Advent Conspiracy

thanks to Cathy for showing this to me. It reminds me of the one for The Girl Effect. maybe the same people did both?

Advent Conspiracy from MBCC on Vimeo.

Cool New Artist: Erik Otto

I especially like his installations.

He's got prints and other things available for sale, too, and 2 books (here and here) via Blurb. Maybe they'll go on my Christmas list.

No more Frostone?!

I am so sad!!! I just found out that French Paper discontinued Frostone! Boo hooo!!! There was nothing else like it!

RSMc monogram

I designed this monogram for my mom. It was influenced by the Vienna Secessionists and I wanted it to be more clean and architectural--drew it with my calligraphy pen and then scanned it. We're having it letterpressed onto 2.5" square enclosure cards and onto monarch sized white cards with cloud (pale blue-grey) colored monarch envelopes.

Cool New Artist: Carl Van de Roer

I like this series by Carl Van de Roer. It was featured on 20x200, which is one my my faves.

Here's a bit about the series:
The term "orb" is typically used to describe circular artifacts in photographs—artifacts which have been interpreted by some as spirits. Despite being debunked and explained (most commonly as backscatter from precipitation or dust), there's a surprisingly widespread belief that orb photographs document the supernatural. There are organizations, conferences, hunts, field experts, detectors and websites dedicated to spiritualist orb photography.

This photographic search for something larger than ourselves was the starting point for this project. I photographed people in landscapes that are partly obscured by precipitation. The subjects are seen searching for or interacting with orbs, which are represented as dots covering parts of the scene.

Read more here.

Paste

Ok, Ok, I know, I know, I am renaming the blog again! I really loved palate/palette and wanted a single word with a double meaning. Mom actually came up with Paste--Perfect!

And I know it's also the name of a magazine, but if it fits, it fits!

Avoca

Mom and Dad brought me back some great things from their trip to Ireland--two wonderful cookbooks and some local pottery! I love these Avoca cookbooks (or go to the Avoca store). Mom said that Avoca reminds her of an Irish Anthropologie. They sell home goods, food, accessories, etc. The cookbooks have beautiful one-color illustrations and expressive type as image throughout. I wish I could find some photos of the spreads on the web---either that, or a working scanner--so I could show you the inside.

1930s-40s in Color

This wonderful set of photos on Flickr was posted on facebook by a co-worker of Roy and Holly and Jeff. I've loved looking through them tonight.
Here's a little about it:

These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.

The FSA/OWI pictures depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, with a focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.

The original images are color transparencies ranging in size from 35 mm. to 4x5 inches. They complement the better-known black-and-white FSA/OWI photographs, made during the same period.

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division preserves
the original photographs and offers the digital copies to ensure their wide availability.

Local weather

Brilliant!

Lifesized Farmhouse Dollhouse

read the full story here!




via all the mountains...

Ann Wood

I am familiar with the work of Ann Wood, especially her birds, but I had kind of forgotten about these gorgeous paper mache pieces and have never seen her cardboard castles. So magical!

ann wood handmade
ann's blog

about: I live in Brooklyn New York near beautiful Prospect Park. I make things, paint, and draw for my life and livelihood. I work with mostly found, and salvaged materials, many of them vintage or antique garments. There is a kind of affection and tenderness in the re-use and re-purposing of things that were once personal and perhaps treasured possessions. Much of my inspiration comes from these materials as well as from many of the ideas I have been infatuated with my whole life : smallness, intricacies, miniaturization, collections, repetition; lost or abandoned things discovered and rescued; the idea of haunted and enchanted places, things and creatures; the setting of a tiny stage.

Cool New Artist: Alison Hall Cooley

I love the abstract work of Alison Hall Cooley.

Here's an artist's statement:
My work focuses on memory of spaces. Expansive color planes, shooting and falling lines, and etchings overlap and move within an underlying composition suggestive of landscape. Textures and values interweave to create a suspension of visual spaces reflective of memory construction. As color fields stack and unfurl delicate markings orient the viewer and provide a handle for the eye. This dislocation produced by plane and color is steadied by navigation of line.

Strength & Honor

My little brother Thompson and I did this hand-lettered sign for his apartment at Auburn. His small group calls itself the Iron Men and their tag line is "strength and honor." He really wanted to paint it onto this board and hang it next to this painting that my grandmother (mom's mom) did years and years ago. I think it turned out great!

