About Us
Who are we?
We are Anjel Van Slyke and Connal Hughes.
Are you married?
Yup. One of our mottos is, “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it.” So we did.
What do you do?
Most of the time, as much as we can. We’re multi-disciplinary designers by trade and from the time we started our first business together, back in 2005, we’ve always kept a lot of variety in our daily work. We can help you with your identity design needs, custom paint your car, and teach you a Mongolian card game if you like!
What inspired 35 Summers?
In August of ’09 we closed the doors of our graphic design boutique, sold off what we could, put the rest in storage, and set off to travel the world for a year.
In 381 days we visited 20 countries on 4 continents, traveling over 71,000 miles; 400 of them trekking and over 15,000 of them on motorcycle.
It was A Dangerous Business:
We took thousands of pictures, we wrote a bunch of posts, we made maps of our routes and our progress, and almost every day was somewhere we’d never been before. It was an amazing trip.
When it was all said and done it was good to return home to see friends and family, but it didn’t take long before we found ourselves getting a little antsy. “What are we going to do now.”
We watched a few classic motorcycle movies to ease our post “on the road” minds, one of which was Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish. The movie’s not great, but Tom Waits is in it and at one point says the following:
Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see, when you’re young, you’re a kid, you’ve got time. You got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there, it doesn’t matter, you know.
The older you get, you say “Jesus, how much I got? I got 35 summers left.” Think about it. 35 summers…
It was one of those right-time, right-place quotes and it really struck us.
Add 35 years to your age and whether it takes you from 15 to 50, from 35 to70 or from 50 to 85, it’s a huge span of time and hard to imagine what you’ll want to have done during that time.
But use summers as a measurement, those magical months of freedom when you were a kid, and it’s not hard to ask yourself: “What if we only had 35 summers left?” 35 bbq’s with friends, 35 road trips, 35 seasons of cherries…
How would you spend them?
What are you going to do about it?
Not everyone has the desire to drop everything and travel, but surely everyone could come up with a list of 35 things they’d like to do; learn a language, visit a country, run a race, build something…
We have committed ourselves to this idea and plan on sharing it with you along the way. We’ve also started a foundation – The 35 Summers Foundation, a 401(c)(3) non-profit – so we can fund the kinds of projects we think are important. We’ll be building that up over the next year. We’d love to hear your stories as well.
For us, the notion of 35 Summers is an inspiration – you’ve got 35 summers ahead of you. How are you going to spend them?
Join us! Tell us your story!
wait… I want to check out A Dangerous Business but it just sends me here!
Relax, you’re not missing anything. When we created 35 Summers we rolled all of our ADB posts in here, so nothing has disappeared, we just restructured a bit!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I would LOVE to join you and tell you my story. When are you available to interview? Will it be in person, by Skype or by pre-written questions? Should I give you my list first and then you ask me about specific things on that list? Let’s make this happen, people.