The Moosehead

Since I moved to New York City for an internship in the summer of 2011, I lived with the same people and their dog for six-and-a-half years. After the pet mover came to pick up Ego for her new life in Amsterdam, I cried and cried and cried. Shortly thereafter, I bought tickets to Amsterdam to see her in the summer.

Below are photos from the trip, none of which, include pictures of me snuggling and smothering Ego because they’re all on my phone.

On this trip, I also visited the Rijksmuseum and saw paintings I studied in art history. It’s always an experience to finally see with your eyeballs something you studied and minored in, and it’s an entirely different experience to see it through the lens of 21st Century technology.

Wandering around the streets of Amsterdam, I found this little shop.

When I was a kid, my family visited Eureka Springs, Arkansas and we took this Wild West picture. It’s a picture that I old very dear because it’s just so strange. Wanting to recapture that but as an adult, I poked my head into Museumfoto and got this very scary portrait of myself that looks like, as the photographer tried to get my mindset into, “the newly made King William of Orange.”

While I was processing all the photos from the trip, I decided to go ahead and buy a ticket back to Amsterdam in November to eat more stroopwaffles and to see Ego again.

This is me now.

After years of delays to refresh and update my style guide, I decided the world really needed to know how I label my Photoshop layers and how I archive everything. Version 1 of the style guide was more about how if you’re going to buy me a Christmas gift, here’s what I like. Version 3 of the style guide is more about how if I leave for vacation and you have to dig through my computer for files, here’s how I stash files away.

I don’t expect the many other Nathans Hoang to adhere to v3 if they couldn’t even bother to even read v1, but perhaps I’ll make another desperate plea on Twitter.

I started in March 2018 and typed and typed and typed while catching up on The Walking Dead, which probably explains why v3.0 had so many typos (because the show is bad), Four months and three version updates later, I have a shareable guide.

There was a tonal shift from Version 1 to Version 3, because it might actually be referenced by the public and not just me. And plus I figured out how to draw a t-shirt properly.

I went from using screenshots of actual Apple interfaces to creating my own so it wouldn’t be so dated.

Of all the pages, my favorite is my new Comfort-Efficiency-Value Triangle that I made up as I was typing everything out.

You can read it below or download it in PDF form in /downloads

Whenever someone finds out I’m from Houston, they usually ask, “Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

I mean listen, we live in a crazy world and I don’t know when my time will be up on this Earth, but I hope my body will find its way back to Alief. That’s all I can ask for.

And hey, is this endless repping of Alief and Houston getting old? I don’t know, but every time Jay-Z shouts out Brooklyn, I don’t really care and I live here, and whenever Beyoncé shouts out Houston, I lose my mind and throw up the Cougar paw, so I’ll continue repping Alief for life. 

And that’s how I ended up with these two designs. Drawing inspiration off the official Alief logo, I wanted to say what I’ve been saying for a while, “I will rep Alief until I die,” so I sketched this out in Procreate during the 2018 State of the Union address.

My new roommate brought up the good point that maybe it’s not a great idea to bring up death with a school district. I mean, Alief is a town, but she’s not wrong. So I made this to balance things out.

I intended to print these onto shirts and bags for my eventual store, which was called “Never Change” at the time (Sidenote: When I brought this up to my internship-day friends, June and Haywood, they roooooooooasted me), so I got a sample tote and it looked fine, I guess (Sidenote: These aren’t the official totes, the design was printed on too low), but I decided it’d need to be on two separate bags instead of a double-sided bag, so I gave it to my high school geometry pal, Christi, who was in town.

I hope I live a little longer, but when I die, bury me underneath the Alief store.

I always hated the Society6 mentality of taking a thing you made and putting it on practically everything they sell: A pillow, shower curtain, regular curtain, clock face and a bath mat. I mean, if you want to get your money, I’m all for it, but it’s not for me. If I was going to make a thing, I wanted it to make sense for the medium. So out of spite of nobody except my imagination, I wanted to make a unique phone case for my upcoming store.

In 2016, I got a new project manager and she was new to Grey and her phone lock screen background said, “NOBODY CARES. WORK HARD." Not one to encourage hard work, I gave her my ”LAY LOW, WORK SLOW“ phone background instead.

I checked back in a year or so later to see what phone background she had now. It was neither the "WORD HARD” one nor the “WORK SLOW” one. Great. I asked her what her favorite animals are and she said a lion and sloth. Cool. 

So I made this lion iPhone wallpaper.

But the whole point of this entire exercise was to make a phone case…so…

Hell yeah. Now I just have to do a sloth.