Edit: Thompson said "Strength & Honor" isn't actually their tag line; he just stole it from the movie Gladiator. :)

Latest landscape painting

I've been working on this the past couple of weekends. The sky had yellow undertones, which I really liked. I think next weekend, if I have time, I might try to build a few frames for some canvases around the house and varnish a couple of paintings.

2009 Joyride

Yes, I do have mad poster-whipping-out and fall festival branding skillz.

I pulled this together for our friend Brent's bash coming up in Oct 16. (we're doing a postercard, too.) His band is opening for Act of Congress and there will be hayrides, bonfire, camping out, etc at a farm out in Jasper. It'll be a fun time!

Cool New Artist: Erik Johannson

Love these nonsensical photo manipulations by Erik Johannson featured on daily mail. Thanks to Jeff for featuring them first!

See more of Erik's work here.

I want to dive into a Letitia Quesenberry painting and never come out

I love the work of Letitia Quesenberry!! She does beautiful atmospheric paintings and drawings. Below the art I've included a couple of artist's statements and a little about her.

"something seen momentarily as though from a window while traveling"-John Cage

These drawings are an exploration of the process of making, with attention to surface, materiality, and the transformative aspects of scale. The images intended to question the recollection of experience and the relative nature of perception, taking a vaselined view to embody contradiction: painting/photography, still/moving, specific/ambiguous.

Letitia Quesenberry
until
The work in ‘until’ conjoins transience and stillness, an effort to seize the fugitive nature of perception. Using thin layers of muted plaster to embed and then expose graphite within the surface, small figures emerge from vast disorienting landscapes. Definition of form emanates without outline: shadows and highlights merge. Representation and scale are simultaneously emphasized and understated, relying upon the viewer’s ability to infer. This lag in perceptible information mirrors liminal experience, the transitory struggle to comprehend the unknown. Success hinges upon the subtleties of surface, a minute exchange between material and process. The intention is to investigate and refine this exchange, giving license to the obscure in order to reconstruct representation.

Letitia Quesenberry graduated in 1993 with a bachelors degree in fine art from the University of Cincinnati. Upon graduation, she traveled extensively in Mexico and Europe. She has exhibited work at the Kunsthalle in Mainz, Germany and in numerous group shows including "Images of the World" at the Speed Art Museum and the "2007 DePauw Biennial" at DePauw University. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Pace Trust, as well as an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She recently participated in a collaborative film project entitled MULTIPLY, which was shown at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her work has been published in NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS and PITCH MAGAZINE. She was born in 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky, where she lives and works.

Cool New Artist: Horst Glaesker

Work by German artist Horst Glaesker as featured on Oh Joy!

Typeface-Anatomy

Clever!

via graphic design blog

HOW Top Ten SItes for Designers

Via the HOW e-newsletter I got this morning. Here they are:

American Academy in Rome
Each year, the coveted Rome Prize is awarded to thirty emerging artists and scholars in the early or middle stages of their careers who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. The disciplines include architecture, visual arts and design (graphic, fashion, industrial, interior, lighting, set, and sound design, engineering, urban planning, and other related design fields).

Concept Feedback
ConceptFeedback.com, designed specifically for marketers, designers and developers, provides a free and simple tool for getting third-party reviews on marketing concepts. Concepts may be posted publicly or privately and can include websites, logos, advertisements, videos and more.

EBEN
Alex Eben Meyer is a Brooklyn-based illustrator who loves woodgrain, colored tape and pilot pens, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Slate.com.

James Ensor
The new MoMA website for the James Ensor exhibition explores the work of the Belgian artist.

Live Now
Live Now is a growing collection of artwork, quotes, thoughts, experiences and ideas, powerfully pursuing the notion of "living now." Plus, the illustrations and hand-rendered type are inspiring by themselves.

Share Some Candy
Share Some Candy is a curated collective of inspiring design and art finds.

Society6
Society6 is a platform for emerging and established artists from every creative discipline to showcase their talent as it unfolds.

Stardust.tv
In the words of Stardust's founder and creative director Jake Banks, "The new Stardust.tv is purely a visual site. Compared with our previous version, this site focuses more on movement and functionality, and aims to give visitors a unique visual experience that will heighten the creativity in each spot we present."

