Friends of The Just Love Project,

It’s been an incredible year for The Just Love Project. It started out as a small idea to keep a New Year’s resolution for an entire year. But it turned into something bigger where we sold prints in order to pass that love on to others.

The untold goal from the beginning was to raise $1,000 in profits over the course of the year for charity. And I’m ecstatic to write that as of two weeks ago, we EXCEEDED that amount with a total of $1,300!

This was due in large part to the outpouring of support and enthusiasm at The Just Love Gallery, a one-night exhibition where 100% of every dollar went to charity. At the end of the night, over $700 was raised for charity.

No amount of words can describe the love and support I felt that night. And to know that by the end of that night, we had met our campaign goal with charity: water. Because of support from people like you, 65 PEOPLE in the Tigray region of Ethiopia will get access to clean water.

By participating in this project, you’ve truly spread love and made this world that much better for someone else. You can check our charity: water campaign here: http://mycharitywater.org/the-just-love-project

Stay tuned to the blog for more follow-up posts regarding this project. For now, check out some pictures from The Just Love Gallery, held on December 11th, 2012. All artwork was on display, we had great music from Naomi Marie and We Shot The Moon, and we had a live screen printing demo.

From the beginning, the goal of The Just Love Project was to support the mission of Hello Somebody with all the profits that came from the sale of all merchandise. Since the year is winding down, I contacted Manny Martinez, co-founder of Hello Somebody, to talk over how the money from the project would be used.

After some great discussion, Manny suggested that if there’s a charity that I hold dear to my heart, to focus the funds from The Just Love Project directly to them.

I’m excited to announce that the profits from The Just Love Project will be supporting the amazing cause of charity: water. They are working to bring clean, safe drinking water to 800 million people that don’t have access to it.

What’s great about charity: water is that 100% of all money raised via campaigns goes directly to fund water project costs in the field. They’ll prove where every single dollar goes by supplying a digital completion report with GPS coordinates and photos of the community we helped.

The goal is to raise $1,000 to fund water projects in the Tigray region in Ethiopia. You can keep track of how we’re doing by visiting our campaign page: http://mycharitywater.org/the-just-love-project

The campaign page does show $0 raised right now, but is not accurate as all of the money is being accumulated and donated all at once. I will be updating the campaign page during the last week of December. Stay tuned!

Thank you all for participating in The Just Love Project.

The Just Love Project is proud to announce The Just Love Gallery, a culmination of a year-long project by Joshua Krohn, a Racine-based graphic designer. The work of Krohn, along with 14 other graphic designers will be featured. The public is invited to this free, family-friendly event to view the screenprinted works.

All screenprints, along with other merchandise, will be on sale with 100% off all proceeds going to Hello Somebody, a Texas-based charity who serves in developing nations.

The one-night-only gallery showing will be held:

It was a great week for The Just Love Project! I submitted some of the designs to a couple blogs and they posted about it. And then, like things often do, it got picked up and re-blogged by other blogs. Here’s where you may’ve seen The Just Love Project during the past week:

• Design Work Life
• From Up North
• HOW Design
• Italian Poster Rock Art
• Serif And Sans
• Design Your Way
• Email Inspiration

Thanks for your help in spreading the word!

This project started as an idea a couple weeks ago that had me making t-shirt designs based on the new year’s resolution of Just Love. While I knew it could be something that I could do, after the first couple of days of trying to come up with the concepts, I scared myself into thinking that I couldn’t do this alone.

For some time I’ve been wanting to organize a collaborative project. These types of things are gaining traction in the design community. It was just a natural progression to combine the Just Love theme with a group of designers that I’m proud to call my “dotcomrades”.

In a matter of two frenzied weeks, the contributors were contacted, the logo was finalized, the site was made, the store went up, the screen printing vendor chosen, and the design for January started.

And thus, The Just Love Project was born.