Welcome to These Birds Art Club

Yo!

Some of you may know me and my family and some maybe don’t. Let me introduce us briefly. I’m Zac and my wife is Kimberlee. We work in creative fields full-time between product design, branding and advertising. We have two very cool daughters under the age of five and we live in a suburb about 15 minutes from Downtown Milwaukee, WI with our two dogs. We love our Wisconsin sports, our local breweries and above all - creating.

These Birds Art Club is what we came up with because we love to create.

I started a clothing brand in college and another one a few years out of college in need to create and share with the world artwork that I thought would be cool. But more importantly, it was a way for me to experiment and learn how to do different techniques and styles. Running both brands taught me a lot about running a small business, especially on the non-art side. While those two clothing brands didn’t really pan out because of things like bad timing in my life or just not having the financials to do it right, I have always felt the need to come back to having my own brand or place to create things under. A little hub I could use to experiment and create things to share with other people.

While my wife and I collaborated at the agency we met at, we’ve been talking about ways we can bring our talents together again to create something for fun. Be our own clients. Do what we want without the need to please a client. The idea to create some children’s books came about after having kids and reading to them every night. Naturally, it made sense as she would write it and I would illustrate it. We’re still working on a few ideas. More to come. But I still hade the urge to do more.

We live in a neighborhood filled with kids, some of them pop up lemonade stands in their yards on hot summer days, some run lawn mowing gigs. I know it’s a good way to show kids how hard work pays off. I want my kids to experience that too, maybe one day as a lemonade stand to show how community is important, but I also want to show them how they can do it by running a brand and website that can reach people all over the world. They love creating, whether making beaded bracelets or painting abstractly on dad’s old skateboard. They love giving these things to other people to see the joy it gives them. It gave me the idea of using this hub as a way of not only teaching them, but collaborating and spending quality time with them and their own ideas. Something they can be a part of too.

I didn’t want to just design another brand as many designers love to do (guilty), rather to foster a place where anything we want to create can live in that environment for people to enjoy. I hate the idea of designing things that get thrown away and put in a landfill. It’s one of the reasons I decided to work at Harley-Davidson full-time. I wanted to create artwork that would live on motorcycles for years to come. I did a lot of food and beverage packaging in my career and seeing all that hard work end up in the trash and only really sitting (maybe) in someone’s memory really bummed me out. We’re hoping to create things that won’t get thrown away, but will be seen as a keepsake. Something that brings joy and maybe a little smile to someone throughout their day.

And the name isn’t meaningless. “These Birds” takes on numerous forms. Initially it was inspired by the Turnstile song “Birds”. The song really connected to me deep in my bones. It felt like the exact attitude I love to embrace during the process of creating art. Rough, feisty, punk, handmade, human, emotion. Creating art should be a little messy and isn’t meant to be perfect. Art is personal and I love the idea of creating just to create, for yourself. Saying “f*ck you” to a social construct. As a designer, sometimes that aspect is pushed to the side to favor perfectionism, especially in corporate. To be honest, I like working in both ways. I love to create pixel-perfect logos and focus hard on the details, but I also love getting messy and letting things be how they are in their natural state. As Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more engrained in our lives (I don’t touch it), the feeling of needing to be perfect starts to feel a little…artificial. And the need to feel human again keeps coming to the surface by experiencing things are hand made or exist in physical form.

This is a place to let perfectionism go. Give the “bird” to that idea and the critics who may follow. So we’re here to experiment, get messy and have a little fun, hoping to open our wings, learn, grow and fly free (and flipping the “bird” in the process).

Thanks for the support and we hope you enjoy all the ideas we bring to life. 🪶

- Zac