Design for the ages

“I wanted something that reflected the age,” said James Crowder, owner of Mighty Fine T’s in Thompson Falls. “I wanted it to be aged.”

Crowder was referencing his winning design for the 40th Huckleberry Festival logo, which features overgrown huckleberry leafage and a massive huckleberry with antiqued finish.

The logo design contest is a custom of the festival. One that required entries to be hand drawn, until a couple of years ago anyway. Sticking with that ritual, Crowder’s design is done by hand even though he is a master with digital art programs as well.

“I hand drew it because it was traditionally a contest condition and I felt it should be kept that way,” Crowder shared.

A Thompson Falls native, Crowder graduated from high school in 1997 and ventured to Bozeman, where he earned MSU’s bachelor’s degree in fine art and graphic design in 2002. After spending years studying art, he decided this may not be the direction he wanted to take in life.

“I continued to work for the U.S. Forest Service as a wildland firefighter, which I had done seasonally while in attendance at MSU,” stated Crowder. He admitted that during these days, he continued to exercise his artistic abilities by doing some freelance work, although never pursued anything concrete.

After college, Crowder lived in Nevada, working as a firefighter for the Lake Tahoe Basin National Forest, and then relocated to Bellingham, Washington in 2012. While in Washington, Crowder “disengaged” himself from the Forest Service hoping to get back into the art industry full time while his wife, Susan, earned her master’s degree in mental health counseling.

As luck would have it, in 2014 Crowder found himself right back where it all began … in Thompson Falls.

“My wife was offered a job here while we were in town visiting family,” he commented. “It was at that time that I was informed that Mighty Fine T’s was for sale and I started working on a way to acquire that business hoping that this might finally be my way into the design field.

“I ended up purchasing it (Mighty Fine T’s) in 2015 with a lot of help from my family and a very generous set of terms laid out by the seller.” Strange as it might sound, Crowder followed by stating that he had a “fairly strong grasp of art and design,” but he “had never screen printed a thing” in his life.

He admits that now, four years after purchasing the business, he is still developing skills to become a screen print guru. With just one look at the shop’s wall of fame and you would never know he is “still learning.” He has created quite a beautiful compilation of custom screen printing.

Crowder is accommodating to all customers. He stated that about half of Mighty Fine T’s customers are those who need shirts printed and do not have an image in mind. He enjoys sitting down with them and developing the perfect image. A quarter of his clients are businesses who already have their logos and need merchandise printed. The other quarter is comprised of those customers who need printed goods for events such as races or festivals.

His biggest challenge in the screen-printing business … he’s a perfectionist and wants to honor his work as a creative artist rather than a manufacturer. “I refuse to put garbage out, so I don’t put garbage in.” He avoids clip art as much as possible and believes that custom artwork produces a unique and higher quality product.

Any poor, low quality or small images that are submitted to Crowder must be digitally redrawn, reworked and made to scale for it to print with quality. It is not as simple as copying an image on a shirt, the whole process is more than one would expect and is no small task. “There’s a lot of work to get an image on the shirt,” Crowder said.

His desire to get everything just right is why he prefers to work with customers on a face-to-face basis. Not only can Crowder design the perfect artwork for printing, he says that getting the graphic and t-shirt to complement one another is something the internet cannot do. Therefore, Crowder encourages customers to stop in the shop prior to ordering because “visual products receive the best work when both of us can see it.”

When ordering from the internet, customers never know what the result will be. “I work with the customer on the product. They (internet businesses) do not have to look a dissatisfied customer in the face and explain why they don’t get their money back.”

Initially, Crowder had envisioned the business to be more of an art house than just a printing shop. He has not lost hope of that dream, although he recognizes it will take time to develop since screen printing is quite time consuming, and being the sole employee, he has little left to dedicate toward fulfilling that “niche.”

Crowder is optimistic and excited about the business’s future. It took 15 years to get to where he is now, and in another 15, he sees the business undoubtably progressing forward, providing more services and custom merchandise to his growing field of satisfied customers.