We say Ook Ook when we do something impressive in our work. Most of the time it is something that we have been trying to figure out for days.

Here’s an example. I insisted on adding a segment to our url many years ago, and now we have discovered it is wrong for the website and has to be undone. FYI, if you are interested in the terminology:
• https:// is called the “protocol”
• whatever.com is called the “domain name”
• everything after the domain name slash is called the “path”

Easy Peasy…days later, we are down a rabbit hole and all of a sudden there are more things we are finding to fix. What?! We don’t have Yoast on some of the inner pages? Now Linda is checking broken links. I am searching online for articles on “installer-data.sql”, which means very little to me. Linda thinks she hand-coded it in the php (techie), and I think the problem is in WordPress setting (not techie).

Back to our goal: We find a promising article that calls the middle section of a url a “chonky thorax”. Really? The article says “the long tail has exploded”. Linda ominously warns, “We might break the site if we do this.” I ask clueless questions like, can’t you just undo? Linda asks me how far in years does Chrome history go back- maybe we can find the original article that got us into this mess? And then…. it’s fixed. I asked her how she did it, and she tries to explain, but I was already moving on, “Great work Linda! Ook Ook!”

Then, we laugh for five minutes and I write “chonky thorax” in our co-list that we are compiling of our silly tech history together.
(And, by the way, in the end, the answer was non-techie, found in the page settings of WordPress, and easily editable.

It’s called a Chonky thorax
Linda pretending she has a macro lens again
I am so freaked out and I want to kill Go Daddy
I schedule all my chron jobs at the same time
Psycho refresh
Nothing so satisfying as figuring out your password
You had me at Malware.
I am going to have to just go back and fix it pixel by pixel.
How can a dropdown menu be sexy? That is ridiculous.
I was going to do that but I got distracted by Russian Spam.
some days I miss that domain.
Your logo looks like spam
you are spiking my resources
I have GDPR
The first thing that I always install is my spam protector.
Oh. I have done this. The all in one integration plug-in. It’s a savior!
I am going to go into my c-panel and kill my php processes – it won’t hurt anything
Bots can’t activate parsers.
Oh no, oh dear. I shouldn’t have done that with the gutter.
Woo commerce Menu structure -I gotta get outta here
Mail Chimp Humor- How can I drop a large content block if I can’t even see it?
Put that in the Divi why is this messed up document
If we had a cool saying we could add a big drop shadow to it and put it up in the sky. But it would have to an awesome saying.
I just cleared out all the homeless articles from our site. They are transient.
Love when I find a tutorial that uses The Worm Tower (home composting system) to show me how to add an unlisted video to a youtube playlist!
Photoscape. That must be a fancy program.
I want to make a tutorial so badly for dynamic pages on Wix. But I hate Wix. (note: we now LOVE Wix- want to do WIX sites – For hire!) I am only doing it because I am forced to.
just say no to logos
General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, has come into effect.
This setup’s designed to be used literally 12-16 hours a day; everything about it is rigged so that it’s all in arms reach and ultra-comfortable. I can (and have) slept in here before.
the day Linda changed my yahoo password
I have a super arousing content idea that will surely make a great addition to your site and provide a lot of value to your visitors. If you are interested, then please let me know your thought.

Linda and I took a field trip to the Spunky Pineapple Co. studio in Woodstock, Illinois. It’s tucked in a great downtown location behind Starbucks and near the Woodstock Opera House. We enjoyed meeting Christina McReynolds and seeing behind the scenes of her screen printing business. Her studio is a super organized, sunny, happy place and we didn’t want to leave.  She is very kind and shared with us creative tips that we are very grateful to learn.  We can’t stop thinking about her metallic inks and thermal label printer for example…art geek stuff.  Beyond her bustling online business, she takes time to print custom shirts for local schools, bars, events and coming soon, us!  Her work is top notch and she uses water-based non-toxic inks.

One of our favorite parts of being freelance digital designers is that we get to learn new things.  Take spray can caps, for example, that you see in hardware stores.  We spent the summer learning a lot about what goes into problem solving, designing and manufacturing them, when we were hired to do Engineered Molding Solutions new website.  Mike Jacobs, president of Engineered Molding Solutions, in McHenry, Illinois, was a pleasure to work for and his business is a happy place to be.  We will never look at another spray cap the same way again!

Do you need a new website? CHELINI & OEFFLING, INC based in Spring Grove, Illinois, provides affordable website design and printed materials. After over 10 years of working together, we have found that we enjoy being very organized, which allows us to work quickly and efficiently. We work remotely with clients as well as being able to work in a team environment.

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winter whites shimmer
indoors, a drip lazily
meanders to board

We have a photo shoot on Saturday with Chicago artist, Guy Benson, who is bringing larger work than usual, requiring a little more prep on our end. Linda is painting a large board white, to use as a solid backdrop surface on which to isolate his paintings. The end product for the client – archived images, accurately capturing color and texture, that can be easily emailed to galleries worldwide. Benson is currently featured at Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago.

We have been photographing Guy Benson’s work for many years, and it has been interesting to watch his work evolving. Below is a detail from “Neighborhood”.

Benson’s figures floating in space are reminiscent of some of Paul Klee’s iconic work. Pictured here: Legend of the Nile, Paul Klee, 1937.

See more of his work on his website, designed by C&O with Benson: artguybenson.com. We are excited to see the new work this weekend.

