beyond design


i always loved the book report assignments that called for a building a diorama. this little apple store diorama is super cute, i like looking at all the cutouts this person did to make it. and HEY what’s he trying to say about apple loyalists driving mini coopers? [guilty!] thanks gregory han & unplggd.com for the link.

food

strawberries with zabaione and bresaola with cucumber, from cucina italiana
[photos: lacucinaitalianamagazine.com]
one of my favorite cooking magazines, la cucina italiana has some great stories of italian food and recipes for all occasions. i tend to stick with desserts that are a bit tart and/or low in sugar, and this strawberries with zabaione sounds like a nice mix of fresh fruit, rich zabaione and a touch of balsamic vinegar. while i was digging around on their site, i saw this arrangement of bresaola and cucumber salad with a bit of pecorino and almonds. i love simple italian antipasti like this, a few ingredients to bring out the natural flavors of the food.

the mother’s day food articles have started up. if you’re the type to treat mom to breakfast in bed, epicurious.com has a rundown of mother’s day breakfasts in bed that even kids can make. you hear that dad & teenagers still living at home? momma loves you, and she’s hungry!

more on sustainable seafood, greenlagirl.com reports on greenpeace’s supermarket scorecard so you can support the store that gets high grades in sustainable seafood practices.

wine

dessert wines
[photo: wine producers]
i was recently in central valley wine country with some friends and we got to talking about how we’ve come to appreciate dessert wine, now that we know how to pick out what we like. and how timely, thekitchn.com has a great list of suggestions here: dessert wines for dessert week.

i like to make extracts, infusions and liqueurs at home, but i tend to avoid those with too much added sugar. this recipe for strawberry liqueur caught my eye because it uses only the natural sugar of the strawberries to sweeten it. strawberries are in season now, so if you are like me and probably can’t eat a whole flat in a week’s time, try out this preservation technique.

eco-awareness

reused boxes
[image: gregory han]
if you find yourself moving and still need more than your usual sources can supply, check out re-nest.com‘s suggestion to buy reused cardboard boxes from usedcardboardboxes.com.

another great re-nest.com find: the dba 98% biodegradable pen!

creative inspiration

design industry

lentil vegetable stew print
[image: claudia g. pearson]
not only do i love this style of illustration, but you really can’t go wrong when food is the subject. thanks to design sponge, i now know about this outstanding artist, claudia g. pearson and her fantastic etsy shop where you can find prints and tea towels adorned with these lovely illustrations.

if you’re looking for green greeting cards, greenlagirl.com has a profile on 100% junk mail greeting cards, printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper using vegetable-based biodegradable inks.

meetings! we’ve all been in them enough to know that some are well-organized, while most tend to stray off topic and waste time. todd henry’s accidental creative blog addresses meeting creep and how to avoid it, so if it’s happening to you, read the article.

color

colors in cultures
[image: informationisbeautiful.net]
in a global design culture, it’s important to choose colors that cross cultural lines in a friendly way. this infographic is an awesome color wheel cross-referencing world cultures with their emotional associations & meanings of colors. aside from being immensely useful, it’s quite a nice thing to look at. next time you have a project, or even dress for a meeting, consider some of the messages you can create and avoid with color.

logos

it’s that time again, logo lounge has released their 2010 logo trends article. i’ve heard a lot of buzz from my design community about getting their work into the annual book. congratulations to all those included! this annual trend report is a really interesting look at new trends in logo design.

typography

type soap
[image: how design blog]
thanks to the how design blog, i’m just happy to know this typography soap exists. i don’t think i could bring myself to use it if i bought it, though.

i’m a huge fan of hoefler & frere-jones knockout typeface, and i’m really enjoying the humor with which grip limited chose to use it, as shown on the h&fj blog.

help save the hamilton wood type museum! Dear friends of wood type: Hamilton has an unprecedented opportunity to qualify for a dollar-for-dollar matching grant from the “Save America’s Treasures” program which has a deadline of May 20th, 2010. This gives Hamilton 30 days to raise enough money to apply for a $25,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re excited to have already raised over $5000 for this vital program that will help us archive, preserve and digitally document our collection of over 2000 vintage advertising plates and our 1.5 million-piece type collection. <a href="interested parties click here for 3 ways to help.

curiosities

clui: through the grapevine
[image: clui.org]
the center for land use interpretation is at it again with a new exhibit through the grapevine currently on display. i have driven this road many times, but the center has a great way of showing us things we’ve never seen in our travels. from clui.org: The mountainous passage that separates the great population of Southern California from the rest of the state is a zone of transit, from one epic region to another. Located at the collision of the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountain Ranges, this steep and convoluted terrain lies between Castaic, the northern edge of the Los Angeles megalopolis, and the depopulated place known as Grapevine, at the southern end of the Central Valley. Layers of traffic, water, and energy move like a braided stream through the mountainous terrain, connecting here to there.

