Windsor vs Itself (2021 & 2025)

For a few years I was really into designing stupid stickers. Most stickers were inside jokes that only Melissa and I would get ("Enough with the barn wood"), some were understandable by the general public "Keep Christmas out of November", but most were related to our city Windsor Ontario.

When we came up with "Windsor vs Itself", we laughed our asses off for a long time. On the surface, it lampooned the phrase "Detroit vs Everybody" that was inescapable at the time across the border. But to us Windsor isn't an underdog fighting a bad reputation, Windsor is a semi-disfunctional city with a tendency to take two steps back for every one step forward. On a personal level, the phrase touched on the alcoholic disfunction and the victim mentality that was starting to wear thin for us.

We gave out a few stickers to friends, then started seeing them pop up in places and more people started asking for them. While the sticker meant something to Mel and I, it meant different things to other people that wanted to express their own frustrations in the city.

A few years later, my buddy Cameron who always loved my stupid stickers asked if I would do a t-shirt version of the sticker. So we did a first run of shirts and Cam hand-delivered them to people via reddit. For the next batches of shirts, we stuck them in the downtown record store Dr Disc for sale. A year later, my friend Murad asked to start making lapel pins of the design and another friend Adam started selling iron-on patches. It's been cool to see the design spread!