CH DesignWorks L.L.C.

Building a Business

 

Skills utilized:

  • Business experience

  • Accounting

  • Quality control

  • Client relations

  • Graphic design

  • Physical print production

In 2015, I shared some work I'd done for myself to the aviation section on Reddit, an online community, and got more than a handful of comments saying that if I were to open an Etsy shop, they would pay money for prints of the designs I had shared. Having wondered what it would be like to start and run a business, that was all the push I needed. Within a few months, the Etsy shop was up and running with a dozen or so various airport diagrams, and requests for custom orders were trickling in. While it was something of a hobby to see if I could start a business, it has become a successful enterprise, bringing in a modest profit every year so far.

The airport diagram series was not an original idea, but rather inspired by similar prints I'd seen and liked, but were all missing one critical component: Scale. I wanted to see what it looked like if Anderson Municipal airport were placed right next to Chicago O'Hare, or any other number of combinations. And so the series I designed found its niche as an accurately scaled one where rather than stretching the graphics to suit a uniform paper size, I flexed the paper size to accommodate a pair of universal scales for the entire series (‘large’ versions are offered at 1” = 1,000’, and ‘small’ at 1” = 2,000’). All the other similar prints I'd seen were also solely of the larger well-known airports, and I wanted to appreciate the smaller local airports, so that's what I started to draw more of. The airport diagram series now stands at a collection of over 100, the vast majority of which are smaller Class C and D airports.

Apart from the Airport Diagram Series, I took on commissions for friends in urban planning and nautical areas, and expanded my portfolio to include diagrams based on all kinds of maps, whether by land, sea, or air. A new collection that's in the works will go a step further, exploring another interest of mine - space.

In March of 2018, I scaled up the Esty shop into a full blown business and registered as an LLC. As part of the scaling up, the Etsy print shop became merely a division of my endeavors, and the business now acts as a broad umbrella under which I exercise my wide range of skill sets. From graphic design and drafting services to aerial drone-based photography to photogrammetry scanning, to spherical imaging, I leverage each facet of my ability to accomplish any design endeavor. My tagline is “Observe. Analyze. Create. Design At All Scales”.