make your own 100 year pinhole camera, from good.is. it will take a long time, and you may not get to see the end result yourself, but you can construct your own pinhole camera using inkjet ink as the emulsion, allowing it to expose a photo-quality image from 100 years of sun exposure. curious, indeed!

beyond design

neighborhood

a friend and fellow designer recently mentioned that her landlord was turning their front yard into a CSA farm, and that they’d be growing produce for sale right at home. when i inquired how they were going to go about it, she pointed me to LA farm hands where interested parties can sign up to buy fresh CSA produce from local LA growers. fantastic!

thanks to eric garcetti’s help, the food & flowers freedom act is set to become law according to laist.com. this is a revision to an outdated law that disallowed selling homegrown fruit and flowers. garcetti claimed to have grown 80% of his own produce last year–i can add that to the list of reasons why i love that he is LA city council president. well, that AND my facebook friend. ha.

greenlagirl.com offers this list of neighborhood tidbits: eric garcetti has a new iphone app “garcetti 311” to help clean up the city, and may is bike every saturday month!

diy projects


[image: bestgreenhometips.com]
winter detox: 12 easy diy air fresheners. as the weather warms up, sometimes i find i’ve had the windows closed and the heat on long enough that my house needs a breath of fresh air. these are some great ideas on how to add natural scents to your home, from ohdeeoh.com.

food & drinks


[photo: brian leatart]
i decided to try out some yams this week from one of my farmer’s market vendors, and since citrus rinds are one of my favorite seasoning agents, i think this recipe is how i’ll prepare them: roasted yams with citrus and coriander butter from epicurious.com

jose & joel’s mexican sangria looks like a classy cocktail version of my usual slice-and-throw sangria system. thanks, designsponge.com!

creative inspiration

design industry

health care reform t-shirt
[photo: barackobama.com]
the importance of health care reform and the genius of joe biden come together on a winning t-shirt design. whatever side you’re on, i think we can all agree, it IS a BFD!


[image: ketchup-mustard.com]
an inspiring set of identity design from designer-daily.com corporate identity design done right: 17 great examples there’s some great work in here! thanks to josh ross for the link.

design resources

thanks to the how design blog, i now have a list of15 excellent free online magazines for designers from technologysoftware.com.

if you like photoshop brushes, fudgegraphics.com is offering this cool set of plain fabric textures as a free download.

from the freelance files, nubby twiglet reviews her first year running her own design practice in one year of freelancing: what i’ve learned.

ok go and the changing face of the music industry

i was catching up with one of my favorite podcasts this week, planet money and was happy to hear they were interviewing damian kulash jr. of ok go about his recent op-ed contribution to the new york times “whose tube?” in this article he recounts the story of how the band created and distributed their video for here it goes again without label approval through youtube.com, which went viral and essentially gained them a much more loyal and active following they’d ever had before. the band assumed to continue this tradition, and you’d think their label, EMI, would have said “sure, do it all again!” but alas, many aspects of the music industry continue to be short sighted about change. instead, in a misguided attempt to protect their assets, they blocked third-party users from the ability to embed videos—the very thing that allows them to go viral—so ok go decided it was time to rethink the relationship.

certainly not the first public departure from a label, but a pretty notable effort was when radiohead decided to release in rainbows on their site on a pay-what-you-wish basis. it went from fascinating experiment to great success, summed up by a quote from rolling stone story the future according to radiohead: According to comScore, a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million visitors to Radiohead’s Web site in October downloaded the album, and while comScore claims only two out of five downloaders paid anything at all, the payers averaged $6 per album — which, factoring in the freeloaders, works out to about $2.26 per album, more than Radiohead would have made in a traditional label deal. And that’s just downloads: Released on January 1st, the CD version debuted at Number One in the U.S. and Britain. and it’s not just the super-famous, npr recently profiled pomplamoose, who has had surprising success by covering highly-searched song titles on youtube to drive links to their channel where listeners invariably check out their original tracks and buy them, building a model from the ground up on a shoestring budget [<a href="check out their cover of beyoncé’s single ladies]. it has made me start to speculate that perhaps a new model where successful bands become the new patrons of startup bands in which they see great potential and who are of like mind, philosophy and approach. and for those just starting out, the landscape is ripe with opportunity to combine and utilize all the free social media tools that promote, distribute and create community around your art.

i’m curious to see where ok go goes with this, but like most of their guerilla publicity, i think they’re hitting all the right channels and moving forward confidently into a model that works best for them. and they get to take millions of adoring fans with them.

beyond design


everyone has played one of these games, and seeing them in live action is totally hilarious! from mfeedia.com

diy projects


[photo: thehipsterhome.com]
the craft zine blog posted a how-to on these little mini terrariums in upcycled lightbulbs and jars. what a great use of cute containers!