Linda and Nicole just completed a website for a new boutique shop in downtown Barrington, Illinois, owned by local Crystal Lakers, Lynn Loure and Rudy Magnani. Lynn brings her curating skills to play in the store with carefully considered objects-of-art. Mum 117 is a cross between a museum gift shop and a lifestyle store, featuring an eclectic mix of home accessories, women’s and children’s clothing, fine art and books. Each item is sourced for its earth friendliness and natural materials. They have opened their doors this week, so it is a great time to stop in and find that special gift for someone. Visit Mum117.com.

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Here’s what happens when both Nicole and Linda need the photo equipment. Thank goodness the guy soon to be photographed on that bucket is Linda’s nephew. At the same time, Nicole is experimenting with a new Savage chroma green screen for her tumblr fashion diary. They have decided that a second set of lights are next on the wish list. As we begin to experiment with the green screen, there are things to work on but it is starting to look like Nicole is standing in that scene.

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We worked with Bob, from Play It Again Sports in Crystal Lake, on Junior Wolves 3rd grade travel basketball uniforms. With new options in printing, especially with fully customizable sublimation, we have been able to create some design options that go way beyond the catalog and online uniform builders.

This uniform is called Juice Infused Gear, in Street style. It has a reversible shirt and reversible jersey along with a shooting shirt. So far, we have been able to do this customization for minimal to no extra cost to the team on uniforms. Bob explained to us that there are two reasonable options for youth uniforms: being screen-printed or sublimated. To put this as simply as possible, in screen printing the dye sits on top of the shirt. In sublimation, the dye becomes a gas and is actually absorbed into the polyester.

The most affordable option for a uniform is to have one pair of shorts with a reversible jersey using one color screen-print and minimal screens. So for example, no player name on the back would save ten screens having to be made. We also included a shooting shirt which is not necessary. The basic screen-print option is less than half of what we paid but we presented this information to the team parents with samples and offered an individual fundraiser to pay for a player’s uniform.

Since we decided on the fully sublimated custom uniform, we wanted to make the most of the custom options. We generally give the coaches options based on their specifications and we build the uniforms together from there. These uniforms are from a local company, Champro Sports, located in Wheeling, Illinois. Pictured below is “Bibs” who got his nickname in baseball from eating sunflower seeds and drooling all over his uniform.

Name font is “Demonized” in Champro font size 2 , Number font is “Varsity” in font size 8

We sized down the shooting shirts to make sure the sleeve length was correct. We sized up the wolf logo to take up the entire shirt. We provided Champro with art files and mock-ups of this design.

Bob helped us to know that with children, you have to be careful with the font size so that the uniform number doesn’t get tucked into the shorts or take up the entire front of the shirt. The number 5 on the shirt front is in Varsity font in Champro font size 6 and “Ridge” is in Serpentine ProNarrow font in Champro font size 2.

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Threadless is creative community company that makes t-shirts, bags, wall art and more. We love so many things about them; for one, they are local, in Chicago! They support creatives and when you buy from Threadless, you support the artist who did the design.

For a birthday present, Nicole Rhino bought the Peanuts Baseball League Design by Vincent Caduc for a tall four year old. He has outgrown the little boy section in stores and is wearing youth xs/small sizes. However, photographed here is the Small Peanuts Baseball T-Shirt on a model who is seven and typically wears a youth small/medium. So, the sizing is generous. We washed the shirt and it really didn’t shrink very much. It is long like the photo shows on their website but this shirt color is more gray than stone – and the graphic is slightly sublimated with a vintage feel than the photo where it looks opaque and screen printed over the shirt. The shirt is very soft, nice stitching and a good neckline. Sometimes it is just hard to know if the XS would have been way too small. In this case, it would have been the right size for a child too big for the 5T section in stores. Because it is cut well to grow into, and boy-o-boy do they grow quickly, by spring he should be just fine…We hope this helps!

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Linda and Nicole learned & laughed a lot designing & printing a t-shirt recently. (We wear our chandelier tanks a lot!) We have had a few people ask if they can order more but at that time, we were working with large quantities which reduced the price, shipped the shirts ourselves, and it became too much of a job beyond our limited hours to focus on as artists and not t-shirt shippers. So, we have started looking at ways someone could buy one shirt and have them shipped directly.

RedBubble.com is one of these online avenues for artists to print t-shirts. (and other things) We like to see how the shirts fit, how they wash and wear before deciding what to print our designs on so we ordered the entire Avant Garde outfit from their promotional Lookbook.

The women’s scoop neck t-shirt came very quickly through USPS and the leggings are being shipped separately. The t-shirt design is by the artist Terry Fan and is printed directly into the fabric or sublimated. See the large image above, white shirt with black design. The shirt is wider at the shoulders and snug at the hips. It is a good length. The cut of the shirt is made to be worn on the edge of the shoulder.

Nicole’s review:
It has a feeling of a raw cutoff t-shirt and not a structure neckline. So, I find myself holding my shoulders “up” a little to have it fit correctly on me and wanted to pinch the shoulders to reduce this loose “falling off” feeling on the top. I usually wear a small, but had ordered a medium. I will see if the small drapes better. Sometimes, I find that if clothes are proportioned well, they still look good in many sizes. I order a lot of clothes online and rarely return for a different size. It is either I like it or I don’t. This seems to be one of those rare occasions where I am going to try a different size. ….to be continued!