Star-Telegram Notes Capitol Annex’s Geren Designs, But Gets It Wrong

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram made note in this morning’s editions about a line of products Capitol Annex created to commemorate the spirit of the “Geren Revolution,” in which State Rep. Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth) helped lead the insurgency that dethroned House Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland). [See Capitol Annex's online store for even more politically inspired merchandise.]

The only problem was that the Star-Telegram failed to actually Give Capitol Annex credit for coming up with the design.  They gave CafePress.com credit; CafePress, however, is simply one of two services (the other being Zazzle) that Capitol Annex uses for order fulfillment and processing. 

We’re glad that the Star-Telegram took note of the design (which has been selling like crazy) but are sorry they didn’t check into it to give credit where credit was due.

At any rate, we thought this would be a great opportunity to tell the story behind the design, and our decision to market it. 

On January 2, we wrote one of many pieces about the race for Speaker of the Texas House. In that post, we mentioned that State Rep. Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth) was mentioned as being the leader of the ABC Republican forces, but was downplaying his role in the insurgency against Craddick. Since we try to accompany most feature stories with an image, we needed an image to accompany this story. 

Given that we compared the nomenclature used by the media to discuss the Speaker’s race was comparable to that used to cover a major revolution, we thought we’d try our hand at a design inspired by pop-art posters highlighting revolutionary figure Che Guevara like this one (a design we are not affiliated with in any way). 

Shortly after posting the image, we got a couple of emails from readers commenting on the graphic. One reader noted, “you ought to put that on a t-shirt!” We thought that would be an amusing idea, and did. We threw up a couple of ads on our site to promote the t-shirt, not really expecting a flood of sales and the design is the most popular one we’ve ever featured for sale on Capitol Annex (meaning it surpassed sales of our 2006 holiday ornament, previously the highest selling Capitol Annex design).

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