This past November we wanted to do something to give back to local communities in an impactful way. After researching charities to make sure that the donations we would provide would make a real difference, we settled on working with Donors Choose and Give Back Friday was born. Thanks to your generosity, we were able to raise more than $1800 in a single day of sales which was directly donated to ten classrooms around our nation for projects involving reading, STEM, art, coding, and music. Our hearts were overjoyed.

Today we have an update, with photos, on all of the projects we helped make come to life. Thank you, again, for your purchases which helped make this day a reality.

Our Love Of Roald Dahl- Books purchased and delivered!

Color Printer for Maker Space - Printer purchased and delivered! Here is a thank you note from the teacher, Ms. Cipollone.

Dear Cotton Bureau,

Noticing your incredible graphic designs on your website, you can appreciate being a frustrated student who loves graphic design but has no means for which to create. Now our students will be equipped thanks to your generous donation. Having certifications in art, library and English, I'm able to create well-rounded lessons, and putting a maker space in the library is a great place for those lessons. You've provided a big first-step in launching our maker workshop and the possibilities are only limited to our students' creativity. Our school is an alternative school and our students do not have many opportunities to express their creativity. Having a color printer will give them an outlet to express themselves in today's graphic art world. Students in the arts use both sides of their brain which increases critical thinking skills. Students will now be able to use their critical thinking skills for more than reading, writing and math - they can have some pure, colorful fun with those words and numbers. With gratitude, Ms. Cipollone

Miss M’s Coders - Chromebooks purchased and delivered, students have begun learning to code! An update from Ms. Manning:

Dear Cotton Bureau,

Thank you infinitely for the donations you made towards my students and their coding aspirations! Because of your donation, we were able to participate in Hour of Code, the students have been able to improve their math skills and I am able to better teach students who have individual needs. My students are so appreciative for all that you have done and the opportunities you now have opened for them. They use the devices with care, appreciation and at their best advantage to make the most of what they can achieve! We thank you endlessly! With gratitude, Ms. Manning

They See Me Rolling - Solar Car STEM Fun - Technology purchased and delivered, kids started on their solar project!

Help Us Create A Story - tablets purchased and delivered, interviews to start soon!

Dear Cotton Bureau,

Thank you so much for your generous donations! My students are using the tablets everyday to improve their vocabulary and writing skills. They are getting stronger at developing proper questioning for our interviews. The staff has been very busy making sure proper instruction is taking place in our classrooms so we have not started our interviews yet. I want the students to be comfortable developing appropriate questions and typing out the responses. I will have more pictures up soon. They will use the tablets to write their thank yous to you all!! Thank you sooooo much!!! With gratitude, Ms. Martinez

Bringing Literacy Into A Science Classroom - Scholastic science magazines purchased and delivered.

Glass Giving Is Great Every Year - supplies purchased and delivered.

Music Centers - Combining The Old with The New - iPods purchased and delivered.

Bringing Reading To Life With Color - supplies purchased and delivered.

Learn And Play Osmo - OSMO system purchased and delivered.

Dear Cotton Bureau,

Thank you for your generous donation to provide the OSMO system to our Kindergarten classroom. We are very excited for it to arrive. The OSMO will give the children opportunities to review and practice their reading and math skills independently. During our daily Workstation time, the students cooperatively rotate through a series of review centers. By balancing paper-pencil tasks with technology and other hands-on activities, the room will be buzzing with learners. With gratitude, Mrs. Beeler

We took a few moments to catch up with graphic designer and illustrator, Josh Lewis recently. After getting a chance to meet him in person at Creative Works, we knew he’d be a fun interview. Read on to learn how he turned a personal project into something much more.

CB: Tell us Josh, what’s behind the obsession with Space?

JL: My love for space began when I was a kid in the 80s. NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 missions sent back images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. I was hooked! It has to do with the sense of wonder and awe I get when looking at this vast universe. It’s beautiful and mind blowing!

Fun fact: I paid tribute to Voyager 1 in my Jupiter shirt.

CB: As a fellow child of the 80’s, I get it! Space is rad. You have a beautiful new Solar System Poster for sale in your Etsy shop right now, what was the process like for illustrating this piece? How long did you work on this project?

JL: Thanks! This poster is based on a personal project. I created a website with my illustrations and fun facts to give a basic overview of our solar system. During my research phase, I realized how complex and mind blowing our solar system is! So the poster was a way to use this art to capture the majority of objects orbiting our sun including the types of planets, largest moons, Jupiter’s trojan planets, asteroids, centaurs and comets.

