On the merits of painting rooms.

I hate painting rooms, soul sucking, physically exhausting, messy, smelly endeavour. Hate it. Hate it.

Which creates a certain sense of irony in my house when you consider how often I repaint rooms. I can’t stop myself. All I need is one good HTML click to benjaminmoore.com or sherwinwilliams.com and I’m done for. I think I have low color self-esteem: everyone else’s room colors are so much nicer than my own. Gotta have it. Now. This makes my husband insane because he likes consistency, sameness, everydayness that changing a room constantly does not lend itself to.

Yesterday, my best friend and I repainted my dining room/entry way/hallway/basement stairs from dark olive green to a color called Abingdon Putty by Benjamin Moore. The colors watch makes it look like a greenish putty color, like ecru, but the reality is not really like that at all. It’s much lighter and brighter than the color swatch, and a little more true on the online swatch, which I find hysterical. The actual color on the walls reminds me of Vanilla Ice cream, which I think should be the name of the color. It’s like swimming in a big bowl of the stuff. Absolutely delicious. Or vanilla creme. It’s so rich. There is depth to the color. “Vanilla ice cream?” my coworker said, “Isn’t that, well, white?” No no no not at all. There’s nothing “White” about this color. It’s got depth and dimension. I swear, its one of the most beautiful wall colors I’ve ever seen and set up next to the chocolate brown trim? My dining room is the color of dessert, I swear to it.

Still, these are the online color swatches, and they don’t match either color very well at all.

    

When it got dark out and the artificial light started hitting it, we discovered the slight green undertone come out more. It’s sort of a springy green color, a surprise. Always moving, always changing, always growing. it is actually inspiring me to bring the great outdoors inside and really play up the natural, growing world within design. Listen to me! I sound like an HGTV host.

Here’s a funny thing. When I was at Ace Hardware store buying my Benjamin Moore paint, the guy working told me to get Ace Hardware paint and have them match the Benjamin Moore color. Cheaper, and good quality paint. So I said sure. And you know what? Ace Hardware brand paint is absolutely amazing. I love it. One coat of this stuff was almost perfect. It’s thick and creamy with excellent coverage and about $10 cheaper than the name brand Benjamin Moore paint. I highly recommend this stuff. Paint match, you’ll be thankful you did. I never found anything great about the Benjamin Moore paint and I think it is ridiculously expensive. But I never found anything wrong with it either. I like Sherwin Williams paint the best, but my new favorite is the Ace Hardware brand. Also? No smell. Not at all. You couldn’t even tell we’d just painted most of the house.

We are going to finish the second coat tonight and begin to put the rooms back together. Once I’m done with that I’ll post pictures. Art on my walls? Can’t wait! Before the walls were just too dark green to hold my art very well. There was too much weird contrast. Now? Can’t wait.

We have lived in this house for a year and a half and it has always felt almost finished but never complete in any room. All the rooms remain somewhat disorganized with no style, and nothing felt finished. We made the worst mistake a home buyer can make in that we painted all the rooms before we moved in. I hated most of the colors after we moved in and Ryan hated some of them (but is mostly indifferent to these sorts of things). So for a year and a half the house never felt complete. The olive green is still one of my favorite colors, but it made the dining room, hallway, entry way feel closed in and the artificial light turned the green a yellowy pea color. I never hung up any art, I never finished the rooms. I hated it. Now? I love it and it finally feels like home. It feels like a space I live in and not one I avoid. I can hang up my art, I can move some pieces into the room to finish it off. After a year and a half…it feels like us. I’m so in love.

-Sommer out

These are a few of my favorite things

There are some brilliant, intense people in this world, but while we live in an era where everyone is special and no one is special and there is plenty of money all around to support talent that is both mediocre, out of this world, and really, really shitty, few people really stand up and out. With so many voices, it is all too easy to be drowned out by the clamoring masses. Sure, places like YouTube have made it easier for the little known creative director to really show off and do experimental things, they are one in a zillion amongst crapcrapcrap. Who else would like the era of Everyone is Special and Everyone Wins to be over? Man, do you remember when poets were household names and writers of philosophy were widely read?

Thankfully there is brilliance at the end of the tunnel, if only you can wait it out that long. Most of it can be found right here in your internet home, cherished and blogged about to your heart’s content. I’ll tell you my favorites, how about yours?