Coming to the /shop

As I begin to fix my website to prepare it for the store, I’m seeing where I can fix other areas, too, especially since once every year, someone on Reddit has a ShowerThought™ that goes something like, “There should really be a sarcasm font,” and then some loyalist who I’m grateful for, says, “Hey, why not try Sartalics!” And then I experience what seems to be a DDOS attack, but it’s just a bunch of sarcastic nerds looking at how to be sarcastic online.

Ever since I changed my website from a hand-coded HTML site to a Squarespace, I wanted to fix it so it’s not templated. The scrolling marquee is a holdover from the HTML site, and the little bug of the moose icon below the left-hand navigation. The little moose pointed to my Tumblr, which I was obsessed with, but then my /latest blog and Tumblr achieved singularity.

Not wanting to lose that dumb little bug but also not wanting to point to the Tumblr anymore, I decided to put one of my URLs that I’d been holding onto since the early 2012 to use.

Anyway, not going to spoil it for any of us, just know that iOS 11 has an automatic QR Code reader when you turn on your camera and point it towards the code.

I don’t know where this QR code below goes (it used to point to nathanhoang.com before the addition), but I printed them out and posted them around DUMBO in 2011. 

Inspired by my cousins, Lauren and Chloe, who dug out their old Canon Powershot, I found the old Canon point-and-shoot film camera that my parents took on vacations.

I’d been scanning a lot of family photos lately, and seeing the pictures taken on this camera brought back memories, so I decided to hook it up to my bicycle like a very two-dollar GoPro and take some pictures around Brooklyn.

Anyway, here are my favorites.

Getting the film developed was expensive but getting that irreplicable film grain and nostalgia is worth it kinda. I don’t know. Haha. It’s expensive. But there’s something about the delayed gratification and never uploading the images to Instagram, a platform I now despise, that makes me enjoy this rediscovered medium.

Did you hear? I’m from Alief, Texas.

I went to Heflin Elementary School for six years, O'Donnell Middle School for three years, and Alief Hastings High School for four years. I’m a lifer and one time well into or after college, we had a Heflin Elementary School reunion. I’m told that’s weird, but Alief is just a weird, special place.

Some famous alums include Beyoncé (for a semester at Elsik), Rashard Lewis, Tila Tequila, Michael and Martellus Bennett, and I wondered what would happen if every school combined forces and work as one instead of having dumb high school rivalries (Elsuck, amirite?). Like if all those alums except Tila Tequila got together to do something great. It’d be pretty awesome. Like, the Alief’s first school, Alief Hastings High School, has the Fighting Bears, and the rival sister school, Alief Elsik High School, has the Mighty Rams, the newest school, Alief Taylor has the Roaring Lions, and Alief Kerr has regular tigers.

Regular tigers? Yeah. I checked.

What would happen if all these schools just…joined forces. Like…literally came together…and protected Alief?

Behold!

On a flight back home to Alief for Têt, I sketched this idea in Procreate. It went through different stances, but just standing erect was too ominous and X-Men Sentinel-esque. There was an image I ran across on Tumblr years ago of a kid by Mike Cohen that always stuck with me, so I took his little stance and made it for this robot holding Alief’s giant sundial pencil.

Once I felt good about the shapes and stylings of the robot, I began on the individual school robots. This was infinitely much tougher.

After getting the thumbs up from my brother and cousins, I traced the robots in Illustrator.

Then I sat on these illustrations for months and worked on other stuff while waiting to go back home in May to photograph the four campuses on the weekend so it wouldn’t be creepy. It had been a long while since I’ve been back in the vicinity of Hastings and boy did it bring back memories. Like falling asleep in the back of French class and getting yelled at by Mr. Katre and him telling me I’m no longer allowed to sit against the wall anymore. There were more memories that was always funny to me.

I often go into things and not know how it’ll live, but I’d been thinking about opening a store for Alief-related stuff. Like how Kanye West sells socks that says Calabasas on it, except mine says Alief. But with these, I knew I wanted to at least make something I would’ve liked as a 15-year-old: stickers.

So look out for these on your TI-84s, Alief Seniors Class of 2019!

I didn’t start drinking coffee until after my mom told me I should learn how to drink coffee in high school because I’d need it in college; after someone woke me up in Intro to Art History 1301 because class was over and I told him my next class (Intro to Art History 1302) was also in this auditorium so I just slept through that class, too; after I pulled an all-nighter at my first internship and fell asleep at my desk in Boulder; after I pulled another all-nighter at my second internship and fell asleep at my desk in New York; after I moved to East Village across the street from Mud.

