You can love both.

Each week for a year, I’m designing a shirt and releasing it on my Threadless store. This is the design for week 24.

When I started this project, one of the first shirts I sketched out was for my wife's birthday. I liked the concept, but when I went to execute it… It was fine, but it didn’t look like Liz. So I worked on some other ideas and none of them seemed quite right. Liz has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for this shirt project and I really wanted her shirt to be perfect… it wasn’t.

I took Liz to Hilton Head* to celebrate her birthday and we went for a long walk on the beach. One of the many topics of discussion was our mutual love of both the ocean and the mountains. Liz grew up out west with amazing mountains, but never really went to the ocean. When she moved east, closer to the ocean, Liz discovered that she loved the ocean as much as she loved the mountains.**

I came back to our hotel room and sketched out what would become Liz’s birthday shirt, Mountains and Oceans. You can get Mountains and Oceans — and all the other shirt designs — at my Threadless store.

* Hilton Head in the winter is wonderful. I highly recommend it.

** Living in Columbia, SC, we are two hours from the coast and two hours from Asheville. For people like us who love both the mountains and the sea, being in Columbia is a perfect location.

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, creative director, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. He's currently in the middle of a project to design a new shirt a week for an entire year. Follow Bob on Twitter, Instagram and Micro.Blog.