I've been anticipating June 2015 for a long while. Long story, short - I've been saving money like a cheeky little squirrel in some dodgy sharesave scheme that work offered (dodgy in a meta philosophical/moral sense, rather than a legal sense) and June 2015 is the date I've been waiting for to get my greedy little paws on the protein enriched goodies.
Okay, I'll stop with the squirrel analogy. Just deleted a whole paragraph on the correspondence between Money, spunk and nuts. I really need to stick to the plan.
So I haven't burned all the money. Of course, I have to pay some of my daughter's master's fees - she's at Cambridge you know. Did I mention that? At Cambridge. Yes. And I've promised my son that I'll pay for him to get his full bike licence, conditional on the fact that his Harley Davidson must always be smaller than my Harley Davidson. I haven't actually got a Harley, and I do really want one, which goes to show just how committed to the money burning cause I am. Because the chunk of the money is going towards persuading you, and everyone else in the world, to burn their money.
This has been in my imagination for a good few years now, so I'm actually quite thrilled to be getting on with it. I'm sticking the following up on my chosen design crowdsourcing site in the next week or so. If you have any thoughts or suggestions let me know.
Oh, yeah..... it contains a sneaky preview of the thing at the edge of my imagination - 'The Cathedral of Money Burning'. I was thinking of 'The Church of Money Burning' but I figured, fuck it, why not go the whole hog. I like churches, but I love cathedrals. Long road to travel until we get there, though. My attempt at the logo/sigil is below the brief. It's embarrassingly bad, but does give you the idea.
Logo design to help save the world
You might think this is crazy. And if you don't, you're probably a little crazy yourself.
For the past seven years I've been burning money. I don't mean spending it, I mean actually setting light to it and watching it burn. It's become a kind of magickal ritual for me. There is no fakery involved, I really do burn my own money.
I've also been trying to figure out what it means to burn money. I've been writing a blog with some quasi-academic musings on the nature of money for the past eight years or so. Where I'm at with it now, is that I think money burning is an act of pure forgiveness (or at least it's as close to we can get to it).
The world needs forgiveness. Bad stuff happens a lot. Retribution just creates the same story over again. A clean slate is something we really want to avoid. Which leaves forgiveness as the only option.
So, I've figured that I need to spread the word about money burning and get more people to do it to, so we can get more forgiveness into the world. So far I've only persuaded a couple of folks to join in with me. Which is where you and your design comes in. I need you to help me save the world.
I'm not rich. I drive a van to earn a living. So as well as having an almost certain prospect of failure, this project is not at all likely to connect you to some corporate oligopoly where you secure private health care and a good pension in return for your soul and the odd T-Shirt design. But as well as burning money, I've also been saving hard for the last few years and with the help of a little good fortune on the stock market I have managed to build up a few quid, hopefully enough to get me to the next stage of the project - the crowdfunding of a The Cathedral of Money Burning (Well, a tent that I can take round to festivals - but tents are expensive!). Meantime, there's lots to do. T-shirts, a blog make-over and new website are on the cards, and over the course of the next year or two there is a whole lot more I need doing. I need some money burning designers to come along for the ride.
The start of it all is the design I need done today. What I want you to try to create is more a Sigil, than a Logo. Fire in a circle and Money in a square.
This is all much too serious to be taken too seriously. If you still have a little bit of crazy alive in you, and you can believe just for a moment in the impossible, I'd love you to fire up your imagination, engage whatever magical box of tricks it is you use cast your design spells, and create something wonderful, excellent and brilliant for me (and the world).
Jon
x
PS Design Tip [added 03/06/15] - I want you to work up the design however you want BUT what I need fundamentally is something simple that can be stuck on a T-shirt, used in a blog header, graffiti-ed on a wall, OR even tattooed on my arm. Basically, it needs to work in black and white.