About

Why It Is the Way It Is

Hey, thanks for being here. I'm Oz, a designer of things in Montreal. The rest of my work lives at ozgur.ca and ozgur.design. Notionblur is where the darker work goes.

The fascination is old. Late '90s, heavy metal and punk, the way these things tend to start.

It was never about black shirts or gloom for their own sake. It was the pull toward the shadows where the odd and the damned actually live, and the need to get them out of my head and onto something other people could see.

So I bring figures worth remembering to life. Historians and inventors, anarchists and vampires, the band nobody bought on time and the student who threw leaflets at an empire. Most of them changed something, refused something, or outlasted the people who tried to bury them.

Marie Curie and Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg and Edgar Allan Poe, Count Orlok and a snarling punk kitten. The kitten changed the mood and brought joy. Fun is in short supply, and that is reason enough.

The Team

Technology and the Zeitgeist

Years of design and art direction taught Oz to make an idea look like something, and to justify its existence through pure utility. Here the same craft points at personal fixations instead of a client's brief. Oz uses whatever artistic and technological means are within reach to build a visual universe that otherwise could not exist.

Scenes, environments, people long since gone. Nothing suits a collection about history, memory, and surveillance quite like a digital medium.

The work is human. The shirt is just where it lands. Memento vivere.

User Experience Ethics

The internet’s favourite sales tricks aren’t welcome here. Nothing pops up uninvited, no countdown timer pressures you into panic-buying a t-shirt, and no button ever guilt-trips you with “No thanks, I hate nice things.” We don’t bury fees at checkout, and the price you see is the price you pay. If you’re on our mailing list, leaving it takes one click that we honour the first time. We’d rather earn a second order than trick you into a first one.

Parody, Tribute, and Fair Use

Many of the designs reference musicians, films, writers, historical figures, slogans, and cultural icons. Some pieces are parody or satire. They take a familiar phrase or image and turn it into a joke, a critique, or a piece of commentary. Others are tributes, drawn out of admiration for a person or a work. In both cases the design is transformative. It carries new meaning and is not a copy of the original.

Notionblur is independent. Notionblur is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to any band, film, studio, publisher, company, public figure, or estate named or depicted in the work. Any names, titles, and trademarks that appear belong to their respective owners. Notionblur uses them to identify the subject of a parody, tribute, or commentary, never to suggest a partnership or an official product.

Parody, satire, and commentary are protected forms of expression. In Canada they fall under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act. In the United States they fall under fair use. These designs are made and sold in that spirit.