a way to have a day
Greetings, earthlings.
Let’s get right into it.
Here are three things I consumed this week worth sharing:
1. A way to have a day.
Sophie Lucido Johnson is one of my favorite Instagram follows.
2. But I’m a crêpe.
I laughed so hard. The internet is wonderful. The internet is rotting my brain.
3. These orange cardamom buns my friend Julie made:
Julie owns Red Wagon Plants, the best nursery around. At some point this growing season, she plans to open a little coffee/pastry outfit in her brand new building, which means you’ll be able to get yourself a little sweet treat and wander through her greenhouses perusing house plants and garden starts and perennials. What a dream!
I am humbled and honored to be a taste tester for this new endeavor.
My favorite kind of communication challenge involves making something wonky, boring, or complex feel interesting, digestible, and shareable.
I often do this through narrative illustration–see this comic about how Vermont’s state legislature works, or this piece I made for Burlington’s Parks & Rec Department about “nature-based solutions.”
There’s something about illustration that engages even the most passive scroller. It makes information attractive, it breaks it up into bite-size chunks, and it makes learning fun.
It’s almost as if… design matters!
In the past few years, I’ve added short-form videos into the mix. Video can be time-consuming because it involves both going out and recording the raw video content (which requires equipment, coordinating and scheduling people you need in the video, etc.) and then lots of hours editing. This is made harder when the people whose voices you want to share have limited time.
When NOFA-VT needed to lift up the voices of Vermont’s struggling organic dairy farmers, I saw an opportunity to use existing recordings of farmers’ testimonies in the statehouse to raise awareness about this issue.
I loved the challenge of cutting down a grainy, 110-minute-long Zoom meeting recording with next to zero views on YouTube into clips that people would watch and feel ignited by. I loved that I didn’t need to bother these busy and stressed farmers and ask them to take even more of their time to perform their pain, to say something that they already said.
I made this Reel and it popped off on Instagram:
I had the same urge while watching a recording of a Burlington mayoral debate last week. I’m supporting Emma Mulvaney-Stanak and she had some FIRE moments in this debate. I wanted more people to see her, so I volunteered to cut up the footage into shorter clips for Instagram. This one popped off a little bit:
I love the efficiency of using footage that already exists. I love embracing the low-resolution, public-access TV quality of these clips. I love trying to find the grabbiest bit of audio to kick off the edit and increase the likelihood that someone sticks around to watch the rest. I love the rush of dopamine I get when I see it working: people sharing these videos with their communities to signal, “hey, people like us care about things like this.”
Anyway, a lot of my time this week was spent as a volunteer content creator for Emma’s campaign. If you’re a Burlington voter, I beg you: please show your support with cash or time. The future of our amazing little city depends on us!
Thank you for all the orders last week!
For those that missed it: I’m clearing out all of my inventory to make room for new work coming this spring. Bandanas, shirts, jewelry, stickers, etc. in my shop are deeply discounted. I’m sharing about this megasale here first because quantities are limited.
I just added my blue lady screen prints to the shop last night!
Christine Tyler Hill
Website: tenderwarriorco.com
Email: tenderwarriorco@gmail.com