The Daily Create today was to design a philosophTEE. “Make Sartre, Dammit!” was the first thing that came to mind, making a pun off of the longtime ds106 slogan, but I basically don’t know Jacques about Sartre. Then I thought, isn’t MOOC pioneer Stephen Downes a philosopher? His name naturally suggested the Kool & the Gang song (YT). I needed an appropriate font, so I went to Da Font and found Prisma, which seemed to fit the groovy spirit of the song, but I also liked the disco ball “o” in the Disco Diva font, so I used that too. I looked for a good photo of Mr. Downes, and found a masterpiece linked on CogDog’s blog. So I put it all together, and thought an assignment Jim came up with for the Hardboiled course way back when, using CafePress for shirt designs. So I found some custom t-shirt site an uploaded my design so it looks like an actual product.
Afterwards I thought I might have been impulsive. It’s one thing to play with Plato, but Downes is a living person who may object to this use of his image, or to the commercial nature of the site. Then I looked closer at CogDog’s post and saw that the photo is licensed CC BY-NC, so maybe I really shouldn’t have used it on a commercial site, even if I’m not actually selling it. I tagged @Downes in my tweet, so he could chastise me, but instead he retweeted it, so I guess it’s okay.