1. Roadside Projects

I about peed my pants when I discovered this artist. Her name is Jayme McGowan and she’s absolutely irresistible. There is something about the faces of her creations that does it for me, not to mention how very much I like circus themed art. I’ve purchased three of her prints, three from her circus group (two are shown below)  and oh, how I want to own the fourth too. I can hardly wait till they show up. The originals, I have no doubt, are beyond beautiful. She creates in 3D paper, which is both very easy and very hard to pull off. The cutting out and gluing down of paper pieces is easy. The concept and execution is fundamentally difficult. That’s why I can’t say enough about artists like this. You can, literally, feel yourself climbing into them. How cool is that?

 

 

 

 

2. Abney Park

Steampunk. This is either a beloved subculture or one that is completely foreign in every sense of the word. Steampunk is a subculture that combines the romance of steam technology- think goggles, dirigibles, brass and oh, steam, with Victorian elegance and dreamy literary references. Military coats combined with long drawn Victorian dresses, tall hats adorned with cracked leather goggles. It is a world wholly its own in which many people trespass and carry on. There are many conventions, many fairs that tip its hat to this genre, and most Anime conventions and Comic Cons can be see filled with them. I love them something terrible. (Check out the book “Court of the Air” by Stephen Hunt for my current foray into the Steampunk genre)

Well it’s not just creative clothing and funny accents that gets us there. It is also music like Abney Park which is so very rich in texture, story and sound. And let’s not forget to mention how incredibly good looking their lead singer is. Particularly their newest CD, the songs are filled with the clicks and whistles of steam technology, rubbed with the velvety goodness of romantic, dark, foreboding vocals and delicious stringed instruments. I get a little warm just talking about them. They even have a track on the deliriously beautiful Mirrormaskmovie by Neil Gaiman.

3. Bitey Castle- Brackenwood Movies

Ooooh. I love this man. Adam Phillips is so brilliant I want take him home and devour him. I found Bitey Castle several years ago when he’d just started his film “Waterlollies” and honestly, I thought the man would never finish. But it’s done now and it’s fantastic. They are all fantastic. They are short flash movies and so worth the time.

“When you are engulfed in flames” you cannot write a proper thing

I do not like writing reviews of anything, and to be honest I’m not very good at it. When I do find something I want to share with others and hopefully encourage them to pick up too, I immediately receive a gut, irrational feeling that my encouragement of the product will not only keep people from picking it up, but will some how inspire those same people to believe I am a tasteless, culture-less, fraud. Most of the time, the objects of my affections are well worth checking out, but I always feel like I’ve done them more harm than good. The irony, of course, is that I spent two years being paid to write reviews for a newspaper twice a week. No, seriously.

I guess it has something to do with the words one must use to convey the product. Some people can do it flawlessly and not sound like a pretentious fool. I can’t, and I think most people can’t. There are very few acceptable ways to say “This thing is great, and you should check it out.” Using metaphors, similies, and anecdotes only makes us sound like jackasses. If one needs a thesaurus to write the review, and one needs a dictionary to understand it, you’re in trouble.

Getting to the point, I just closed the book, literally, on David Sedaris’ newest book “When You are Engulfed in Flames.” I bought it at the book signing recently in Omaha at a nice little book store called The Bookworm, which has a darling cafe inside it, but an alarmingly large romance section and a pitiful fantasy sci-fi section. My friend and I had seats near his podium, which was all well and good, but it felt like 120 degrees in the tiny store and I spent most of the time feeling like I was melting.

He read from the book, he read from his journals, he read a new story that will go in a new book soon enough. He was charming and tittery and very funny. He has one of the best reading voices I’ve ever heard. His stories are wonderful, but when he reads them they take on a life of their own.

I met him, briefly, so that he could sign my book. Our conversation was mostly inane, and I felt bad that he had to find a topic of a 2 minute conversation for all 300 of us. I couldn’t help but get the distinct impression, while he was reading and while he was signing, that he would much rather not have been doing either. That he would be quite content if we’d just by the book and go home. In the front of the book he signed it to my name, and drew a picture of what I suspect might be Abraham Lincoln, though it is impossible to be sure, with a word balloon saying “Franks are for winners!” which might sound absurd but at the time he had just been given a hot dog by a little servant girl though the line of people waiting to get signed was denying him the ability to eat it. I suppose that was less haunting than the girl before me who, from what I gathered was enjoying her birthday, and he offered her a gift. A condom, but only if she used it for “back door” fun. She promised. After she left, he asked me if I thought it would be used with the boy she was waiting with. I have to admit, I wasn’t prepared with a sharp enough answer and merely suggested that it could go either way.