The Design Cubicle
Design blog with tips, articles and resources on all subjects of design, ranging from print design and web design to branding, advertising, marketing and more.

the sope
The Sope is the online home of Sophia Zou and Peter Lim, two designers who are currently living and working in San Francisco.

Check out the whole story here.

Cool New Artist: Linda Fantuzzo

So, maybe she's not exactly new, but she's new to me. Charleston artist Linda Fantuzzo is featured in Sept 09 issue of Southern Accents.

Fantuzzo is influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, one of my favorite artists, and Wayne Thiebaud. She calls her style "painterly realism," but it seems very influenced by abstract expressionism. Her work is about light and time. When Fantuzzo thinks a painting is working, she steps away, takes a break, and comes back to look at it in a new light. She turns it upside down and sideways and looks at it in a mirror, in reverse, to help herself see it differently and clarify her sense of its composition. "At that point, no matter now representational it is, I view it abstractly. A good composition works in all positions," says the artist.

Antique Factory Cart Coffee Tables

Identity and biz card for Michael Gamotis/Antique Factory Cart Coffee Tables based here in Birmingham. 

Uprising

Business card design I did for my friend Laura's cake business, Uprising Cakes. I helped with the branding and designed the identity. Working on a website now. For the biz card we did thermography for the logo so that it mimics piping, and there is a two color pattern on the back. Printed on Mohawk superfine. I love the results!































a couple of her show-stoppers

Clay + Abby Save the Date

Save the Date I did for our friends getting married in January! Printed as 4 x 6 photo prints and to be mailed in these cement-colored envelopes. Beautiful photo by Amy Williams Photography.

Design Project Throwback: Vienna Secession

With all this nostalgia I've been experiencing lately for the Vienna Secessionists' work, I started looking back at my old school project that I did on them. Part of the project was a book. I featured a lot of the work of the movement and wanted to complement it with handlettering and some other hand drawn supporting elements that fit the aesthetic. I'm posting the spreads here for reference for the project I'm currently doing for mom. It would probably be better to post the great photos that Jeff WIlliams shot, so I'll try to do that later.

Beautiful work from the Vienna Secession

So I think I'm going to go with a monogram for mom's stationery. I have been working on one that I really love... it has a similar aesthetic to these that were done by the VS, but it's a little more organic... but not flowery. I'm considering doing some kind of stylized trees/pond in a similar aesthetic. Then I want to get in touch with a friend and letterpress genius, Patrick Masterson, who is here in town, and see about getting them letterpressed on some kind of robin's egg blue paper.

I can't remember where I got all this! If you are interested, I could probably track it down.












































Here are some more monograms, not by the Secessionists.

NY City Limit

I love these clever & witty gadgets from NY City Limit (distributed by The Sarut Group, whose tagline is "Inspire | Educate | Entertain"). Even their home page is cool! I found them via Red Stamp, which is another GREAT site that I'll post more about later.

Folk Art

You know how I love folk art. Mom wants me to design her some stationery, something unique, and so today i was thinking about that and started researching folk art and embroidery. Now sure if this direction would be applicable to her stationery, but it's all so beautiful and enchanting that I had to post here for my reference. Found some wonderful things...here are a few.

a wonderful swiss folk art textile via Anonymous Works

some Swedish art via Animation Archive

Swiss folk ornaments on myfonts.com. Would love to use these in some application.

Illustration from “Gustaf Tenggren’s Tell It Again Book” courtesy of ASIFA- Hollywood Animation Archive, via How To Be A Children's Book Illustrator

so many beautiful paintings via Cupboards & Roses Swedish Antiques

and lots of wonderful things from Swedish Country!

the box doodle project

I've been researching websites and web design lately, partly because that is new territory at work, and I keep coming across sites that are so clever or cool. I like the horizontal nav of the box doodle project, and the concept of the project is amusing, too:

the rules are quite simple:
rearrange a box to make any
kind of figure or object.
make the most of least.


some designs below.
















































































they even have a box doodle tool that you can use to make one online and then take a screen shot.

Birmingham Museum of Art

I like this new thing the BMA has going on: they created "cool picks," a curator-selected group of art that changes monthly. The slogan is "It's Cool. It's Free." I saw the billboard last Friday going to work, and the composition is green and blue rectangles arranged on white to suggest paintings hung gallery-style on a wall. I think it's a cool look.

