New Mission Designs

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New Mission Designs is our newest featured CafePress store. As soon as they wrote in to us, we knew that they would be next. Please note that what's in italics was written by BurnTees...everything else was written by New Mission Designs.

I'm very happy with the name I chose for the shop, "New Mission Designs." It refers very directly to a landmark of my neighborhood, the New Mission Theater. The idea is that the life of the neighborhood (San Francisco's Mission District) has revolved around or mirrored the life of that theater and continues to do so -- the theater and its marquee are really an icon of the neighborhood. More personally, the towering marquee was a prominent sign of home, one that was visible from far away as I left or returned to the house in which I grew up.

My shop has grown in diversity since I opened it. Originally most of the designs spoke to my identity as queer, and were designed for a similar audience (see my "Hot Guys" and LGBT Pride sections). But soon enough I added shirts that were funny enough, but not really very gay, so I diversified into a general humor section and a political section. Those sections have ended up being my most popular (I do get a lot of Google searches for "hot guys," but I think they're looking for something other than shirts and they don't stay).

In the coming months, I will likely be focusing on some political designs. The California special election is too good a source of material to let pass. Rest assured, though, that I'll still be putting up new designs in the other sections as inspiration strikes. If you want to know about these updates, sign up for the newsletter it the right-hand column of my store (all email addresses kept extremely private by Cafepress, of course) and check back often to see what we come up with!
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BurnTees is a big fan of this shop. We're fans of the design, but more importantly, what the shop has to say. We're not gay (not that there's anything wrong with that...Seinfeld fans?), but we believe greatly in the freedom of choice. Hopefully one day we'll live in a world where sexual discrimination is frowned upon as much as racial discrimination is.

Oh yea, and we love how all the designs in the hot guys section have names. This way, when you're wearing the shirt, and some naive gay bashing idiot says to you,"what the hell is that!?"...you can calmly respond,"oh, that's Gabe." (note: I was going to say gay bashing republican but...well...I like controversy, but not that much.)