I started this project with tons of research through NASA’s website, books and even a visit to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I gathered tons of references and started with a few tests. My goal was to create a stylized illustration that shows key features of the object. So Mars has Valles Marineris (the largest canyon in our solar system) and Jupiter has the Great Red Spot (a gigantic storm that has raged for centuries.) To create a stylized yet accurate illustration takes time to get it right. It’s hard to nail down the exact amount of time, but some of the simple moons took an hour or 2 and larger, more detailed planets took 15-20 hours each. I was defining the style and learning about the planet/moon/object as I went. Through it all, I had a blast and improved as an illustrator.

CB: That’s a lot of work for a personal project! Did you think when you started the website that it would eventually end up being something you were able to make money off of? You’ve turned this little project into two tees and a poster so far, not too shabby!

JL: Yes! As I was creating the website, I knew I could create lots of products around my work. It’s the solar system. It can be a lot of things! Thanks to Cotton Bureau, I was able to kick off the first product with my Jupiter shirt.

Yes, this was a lengthy personal project! Before I started I told myself to focus on something simple and obtainable. I wanted to give a basic overview of our solar system. At the time I thought that there’s only the sun, 8 planets with a couple dozen or so moons, 3 or so dwarf planets and a couple of belts. How hard could that be? Turns out there’s millions of objects orbiting our sun! Ha! I was able to simplify the content a bit, but it was far more work than I realized.

CB: Besides personal projects like this, what other stuff do you do in your free time?

JL: The rest of my free time is mostly spent with my wife and three kids. Our kids are 13, 12 and 8. They’re growing up fast, so we spend our time making memories like building Lego, playing games, going to the library and exploring Colorado. My 2 youngest will draw with me from time to time.

I’m also a runner. I’ll admit that it’s an acquired taste, but it helps my focus and overall energy. I stick around the 5k to 10k distances.

My office consists of art books, vintage childrens books, toys and art prints. I’m usually adding to the collection and I’ve always been a sucker for Lego minifigures.

CB: I remember you telling me at Creative Works last year that one of your sons created an online Lego version of each of your planets as you released them. How did that feel, to see your son following in your footsteps?

JL: The most rewarding part of this project was connecting with my oldest son. He’s a high functioning kid with Asperger’s Syndrome. He’s quiet, didn’t initiate conversations at the time and only talks about the topics he cares about. He saw me developing the content/site and would check in from time to time. When I launched the site, I released 2-3 pages a week. On the first day of launching the site, he said he had something for me on our computer. He had my sun page up and had built a Lego version using the Lego Digital Designer. That blew me away that I was able to connect with him! He followed along and built Lego versions for about half of the pages. That’s something I’ll cherish the rest of my life!

CB: What an amazing outcome for this personal project of yours! It was great connecting with you again Josh, thanks for chatting!

You can view more of Josh’s work on his website, see what new stuff he’s getting into on his twitter, instagram, and dribbble pages, or sign up to be notified when his CB tees are for sale again, here.

San Francisco based designer Lain Lee lives and breathes his personal motto “Design with passion, deliver with purpose.” We had a chance to catch up before 2015 ended and get his thoughts on what that means and how he puts those words into action every day. Read on to learn more.

CB: Your website has a great tagline “Design with passion, deliver with purpose.” What does that look like for your clients?

LL: This is a motto I came up with a few years ago to summarize my approach to design. I have been told that I’m a great listener and that it’s one of my greatest talents. To design with passion, for me, means to start with a good, old fashioned meeting (whether via phone, video or in-person) and try to get into the mind of my clients. I know that their project will go nowhere very fast if I don’t first understand the vision they have and try to extract that from their mind’s eye. My passion in design is deeply rooted in telling a story, which is where I always start. I urge clients to really explore the purpose behind what they’re doing, not just visually, but also “behind the scenes”, the things that may never be verbally communicated but could be tacitly communicated through the brand. Personally, I don’t like to put anything out into the world (client work or personal) that doesn’t have a purpose. Every project I work on has to have a meaning, a goal, an intention. So for my clients, “Design with passion, deliver with purpose” looks like this - a high quality project, from start to finish, customer service to development, design and delivery, that has purpose and meaning.

CB: Building on this concept of intention, what intentions do you bring to your client work? Your personal work? How do they differ?

LL: For my client work, my intention is always to interpret their vision with innovation and quality. A lot of people don’t know what they want to see, but know definitively what they DON’T want to see. Therefore, they have a hard time differentiating between high quality design and “imitations of quality”. For my clients, I will always approach every project with quality in mind.