The book circles around the topic of death slowly. The vignettes told always have something to do with death and dying, though very few are directly related to a special death or dealing with death or anything like that. And of course they are funny, which makes them nearly absurd as they circle the drain. I could say something writerly and clever like, “Like sipping a good martini with close friends while discussing the lack of merits of those not invited…” but I’ll just feel like a jackass and probably sound like one too. The book is great and it’s funny and worth reading. It does not feel like a memoir, it feels like fiction, though it is more like exaggerated non-fiction. It’s not too glib, and it is very pretentious and will make you feel better than everyone else too. He talks a lot about living in other countries, a lot about death, a lot about his companion Hugh. He talks about smoking and quitting, he talks about his Greek grandmother and passing gas and airline flights. He discusses drugs and drinking at length and yes, even manages to make addiction histerical. They all work together remakably well, and I can’t help but wondering if after so many memoir books, he’ll eventually run out of stories to tell because certainly a man cannot have so many grand adventures without eventually imploding or dying of an overdose.

So read it, won’t you? 

The art of Sedaris

I’m knee deep in Naked by David Sedaris and it’s possibly one of the most entertaining books I’ve ever read. It shocks me that anyone could have a life like he has had, but it shocks me more that anyone can write about their life as well as he does. One of the things about memoir and essay writing is there’s a big question of “Who bloody cares?” which is a valid question when it comes to spending any amount of time reading about other people’s lives. Are we really so interesting that anyone would be fanscinated to spend 200 pages with us? I doubt it, yet we’re just narcissitic enough to do it anyway. David Sedaris, on the other hand, is plenty interesting, almost to the point that it seems necessary to read about his life. We should all be so lucky to learn what he has.

I think part of it really is that he’s entertaining as hell. His chapter about the prositute that spends an evening just before Christmas with his family is so funny that I had to leave my desk at work to compose myself.

This book humbles me because I know I do not write like this and I believe that memoir is not widely read because it’s so god damned boring in most cases but if we could tell the story of our lives like David, we’d hook a nation. How many of us dread looking at other people’s pictures? Or hearing stories about other people’s vacations? Or even worse, hearing about other people’s dreams? It’s mindnumbing. It really is. And so are most memoirs. I’m sorry, I realize I’m a creative non-fiction writer, but most of it is boring. The number of writers that write their lives well is pretty small. I want to be a part of that group someday, but I don’t blind myself to think that I’m there yet.

So go read some Sedaris. Laugh hysterically, feel happy that it didn’t happen to you, wish that it had happened to you, enjoy some good writing.

Soon I will be invincible.

While on vacation I read a wonderful book called “Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman. If you love comic books and superheroes and super villains, this is such a good book for you to check out.

The first thing you should know is that in the world of “Soon I Will Be Invincible” is that superheroes and super villains and aliens and powers and fantastical beings are common. Every day. Normal. Big fights in major cities are tales to be told in the evening news, heroes have corporate sponsorship, villains get their starts in seedy places. The thing in a person that makes them a bad guy instead of a good buy is a disease, a psychological disorder that they can determine and treat. Some heroes are born that way, some fall victim to massive laboratory accidents, others to radioactivity, some to inter-breeding between aliens and humans, or by stumbling across a magical artifact that imbues powers in its owner.

There are two narrators: Doctor Impossible and Fatale. Doctor Impossible is the world’s most brilliant super villain. He’s getting old though, and at the beginning of the book he is breaking out of prison for the twelfth time. He comments, deadpanned, that once upon a time he was the premier genius, threatening to hurtle asteroids at the earth, fighting head to head with the worlds best super heroes, defying all that oppose him. Now, in prison, his biggest worry is whether or not there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser at lunch. Doctor Impossible is a wonderfully nefarious character.

Fatale is the newest member of the prime hero team The New Champions. She is a cyborg and not fitting in exactly well with the other heroes. There is Blackwolf (Batman like) who has no powers but is a gifted athlete, master tactician and high functioning autistic. Damsal, leader of the New Champions, Mister Mystic, Elphin, Rainbow Triumph, Faral, and so on. They are super heroes with super strength and super speed and invincibility, but also normal problems like being bulimic, or barely human. Fatale has a clock in her cyborg eye that won’t turn off and the people that made her have vanished so she can’t ask someone how to fix it. So the time is constantly blinking in her eyeball.

The story is about Doctor Impossible versus the New Champions, but it is also about the genre, and about the characters, and the stupid screwed up problems they get themselves into. It is clever, and funny as all hell. The writing is perfect. I highly recommend it.

The English Teacher by Lily King

“THAT SHE HAD NOT KILLED HIM IN HER SLEEP WAS STILL THE GREAT RELIEF OF EVERY MORNING.”

