This is my son Julian. He's 17.JUL is named after him but the business name is also a play on words, sounding like jewel. I call him Jul most of the time. And sometimes my customers call me Jul, which is fine because I love the name and I long ago got used to being called by someone else's name -- a side-effect of being a twin (my sister is Nora of Noni Designs, Ltd).When I named Julian, my father was upset because I didn't choose a family name. When Julian was 6 we traveled as a family to scatter my grandmother's ashes at the old ancestral home and there was a huge family tree there, going back to the 1800s certainly, maybe farther, I don't recall. It was covered with Julians! I had had no idea and of course neither had my father.Julian has just joined JUL part time. He is planning to apply to art school this fall and is currently taking art classes at the Howard Community College in lieu of a senior year of high school. As part of the JUL team, he is beginning to take over the product photography although I still do some. He takes product with him to New York City for weekend visits as he has many friends there. He and his friends take photographs for me on location, offering a fresh perspective that inspires me to push my design farther and to think of new ways to show my existing products. Julian is also designing for JUL and for his own business, Ibbid: www.ibbid.com.One of the first places you can see Julian's mark, aside from the photography, is the first in a series of wimsical tote bags we have developed and which are now available for pre-order. The first is called "Conversation with a Bird" and is based on a painting by my favorite Javanese painter -- Budi -- with whom I am collaborating to bring his gorgeous imagery to a broader audience. When we started to work with Budi, we decided to simplify Budi's images to their starkest outlines. The painterly aspects of his works needed to be flattened out. This is Julian's job. He works with the images in photoshop, literally 'painting' on top of Budi's paintings, searching for their visual essence and bringing that out in his interpretations. Here is the first of the bags:These beautiful bags have an interior zippered pocket, are fully lined with an inner layer of canvas, have the option of fabric or leather handles, and have the silk-screened interpretation of the painting hand-stitched onto the bag, emphasizing the fact that these bags are 100% handmade and Fair Trade. The red man and his Bluebird-companion are on the front, the title of the painting with another Bluebird on the back. The CreativHand logo is stitched onto the side like a sticker, a little bit of cheekiness to match the wimsy of the imagery.Without Julian's brilliant command of digital image manipulation and his ability to 'paint' over these images to make them amenable to our production process and to bring out particular aesthetic aspects, we would not be able to develop these designs. His contribution appears invisible in the finished product. This is so often the case. We have worked on products many many times that have incredible aesthetic simplicity. Pedestal buttons are an example. But this simplicity is deceptive. The effort and thought that goes into establishing proportion, materials selection, technique for execution, all of these things make a difference in the character and quality of the finished good. And all of the hours spent discussing, the many iterations that we go through over months, even years, before we are satisfied enough with the results to bring them before you -- all of it is invisible in the finished good. Unless of course I tell you the story, in which case you will have a little window into the work of JUL.We love talking to customers and finding out which of our products you respond to. We really love working with our producers, discovering their capacities and thinking through, and experimenting with, what these capacities mean for our designs. The more complex our understanding of our producers' capabilities, the more we can expand our aesthetic reach. And we really love collaborating together on new ideas, pushing them past where we might have stopped if we were all working in isolation.Bringing Julian into JUL adds another design-voice to the conversation, one you will be hearing more from as time goes on.