This is what I pulled from their website.

Nate Duval gig poster

Check out this beautiful 5-color (one is gold!) screen-printed poster I ordered! Thanks to LeeAnne for introducing me to the work of Nate Duval.

Where should I hang it? I was thinking in my studio.

Swedish Fish ads

So in the spirit of all things Swedish, today I am celebrating these clever Swedish Fish ads. Funny that their tagline is a "a friend you can eat." Does that fly over here in the U.S.?


Agency: JWT, New York

via all over the place

Light Locations

Light Locations has some fantastically beautiful interiors. Most of their interiors are filled with white & light. Lots look very Swedish Modern, which is the style I've determined that I love best, especially when a dash of the eclectic, textural, industrial or historical is thrown in. And over-the-top pattern, color, ornamentation, and architectural salvage pieces in small doses to juxtapose with the cleanness.

I love these houses! From their website:

Light Locations is a photographic location agency providing beautiful, inspiring lifestyle locations to the film/TV and photographic industry.

Light Locations was started by Sophie Hitchens in 2001. The business has grown from strength to strength and now has an established, well known name in the industry.

Sophie takes pride in providing only the best, most stylish locations in the UK by keeping her portfolio to a manageable size. This enables her to have a personal relationship with both owner and client and provide an efficient, friendly service.

The website is always being updated and clients are kept up to date with any new properties taken on.

Josef Reyes: One of Print Magazine's New Visual Artist for 2009 Shares a New Favorite

I found this commentary on SPD. What a cleverly illustrated book! I love the facing windows in the snow day spread.

Remy Charlip's "Arm In Arm" is a children's book I picked up at the Antiques Garage flea market on 25th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. The illustrations in "Arm in Arm" are delightful and intelligent, but what I find most remarkable about this book is the way in which the illustrations acknowledge and exploit the physical properties of the page.




In "Arm In Arm," Remy Charlip tells stories not only through his illustrations but also through his placement of the illustrations on the book pages. In the spread pictured below, Charlip narrates a snow day scene:




Here, Charlip talks about the two opposite ways that kids spend snow day -- some kids see it as the perfect reason to run outside and play, other kids see it as the perfect excuse to stay in bed the whole day. In depicting this scene, Charlip capitalizes on the format of a book spread to great effect. Since the two groups of kids are basically mirror images of one another and the two facing pages of a book spread are also basically mirror images of one another, Charlip simply places one group of kids on one page of the spread and the other group of kids on the facing page. To establish this mirroring scheme, Charlip draws windows on each page, with each window facing the window on the opposite page. Each window looks out to the scene illustrated opposite to it, thereby clarifying the link between the two pages.

In illustrating this snow day scene, Charlip clearly had the format of the book spread in mind -- he acknowledged the symmetry created by two facing pages along with the gutter that creates this symmetry, and incorporated these elements into the illustration. He treated these elements not as constraints but as tools for illuminating the story. In doing so, Charlip tells stories not only through the content of the book but also through the physical properties of the book itself.

To my limited knowledge, Remy Charlip is not a graphic designer, but I regard "Arm In Arm" as one of the most inspiring examples of book design I've ever seen. Charlip demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the page through his clever use of negative space, gutters, and fore-edges. His pages don't merely feel like dry receptacles for content, they feel like entire worlds you can jump into.







Josef Reyes is a graphic designer at Buchanan-Smith LLC. He was previously a freelancer at The New York Times where he worked on the various Sunday magazines published by the newspaper (Sunday NYT Magazine, Key, and Play). Josef has a BFA in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Arts. He hails from Manila, Philippines.

90s flowchart

via here

paperwhite studio

I'm helping my friend laura brand her cake business and am designing her a biz card right now. So lately I've been researching cakes, bakeries, etc... and one direction I'm thinking about is doing an ornate, kinda stylized cake with my calligraphy pen. Came across this beautiful website and work. Some of her lettering is is kind of hallmark-y, but some is really nice..especially the logos. And I think the site design is nice.

paperwhite studio

Mac Shack II

...and round one, per my clients' (dad and Thompson) copy edit comments and worry that it looked metrosexual and read "Iran Men" (you can guess which one made that comment). I tweaked the o's previous to my earlier post.