One of my biggest fears, when I pick up a book, is that it’s going to be one of those book that start slow and build into something fantastic. The reason I fear this is because my short attention span rarely allows me to go more than 30 pages of ho-hum writing to see what’s on the other side. That’s why when I finally got a chance to sit down and read Lily King’s “The English Teacher,” I groaned a little inside each of the first 30 pages.

The book starts slow, I can’t mince words. It’s Lily King Lite, gentle descriptions of two big characters and a brief buzzing around their head of what they are really thinking, which, by the way, is just a pin prick of truth developed later in the book. It’s almost like they are automatons at the beginning, thinking the thoughts that characters being introduced must think in order for a reader to get caught up on their life super-fast. Later, right around the magical page 30, their personalities actually start to manifest in their thoughts- creating a distinct crater between Beginning Protagonists and Plot Protagonists. This isn’t very good writing (or editing) in general, but I suspect more of an accident than a tell tale sign of the writer.

Once the awkwardness of the beginning is over and the characters are established and their internal monologues given voice and neurotic behaviors abound, the writing slides majestically into a kind of symbiotic rhythm. The fucked up mental issues and situations the characters put themselves in and the familiarity and disturbing similarities found between reader and character makes the book hard to read and hard to put down at the same time. Don’t mistake it- the characters in the book are not likable. At least, not all the time. They are sometimes wonderful, but often they think inappropriate thoughts and behave in inappropriate ways. Thoughts I have had. Thoughts any reader has had. Not typical thoughts given to protagonists. They are thoughts that, when we have them, we feel guilt and shame and never tell anyone, and if we know that others have these thoughts we feel discomfort and embarrassment for them and instantly create a division between Us and Them- The Thinkers of Inappropriate Thoughts.

The main character, Vida, has wild red curls that define her in my mind. I read and while I never really envisioned her face straight on, always a profile, if that, I imagined her hair in every scene. Sometimes she was me, and sometimes I was her, and while her problems were not necessarily my problems, our neuroses were not all that unfamiliar with one another.

I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone who loves reading and classics and the English language. These characters are so well developed and deep and unfortunate and they are paralleled by classic stories and poems, most notably Thomas Hardy’s work. Vida can’t deal with her own life head on, she has to worm her way in with characters and plots of books she knows better than her own world. I get that.

And if the story and characters weren’t enough, the writing is brilliant and beautiful. The writing adjusts subtly to the characters doing the thinking or speaking, giving another level to the characters. They don’t all share the same voice- the voice of the Author. They have their own words. Their own rhythms. I love that. Also? Vida’s rant about modernism in her classroom is priceless.

Go. Read. Love this book. Get past the first 30 pages and be unable to put the book down until midnight when you finish. That’s what I did.

Oooh-la-la-Lush!

I don’t usually write reviews on things that require a reader to spend money, but I’m going to make an exception and tell you about one of my new favorite websites and my absolute favorite new products. Because I like to help spread good in the world.

First, let me tell you about persuasive rhetoric. Advertisers are fantastic at what they do. They know what words to use, what trigger very specific responses in our thought process based on our culture and experience. They know which colors work best to push their products. Did you know that red and orange are hunger inducers? Watch to see how many food advertisements and commercials use these two colors. Ads that work best are the ones that work but make you think that you are purchasing something because you really want to. You’re being manipulated daily.

I’ve taken a lot of classes that work with these ideas. I’m fascinated by the manipulation of the human population. It works. You can’t fight it. I know how it works and that it exists and even how to do it, and I can’t fight it. Images are the most powerful for of persuasion ever.

So what works on me? Luxury bath products. It really doesn’t matter if a bath product is luxury or not, if it’s ad makes it seem like a luxury, I’m in. There’s something about turning my bathroom into a spa, with lotions, glitter, powder, pampering, and sparkly clean bath water that makes me go “aaaaaaah, I’ll take it!” It’s not a surprise that one of the biggest reasons I wanted the house we ended up buying was because it had a whirlpool tub in the bathroom. I want to feel pretty, pampered, and romanced.

I’m especially sold on organic, hand-made items. The idea that someone is slaving away somewhere in a studio to put together lip balm and bath additives to make me feel buttery smooth makes me weak in the knees. So when a friend of mine said “You’ve got to check this out” about a website that centers on luxurious pampering items, it wasn’t long before I was putting in my first order.

Lush is not a lovely secret, it just took me a long time to hear about it. Many large cities even have stores, but not mine. I have to shell out the money for shipping, but it’s so worth it. Their bath items are divine. Last night I dropped half a Butterball into my bath water and ooh-la-la. Even sick, the scent made me relax and the heat of the water helped make my congestion open up. The Butterball made my skin silk smooth and yummy. No lotion needed, one bath with the Butterball and a season of ashy skin is gone.

