Meet Spoonflower: Introducing Adam, resident metalhead
This week, I'm pleased to introduce you to Adam Hunt, a member of the Spoonflower printing crew just returned from touring Japan with his band. Read on for more about Adam in his own words!
I grew up in La Habra California, a small suburb of Los Angeles located in Orange County. It was basically just like every show you see on TV. Everyone I knew lived in a beach house and birthday parties were a really big deal...totally joking. It’s actually a pretty small town and is largely Hispanic which made for some awesome food.
As a kid I stayed mostly outdoors. I was pretty bad at sports and video games so I stuck to my skateboard and BMX. We had a small park about a mile from my house that we dubbed the “Bamboo Forest.” We built some pretty dangerous jumps across creeks, over rocks and up hills. Along with hanging out in the Bamboo Forest--and this is gonna' sound really strange but I fully embrace it--I also loved to Dumpster dive as a kid. Just around the corner from my house was a company called Local Grafix. They specialized in making stickers for every surf and skate company you could think of, so every day I would look in their dumpster for sheets of misprinted stickers. One time I found a six-foot Airwalk decal. I think that made it worth it. (Maybe.)
My first job was working at a trophy shop, and I would also count it as my least favorite job. It was my first exploration into full-on work mode so perhaps this is where my hate comes from. Having to give up all my time and having to use my money to buy things like work clothes or comfortable shoes didn’t exactly set the tone for awesomeness. On the flip side, one of my favorite jobs was working at a screen-printing shop for my best friend. I mostly focused on handling all the art that came through, but we also entertained each other with daily YouTube finds.
I first heard of Spoonflower from some heavy Googling I did when I moved to the area. I was researching potential job prospects in Durham and came across the website. I followed it for a few months and applied instantly when I saw an opening. It reminds me a lot of working at the screen-printing shop I worked. The workflow is very similar and I love the daily challenges of a production environment.
Spoonflower is a super-fun environment to work in. Currently one of my favorite things to do is to add to the fabric tag art installation that is on the wall in the print room. I have been collecting all these tags and hopefully within the month I can make a run all the way to the ceiling. (Workers of Spoonflower, please give me any loose tags you find pertaining to the linen.)
In my free time, I'm a musician in a band called Graf Orlock. Ahhh, the music! It started off as a joke but has lasted some 8 years. I played in a pretty serious metal band for most of my teens. The band broke up after the guitar player and I refused to drop out of school to do a tour. The band had become really serious and totally un-fun. The guitar player and I realized the seriousness and typical singer attitude were what we hated. Along with all the lyrics. (Really, what hasn’t been said by now?) So somehow we came to the conclusion that we should start a band that was only instrumental with no singer. Instead of vocals we would use sampled dialogue from our favorite action movies. Thus Graf Orlock was born. We played for about a year as an instrumental band, but realized we could only take it so far. We added a singer and started to use actual film scripts as the lyrical content. There’s a giant backstory to a lot of this, but all you need to know is that we have songs about Out For Justice, Commando, Die Hard, Lord of the Rings, Point Break and Robocop. We're always open to suggestions for movies, but if it’s not violent or extremely profane we probably won’t use it.
I think my dream band would be half Black Flag members and half Black Sabbath. Maybe everyone in the band would play at the same time. In this band I'd play guitar though, because drums take way too long to set up. It would be called Black Flaggath, and our first show would be Koo’s Cafe circa 1999 in Santa Ana California, assuming time travel would be an option in this scenario.
This weekend I will be catching up on some screen printing I need to do and going to Richmond to see a friend's band play. I also do a lot of freelance design work, mostly album packaging, so I know I need to devote some hours to that. (You can see some of Adam’s design work here.)
As for Spoonflower fabrics, I'm still very new and am still learning the names of designeres and what I like. I’m a big fan of our linen/cotton canvas, though. Almost everything you print on it looks awesome. Every time I see it, I think about all the potential for full-color punk patches. I have yet to learn to sew though, so for now I focus on making things digitally. I'm a huge packaging nerd and will dork out for hours on diecuts, embossings, Pantone colors, and all things printing related.
