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Beautiful Swear Words

A typography project that went mega-viral and landed on Adult Swim.

I drew a beautiful swear word every workday for months.

Blue pencil, black ink, whiteout, then into Photoshop for color. By the end, I’d made about a hundred.

Inked ornamental flourish over blue pencil guides

Blue pencil sketch of decorative swear-word lettering

Finished black ink SHITHEAD lettering and ornamental frame

Animated color version of the SHITHEAD lettering

Animated SCROTUM lettering on a winged emblem

Original Beautiful Swear Words Tumblr website showing the NumbNuts lettering

The project went viral in a pre-Instagram era. Soon, Adult Swim got in touch.

They made this short bumper ad and played it on primetime TV for a week alongside "Adventure Time."

Beautiful Swear Words: Adult Swim bumper

T-SHIRTS

I turned the project into a t-shirt brand. I took weekly pre-orders and shipped shirts all over the country. Lots of people subscribed to get a new shirt every week.

Black T-shirt with stacked pink and orange swear-word lettering

Beautiful Swear Words label printed on the back of a black T-shirt

Black T-shirt with yellow SHIIIT lettering on a red burst

Red T-shirt with cream script lettering

Blue T-shirt with white ornamental Crap lettering

Skateboard grip tape with a central strip of punctuation symbols

What are you working on?

Is your website not converting? Does nobody on your team have time to turn social media into new business? Is your logo not quite legit?

Tell me what’s going on. I’d love to talk.

theoolesen@gmail.com ↗