Mac Shack sign

Sign I am doing to over the Mac Shack at mom and dad's house out by their pond. My dad's small Bible study group of fathers and sons meets out there once a week. Now the boys are all growed up! Most of them are finishing up their freshman year of college, including my little brother. I designed an Iron Men logo for them last summer. The Mac Shack is named after my grandfather, Lloyd F. "Mac" McMurtrie.

Osborne and Little wallpaper

Osborne and Little has some nice wallpaper. Southern Living [June 09--just got the issue at SPC, so doubt that it's out yet) did a piece called "a better bedside table" and used Benvarnden (shown first here) The colors were much, much less pink in the mag [the orange was really golden, etc) and I liked them better there, so I'm not sure which is more accurate. Nonetheless, it's a nice print. So are the others.

Vintage paper dolls, etc

Some pretty little ones for your enjoyment. Found them all over the web.






































































































And check out this French site bibigreycat with lots of neat illustrations.

Memoriam

I really like this typeface Memoriam featured in my newsletter from MyFonts a week or so ago. Love the hairlines. Here's some background.

The tradition at the New York Times magazine has been to dedicate the year’s last issue to the people who passed away during the year, especially those whose lives have affected us. Art director Nancy Harris Rouemy, whose typographic design sense has earned her many prestigious awards over the years, decided on an all-type magazine cover for the 2008 issue, and commissioned Canada Type to do a new typeface especially for that project. Now Memoriam is finally here in retail form—not least because hundreds of people have asked for it.
Though a few other Canada Type faces were used in the magazine with great results over the preceding months (mainly Ambassador Script and Sympathique), Nancy thought a some of the ideas in Jezebel's uppercase and Treasury's lowercase would be a good fit onto an all-type commemorative cover, but with a much higher contrast and the infusion of a more luxurious and elegant brand of poster calligraphy that doesn't date itself. After a few different attempts, the first shapes were born, and six weeks later there were enough forms to do the cover. The typeface was such a success with the editors and designers, it was used all over the magazine, instead of just the cover.

Cool New Artist: Lindsey Adelman

Awesome organic/industrial pieces by Lindsey Adelman.







via design*sponge

AIGA stop action film

done by good focus and commissioned by AIGA to use at their compost modern conference.




via design*sponge.

Clothes Pin Dolls

I like these little dolls on etsy by PinCarnations.

Charley Harper memory

I just ordered this Charley Harper memory game and I am so excited!

Wiley Valentine

beautiful work from letterpress shop Wiley Valentine

Point: AIGA Colorado Education Journal

I found this journal on AIGA's website yesterday. You can download each issue in its entirety. It's really nice. Here's the cover and a few spreads from issue one. Go here to learn more and download more.

The Leonardo Code

So I read Angels & Demons last weekend at the beach, and now I'm going back and reading The Da Vinci Code. Then I'm going to watch both of the movies! The stories are pretty good, and the books are fast-paced.
However, it really really irks me that all these cryptologists, curators, art scholars who spend their lifetimes devoted to studying Leonardo da Vinci, etc, in the novels refer to him as "da Vinci" instead of "Leonardo." Everyone in the real world who knows anything about art knows that "da Vinci" refers to where Leonardo is from, and that the art world refers to the artist as "Leonardo."

Read more here. I especially like this concluding paragraph:
"Da Vinci," then as now, indicates "from Vinci" – a distinction shared by many thousands of people born and raised in Vinci. If one felt utterly compelled, say, at gunpoint, to use "Da Vinci," he or she would need to be certain to write "da" (the "d" is not capitalized) and "Vinci" as two separate words.

Moo

I saw some customizable sticker books featured on RealSimple.com today. Available on this website moo. Anyway, you can customize them to an extent, and they also have stuff like postcards, biz cards, etc. You can upload your own images, or you can use some ready made designs. I like some of these designs by "Snuggle Muffin."

NoteCards $21.99
Buy this on MOO.com

Jason Miller Studio

Yesterday I was watching Ovation TV and they were featuring Jason Miller and his work. The ideas behind many of his project are very intriguing, and largely about highlighting the imperfect and trivial instead of concealing it. I.e. the Duct Tape chair, thinking about duct tape as a "badge of honor," and recreating strips of duct tape in leather. Or "Seconds," a series of china with misplaced birds, flowers growing down, cut up patterns. Here's some of his work. Definitely check out his website.