Literally across the street. Like, if I made a tin-can telephone from my fire escape to Mud, I could put in an order, run down the six flights and get the cup in 30 seconds.

Mud is special to me because I’d grab a cup every day on my way to work and the people there were part of the 9th Street community: Greg and Seth would talk basketball with us, we invited everyone to our Fourth of July parties, Garrett took Mark and Bonnie’s bed when they moved to Amsterdam. And also their coffee tastes like hot chocolate.

Anyway, during a brief period when my roommate, Bonnie, and I had an overlap in unemployment, I talked about doing this project where she’d blog about coffee and I’d paint different coffee shops using their coffee. That never happened.

Five years later and inspired by the stylings of Christoph Niemann, I finally decided to see how it’d be. First I started in Photoshop, using Kyle’s brushes with a couple colors: black coffee, and coffee mixed with white paint to mimic cream.

The painting on the left was based on a picture I took in April. When I came back a month later, I realized the windows were open: my favorite time of year, when I could literally sit outside Mud for hours. So I redid the windows in Photoshop and had the draft to base my painting off of.

Now I knew coffee was a weird medium (I’ve seen my mom dye fabrics in coffee), but I wasn’t expecting it to be so faint. I experimented different techniques on how to maximize color with temperature, layers and grounds-to-water ratio, but no matter what, it was never as dark as it gets when I spill coffee on my white tee.

It was becoming clear that the “black coffee” color from the Photoshop test was an overestimation so I’d just have to be patient and layer coffee over coffee.

It took two episodes of Master Chef Junior and the first quarter of Wonder Woman, but I like how it ended up. It was a struggle to scan because it’s so faint, and I’m not sure how long it’ll last because coffee is acidic and that’s not good for paper, but the possibility of me licking the paper is also on the table.

Because I’m obsessed with things in sets of threes, I’m going to work on Mud’s two other venues, Mud Hut on 1st and Houston and Mud Truck (RIP).

In October 2017, a corner of the office had an MLB Playoff bracket for $1, so I had the Houston Astros going all the way. I got laughed at for being hometown. Just as I got laughed at when I wore my Astros hat to this Pumpkin Lantern Blaze thing and took the Metrorail back home, which stopped by Yankee Stadium where my Astros lost 1 to 8. But guess what?

Astros won it all. 

And I won $4 instead of $8 because I had to split the pot with some other dude.

(Quick aside: My roommates, my good friend Joe and I sat in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium for the 2015 AL Wild Card game and we got boos, food and slurs hurled at us throughout the entire game. And the Astros won. And that’s when I decided I’d root against the Yankees against everything ever for the rest of time.)

Anyway I happened to be in Texas for my other good friend and former copywriter’s wedding, so I got to see the parade with my eyes and my other other good friend Caroline.

Here are some pictures to relive the magic.

This year, I filled out an NBA Playoffs bracket at work and guess who I have winning it all?

That’s right, the Houston Rockets.

And guess how much money I’m going win?

No, you’re actually wrong, I’m the only one who filled out a bracket so it’ll just be me. It’s a very sad situation.

I keep receipt paper at work for scrap papering, note-taking, to-do-list making purposes, and one day during an in-office happy hour, I doodled my friend’s favorite dog on the paper and it wrapped around naturally as receipt paper does, and I thought it was cool and she thought it was cute and then I forgot about it until I checked this place where I printed my Birds and the Bees bag and it turns out, they did all-over printing on t-shirts, which is perfect because this doodle wouldn’t work unless it was seamless, so then I paced around the apartment with excitement, sat down and fired up Photoshop while watching Nocturnal Animals.

I started off with a sketch of my roommate’s favorite kind of dog, even though she’s a cat person, the dachshund. Then I had to take that dachshund sketch and put it into Illustrator to stretch the dog out and make sure it’d wrap around correctly.

Once I got the dachshund to the optimal length, I exported her back into Photoshop to start different brush tests.

Happy with how the little guy looked, I went back to the original pup cause I knew at least one shirt would be bought. It took a while to get the correct brush, but it didn’t occur to me to fill out the scottie instead of outlining him like the dachshundd.

The final step before I sent these to Printful to be made into shirts was to put it back into the Illustrator template.

Now look at these mock-ups and imagine how excited I was to get the orders in.

Just look at it!

I broke my style guide rule and wore a shirt with a print on it to work. I was very excited.

My other roommate works in fashion and gave me her approval, so it’ll be in my revamped store soon!

Also, because I like things in threes, there’ll be a third dog soon.