projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:09:09 +0000

I have a t-shirt that will be sold for one day only, tomorrow, Friday September 11th at the daily graphic t-shirt site RIPT Apparel for only $10. $10 bucks people! Come celebrate with me and pick one up. It is cheap and awesome! And should be delivered pretty fast as well, just in tim for a wonderful Fall night ahead!

projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:18:38 +0000

I want to tell you about a new venture I’ve started called RIPT Apparel. RIPT is a new online retailer that sells one of a kind t-shirts for a limited time of 24 hours, then they “rest in peace” forever.

Over the past few months, 2 good friends of mine and I have been meeting weekly, discussing the necessary things to tackle in order to get RIPT off the ground. We’ve collectively built the business using our unique skills and talents and surged forward to produce what lives now at riptapparel.com!

We launched the site Monday, June 8th and have heard such wonderful praises and responses from people all over the globe!

One of our main missions at RIPT is to provide a unique outlet for up and coming artists to promote and sell their art. We feel we’ve provided just the place for this!

One of the ways we’ve done this is we built a community right through the website. Anyone can sign up and join in on the conversations happening everyday! Since Monday’s launch, we’ve had over 400 people join so far, and the number keeps on climbing!

We have also been running a promotion all week, giving away a free shirt for a random new member of the RIPT community as well as a twitter promotion for 50% off their next purchase.

Some of the wonderful artists and their shirts that we’ve collaborated with this week include

I just want to thank everyone for the support and for going to the site and even more for the people who picked up shirts in the first week! You are all absolutely amazing! There will be many more updates on the on-goings of RIPT so check back soon.

And don’t forget to stop by the website and say hi in the comments! Also feel free to follow us on Twitter too!

projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:58:16 +0000

Now since launching CSS Scoop, I haven’t had the chance to do any sort of recap on which sites stand out above the rest so I bring you this “Best of” post.

I’d love to add every design in this list because frankly, I love everything that gets added to CSS Scoop, but doing that wouldn’t make too much sense because you can just go view them all yourselves, but if you wanted a little taste of the quality of work that gets submitted and excepted to CSS Scoop, here ya go (organized by category).

projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:18:15 +0000

When starting a new band, you need need so many things just for it to have the potential to get off the ground. You need, time, good scheduling, motivation, drive, practices, song writing, collaboration, determination, fun and many more.

Chresten, Paul and myself have been sneaking away to a dungeon in the basement of the Music Garage for 4 or 5 months now and have been writing and writing and writing. We officially call ourselves “My Ocean, My Sea” and have even tracked some scratch demos (posted below).

We have about 7 finished songs and as we continue to practice them and perfect them, it dawned on my that another vital part of a band’s existence is their brand (logo, website, all that jazz).

This should be pretty fun and I’m excited to begin, also it works out well because I’ve been looking for something new to do since my latest project Css Scoop is almost finished.

Here is a rough demo of “King of the Island”

Download audio file (BASSGUITking.mp3)

projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:22:01 +0000

Well it has been exactly one month since I launched CSS Scoop. I have posted over 150 designs of my personal choosing and separated them into different categories. I have also built “The Scoop” where you can find up to date articles pertaining to web design etc (over 500 posts so far). Also I have had over 2,000 visitors, over 8,000 page views and the average time spent on the site is over 4 minutes. I even have a couple advertisers signed up now.

CSS Scoop is built entirely with WordPress and it is working out great. I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which I have to say is lovely.

Some of the featured plugins I am using are:

Overall I think CSS Scoop is turning out to be the place for the best designs on the web, mostly because I hand pick them myself. But I’m holding a rather high standard for what sites get in the gallery, just to ensure the quality of selection. I know that more popular sites like Css Mania and such post basically anything, and thats not what I’m trying to do with CSS Scoop.

I highly recommend signing up for email updates from “The Scoop” here. Fresh design news delivered to your inbox daily. On top of that, they look great thanks to feed burner as well.

Some outstanding issues I have left to work out are:

Fix pagination on homepage to exclude posts from “The Scoop”
Redesign the footer and organize its content better
Increase awareness of the gallery
Potentially set up a blog, and have news submitted by readers
and of course, always keep posting designs as much as I can

If you can think of other things that need a little TLC, please by all means, email me or submit your site.

projects | tj mapes

tjmapes — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:14:07 +0000

So on and off for the past month or so I have been developing a new gallery site to showcase some of my personal favorite designs. Every morning I go through all rss feeds from galleries I subscribe to for inspiration, as well as a few other sites and tag my favorites over on Diigo.

I’m about to cross the 500 websites tagged mark, which I think is pretty rad. Since I’ve been doing this for a long while now, I’ve always wanted to build a site that pulled down all my favorite sites to display all of these for others to view. So I finally created Css Scoop.

Css Scoop features your typical stuff such as rating designs, threaded commenting using Intense Debate and a designer resource section of links called “The Scoop“.

I’ve learned lots more about the wonderful world of wordpress and jquery doing this project. It has been really fun.

Now that I’m done with much of the cosmetic work, I’d like to know what people think, as well as what else I can do to make the site stand out above the rest, so please shoot me an email or a comment with suggestions of any kind.

I wanted to thank Justin quick for helping with the logo. I actually ended up combining my version and his.