As a creative professional, even as a young kid doing music and film projects, I haven’t always had the best equipment to produce my work. Therefore, I came from the school of practice and thought where you always made the best of what you had. My goal when I sit down to work on a client project, therefore, is to produce the highest quality product with what I have to work with, and make the seemingly impossible, possible.

With my personal work, I usually don’t have the same constrictions that I do with client work and therefore have full creative freedom over what I produce. However, the goal remains the same at the end of the day. The only way that my intentions with personal work differ from client work is this: with client work, I aim to please my clients; with myself, I’m never happy with the outcome! LOL

CB: Ha! Good point about self as being the harshest critic. How do you overcome your misgivings about a personal project and put it out in the world for others to see and comment on?

LL: This answer is very simple: not being afraid to fail. I’m not even sure if this is something I consciously set out to do. My dad taught me at a young age that you miss 100% of the chances you don’t take. He showed me (through both examples of his own as an entrepreneur and the time and money he invested in me and my siblings’ growing up), that if there was ever anything I wanted to do, I simply needed to put actions to my dreams. So for me, my mentality was to just try and if I failed, it wasn’t an end all scenario, it was simply an opportunity for me to improve and try again.

Also, I think our creative culture is so heavily focused on seeing the end results of things, we don’t teach each other to appreciate the creative process. We all go through the highs and lows of creating - the headaches, frustrations, screaming sessions, hair-pulling, nail biting, self-loathing, constipated frustration of not knowing what to do when we get stuck. Instead, we focus on showing the final, polished product and that’s all our peers see. It’s really created a false sense of accomplishment. I think it’s important to share transparently those personal misgivings. I’ve made a lot of mistakes publicly that I can’t take back. Instead of wallowing in them, I go through a grieving period but then see what I can learn from those mistakes to apply to my next public effort. And if you’re going to ask for public feedback or put something out there for your peers to critique publicly, you can’t be too defensive, so it’d really help if you could take some time to get comfortable with failure. :D

CB: I imagine this “don’t be afraid to fail” outlook carries over into your work as a cheer coach, yes? How did you get involved with coaching?

LL: Absolutely it does!

You know, tumbling is not natural by any stretch of the imagination. Everything I teach my athletes to do is a learned behavior, it’s not inherent to the human brain. It’s actually the antithesis of what the brain naturally is programmed to do, which is keep its vessel (our bodies) safe. Therefore, I spend a vast majority of my time as a coach playing more of a psychologists role, helping to explain the roles fear and the brain play in learning to tumble or stunt.

I became involved with cheer when I was in high school. A group of girls saw me and some friends jumping and flipping on, over and off of things after school one day and came over to ask us if we’d try cheerleading. My friends said no, but I wasn’t about to turn down a group of cute girls, haha! Then when I went to my first practice and saw how physically engaging it was, I was actually genuinely interested! After many years, I stepped into a coaching role and saw how poorly a lot of cheerleaders were trained, and witnessed a lot of good kids get hurt. I saw a need for someone to really drill them on their technique to stay safe. That’s why now my mission is to instill in young athletes the tools necessary to stay safe, be leaders in their communities and conquer their fears, both on and off the mat.

CB: It sounds like being a cheer coach is quite rewarding! How do you like to relax and spend time away from work? What gets you re-energized for the week ahead?

LL: Yeah, being a cheer coach truly is rewarding. Nothing gives me greater joy than the smile on an athlete’s face when she or he gets a skill they’ve been working on for months. That “a-ha” moment when they finally make a connection between body and brain gives them such a sense of accomplishment, I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

To relax and re-energize, I’ve actually just started a new ritual. Every Friday, I hit up my fave local coffee spot, grab breakfast and just chill in the corner spot with my coffee and laptop for a few hours. It’s close to home and work in case the wife needs me or I need to make a quick change for a client, but remote enough to where I get to seclude myself even for a little bit and just think. I also like to work on personal projects and my other brands at least a few times a month, work and life permitting. Getting to explore different visual styles allows me to not only expand my capabilities as a designer, but also put them hours in and hone my craft. Other than that, it’s the farmers market and chilling with the Mrs. on the weekends :D

CB: That’s a pretty good looking breakfast, Lain. Thanks for chatting with us!

You can see more of Lain’s work on his website, keep up with him on twitter and dribbble, or follow along on his instagram. Lain’s latest CB design, Make The Money, is available for pre-orders until Tuesday, January 26th at 8pm EST.