[photo: designspongeonline.com]
sewing 101: how to make a shower curtain from designspongeonline.com. i think this project is a really cool way to make a washable, colorful shower curtain from fabric you really like.

food


[image: kana76]
try this: sweet and smoky broiled grapefruit from thekitchn.com. i love grapefruits and i think this sounds delicious. maybe a good way to prep fruit for savory sauces as well. great idea!

sharing a great standby recipe that i love from epicurious.com, these szechuan sesame noodles are spicy, nutty and tangy. i’ve been making them for years with buckwheat soba noodles.

drinks


[photo: rockscissorpaper.com]
pour mom a drink from rockscissorpaper.com is an interesting sounding cocktail recipe using elderflower liquor. i love the flower garnish, perhaps my mom will have hers with nasturtiums.

in honor of tax day, this cocktail for tax night: the tax night relief is a fun idea, from thekitchn.com.

it’s helpful to become familiar with wine lingo by heather stober fleming for southcoasttoday.com is a good reference for defining all the common terms in wine tasting and character. always good to refresh your knowledge, which helps you pick out more nuance next time you taste.

music

my sister has been nominated for singer of the year by the jazz journalists association! additionally, my client gerald clayton has been nominated for up & coming artist of the year. very exciting, and they’re in excellent company. can’t wait to find out how they place on june 14!

creative inspiration

typography


[image: print magazine]
in his article lettercentric: type as writing, paul shaw outlines a brief history of script type and how opentype technology has helpt script fonts get back to looking like hand-lettered forms. from print magazine.

the periodic table of typefaces has been circulating for awhile now, but i thought i’d post it up for clients who hadn’t seen it yet or are outside the design blogosphere. this chart outlines many classic typefaces in somewhat of a hierarchy of ubiquity, with the ability to zoom in for a better look and a credit to the type designer.

how magazine posted this really cool spotlight on james patrick gibson‘s new york type photo blog in which he photographs and submits specimens of awesome type samples from the wilds of new york city. what a great collection!

design industry


[image: thehaitiposterproject.com by alonzo felix]
thanks to <a href="designworklife.com for posting some of the results from the haiti poster project, which has a staggering number of great posters to peruse.

my colleague & wordpress master doron orenstein just posted an article on how to easily create and share color palettes online. thanks for this cool utility!

did you know that AIGA [the american institute of graphic arts] has a center for practice management free and available to the public? if you are frustrated with running your design business, see how your management style measures up with our industry organization’s list of best practices.

get your paper index from how magazine! from their blog: download [a pdf of] a comprehensive list of paper mills and suppliers, as seen in the May issue of HOW!

going to the creative freelancer conference or how conference in denver this june? i just joined this twibe [a twitter tribe for attendees]. if you’re on twitter, join up!

biznik article of the week

The Truth About Branding by Kevin Simcock

more information on all the ways your brand becomes touchpoints and opportunities to communicate with your target audience and potential clients. simcock gives a careful explanation about how prospective buyers interact with brands and divides these touchpoints into 4 categories: planned messaging, product messaging, service messaging, and unplanned messaging.

creative inspiration

design industry


[photo: designbythesis.com]
check out this spotlight on the thesis new year’s card from underconsideration.com. this letterpress card was printed in only 2 colors, using varied impression depths to create perspective. so subtle and lovely to look at, makes me wish i had one to touch.

have you ever wanted to print your own pattern designs on fabric without going into fabric manufacturing? my friend josh ross linked up spoonflower.com the other day, and it looks like a great way to play around with homemade fabric design.

typography


[image: houseind.com]
have you gotten your <a href="eames century modern catalog from <a href="house industries yet? these catalogs are outstanding visual reference material, and they’ll send one to you for free if you leave your address. follow the link to the house industries blog to see a cool video giving a snapshot to each phase of the print production process. celebrating this font release, they’ve also created a suite of all kinds of fun products to play with as well [from howdesign.com].


[image: the look partnership]
designworklife.com tipped me off to this awesome typeface lodgecode by the look partnership. so clean and clear with a slight retro flair makes it both elegant and endearing. available at youworkforthem.com

books


[image: indexbook.com]
i am really interested in taking a spin through this book, wine labels by eduardo del fraile for index book. follow the link for sample spreads from inside the book, they look great!