle for your content so YOU can make money. That’s what we’re really excited about.

Neato! So how does it work?

The whole thing is powered by a bookmarklet. You can read more about how that works on our how-to page. Not sure what tweets you might want to put on a shirt? Take a look at some of the one’s we’ve done, as well as any tweets that other users are turning into tweeshirts.

Also, don’t miss the Merlin Mann collection! Merlin’s tweets are often angry, but humorous. As other prolific tweeters have large numbers of shirts generated from their tweets, we’ll add new featured collections. Maybe yours?

Developer support baked in

For the time being, the feature set is small but that won’t last long! In the mean time, if you have created a Twitter client (web or desktop) and want to include “ChoiceTweets support”, all you need to do is add an icon that links to the same URL as the Tweet’s permalink, and change the Base URL from http://twitter.com to http://choicetweets.com. More on that on our Developers page.

GO! Check it out!

This is the first iteration of the idea, and we’re excited to see how people use it and add new features and learn lessons for the next site that we build. That’s why we’re using UserVoice to collect feature requests! Be sure to add your ideas there after you’ve made your first Tweeshirt.

Big thumbs up to Erik Kastner, who took on some fun challenges with generating the images necessary to make this concept work. I always enjoy working with Erik, and look forward to having him continue to lend his development expertise and problemsolving prowess as this project matures.

And of course, I always appreciate Matt’s support and interest in taking new ideas like this for a spin.

So head over to ChoiceTweets.com, and grab the bookmarklet. And let me know what you think!

Note: my buddy Zach Inglis pointed out that some of his coworkers prototyped something similar in the past. We certainly knew that this had been done before, but thought there was LOTS of room for improvement! So thanks to those who inspired our creation, and we’re excited to continue to improve on the idea based on everyone’s feedback!

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me having gone independent.

Wow.

A year. Really? I go back and forth between “that’s it” and “that long”? In some aspects, I feel like it was only a couple of months. In other aspects I look at all that I’ve managed to accomplish everything I’d set out to do, and much much more.

I partnered with some amazing talent, many of whose work has earned us opportunities to work together more than once. I worked with some amazing clients (many of whom are brands that I really, really love).

I’ve co-built a couple of funny little apps that got a fair amount of attention, which was never the plan…the plan was to have fun building them.

I co-founded our own little version of a much larger movement that, in it’s own right, has paved the way for more opportunities for myself and countless other people. That’s one of the most gratifying and exciting accomplishments of my life, and I’m SO happy and grateful to have been a part of it and have made all of the friendships and connections I have along the way.

One year in, I’ve learned a lot about making choices and how to learn from the choices that I, and others have made.

The Next Chapter

It’s only appropriate that my newest client not only has choice in their name, but is excited to learn what happens when you give a community some opportunity to make choices.

My newest venture is a new kind of building. This one is less about building a website site and a lot more more about building a community. Learning from the wonderful community building experience we’ve had here at IndyHall, I thought it’d be great to take the model to the road and allow others to benefit from it. This next foray into community building is with a company called Choice Shirts, just outside of Philadelphia in Pennsauken, NJ.

The new project is called The Choice100 and it’s first incarnation as a blog has launched last night. It’s simple and direct, but that’s by design. The whole goal of the project at this stage of the game is to facilitate asking a potential community of design talent what they think about the proposed community model, and feed back as to what would benefit them the most.

This project has me really excited for a number of reasons. One, it’s a really fun opportunity to have conversations with the folks who work in a field that I’m closely tied to (design, that is) but from a whole new angle for me; graphic design for apparel.

Even moreso is that a company with a fairly traditional (and well established) business model is just as amped as I am to listen to their customers (who, in this case, double as their product creators) and be so open about the process.

In the preliminary research on who to have in the loop for this, I got some really positive feedback from designers that have worked in other t-shirt “contest” and “designer community” scenarios. Of course, they’ve all had thoughts as to what was good and what was bad. What’s really great about ChoiceShirts and The Choice 100 is that the company has a history spotted with creative evolutions of existing and established business models, and that they are embracing a conversation within a community to help model the next steps for their company.

Sounds wonderfully Cluetrain to me. What happens when you stop selling and start conversing. ChoiceShirts is not only embracing that, but they’re excited to embrace that. That’s immensely energizing and inspiring for me.

We’re going to be starting from the ground up. This blog is out there to announce the existence of this new evolutionary process for ChoiceShirts, and gather the interested parties in a place where they can converse. Next steps will include some real-world brainstorming, which we’ll facilitate at IndyHall much like the first brainstorming session we held back in August.

Check out the site, leave some comments, and subscribe to the blog and twitter feeds if it sounds like something you’re interested in participating in. Remember, this project is about us hearing what you have to say!