5 Years of The Nork! Project

The Nork! Project will celebrate its five-year anniversary in November 2022.

If you came across us early on, you have watched us grow from a scrappy startup. We first got our start selling stickers for a dollar at Military Park during Newark First Fridays’ Art Walk. We did that for two years while we learned to screenprint at the Newark Print Shop.

If any of the ink on your canvas tote bags ran or your t-shirts began to fade from those days, it’s because we hand-printed those products with a softer ink while we were still wrapping our heads around how to create quality and lasting products. Now, we have developed the customer base and following that allows us to hire people who know what they’re doing.

We've tried to forge a visual language for hometown pride. And we are still trying. The Nork! Project has gone through a couple internal revisions and a few different iterations of our brand identity. 

So, what the hell is a Nork! Project?

The Nork! Project is an independent art and apparel brand that offers quality goods and cultural activations surrounding the City of Newark. However, Newark is not what we limit ourselves to. We hope you are as stunned as we are when we say that our online shop has shipped items to over thirty-five states. 

There is a Nork Smiley t-shirt in Hawaii, a Newark is for Hustlers tote bag in Atlanta, and a Nork! Logo Cap in Detroit. Our Newark-featuring items span the country.

After these five years, we have a better understanding of who we are as a brand and as a company. With the 25+ text-based designs we’ve shared in our time, we now believe that the Nork! Project—in its essence—is a communications company. 

The message is our shared artwork and our medium are the items that we can squeeze under a silkscreen. We cannot even begin to count how many online impressions we’ve had. With the exponential nature of having your stuff floating around both on people’s bodies and on the internet, we can safely bet that one million pairs of eyes have landed on the things we’ve made. And if they read the print, then we did our job.

The Nork! Project: A Communications Company.