My other favorite item is Honey Trap, a lip balm that at first I didn’t think I’d like. The scent was super strong and the balm was too cold to use because it had been sitting on my frozen stoop all day. Once it warmed and I slipped it on, I was in love. It made my lips smooth and the harsh dryness that has been following them all winter disappeared.

Many of their bath bombs have hidden surprises, like making your bath water glittery, luxuriously pink or filled with rose petals. How delicious is that? I’m currently trying out their deodorant that they sent as a sample and so far? No stinky. We’ll see how long it lasts.

I love feeling girly and luxurious and Lushdoes it for me. I’ll end up sinking large portions of my pay check into their online shop, and you should too.

This is how you experiment on the world.

Even on the internet, everything is a popularity game. But designers and artists almost always win.  

Sometimes it seems like all great websites come to us from the ether of this slippery concept called: word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is uncontrollable, for the most part. Only a few people in the world have the know-how and face-currency to play the viral marketing campaign. Stupid people (or people being stupid) find fame on the internet this way. Sometimes eccentric and talented people do as well, but as a rule of thumb, the more ridiculous or obnoxious you are, the better chance you have of becoming internet-famous by word-of-mouth. Just ask the Jewish “Sexy” of “So you think you can dance?” fame.The reason that I am pointing this out is that I have stumbled across another fantastic design website and it got me thinking about how I find them (or any cool website for that matter). Usually it is by word-of-blog. Someone I like posts something I’d like and I I therefore spread the love by posting about it and thereby keep the chain going. Other times, someone I like posts something I might like where I discover a link to something that blows me away. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Today I’m introducing Coudal Partners  (http://www.coudal.com/) to the whirligig of word-of-blog chainlinking. I found them by crazy change: I was becoming frustrated by WordPress putting extra spaces between paragraphs that I absolutely detested as far as page design goes, so I went shopping on the WordPressForums for an answer. Another girl, whose blog seems to be abandoned or at least has become the product of a busy blog-owner, had a fun user pic that I liked. I clicked, and one of her two entries was about her participation on this website. I love how things like this happen. To the eye, this website more closely resembles the front page of a newspaper, with its serif fonts, headlines and subheads. It is easy, familiar, and pleasurable to read. There is a sense of active news happening right. here. and now.There is lots of information everywhere, which is both good and bad. It is good because you can navigate all over the place easily. It is bad because you can navigate all over the place too easily. I lost the home page within a few minutes of finding the site and had a hard time getting back. The “About” section is woefully inadequate considering how much information is tied into this site and how many side projects the site is involved with. Who are these people and what do they do? Bloody hell if I know. But what I can find is pretty awesome.The writing is grand. Not too glittery or adjective heavy, not too dependant on sounding hip and edgy. The news pieces are to the point but interesting and full of personal voice. But this is not a writing site, it’s a design and art site that dabbles in, oh, just about everything. They seem to rely heavily on active participation by artists from everywhere, which leads into their current title project, Layer Tennis.

Layer Tennisis an art project where two people volley a piece of design work (most probably done in Adobe Photoshop) back and forth adding their own flare each time. It is a match over who can best the other artist at being the Most Awesome. I can’t even imagine participating in one of these matches because to be honest, they blow me out of the water. I’d be embarrassed to show my face anywhere near these guys. Do you think you have what it takes?

Another excellent section of this site is their Museum of Online Museums. There are featured online exhibits that are really neat and might be missed if not compiled here. My favorite is the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies  because I remember using some of these art supplies in elementary school. The MoFAS rushes me back to tiny, noisy metal desk with flip top access where I’d rub Elmer’s glue on my fingers and peel my fingerprints off or get high on the Rubber Cement. It is when my second grade art teacher scolded me for not putting perspective on my self-portrait’s hair at a time when I couldn’t even spell “perspective.” Rubber cement? Check. Old boxy Apple computer? Check? Bendy metal ruler that breaks skin when used as a weapon? Check and check.

The Payphone Project (of Nebraska) is cool because, I, well, live there.  The Gallery of Girls in 60’s Car Ads is also a fabulous blast from the past. I love how beautiful those women are. Curvy too!

The Swap Meat is a part of their site that shows off some of the crazy stuff fans have sent them. I love how the people who work for Coudal Partners really put their own personality into their work and it’s not just the good stuff that makes sites sell. Another section, Verse By Voice is a project where they had people read poetry on their answering machine while Field-Tested Books is a sort of year in review of books, though that appears to not have been updated since 2006? It’s a little hard to tell. I really love the site and really hate it for its serious navigational short comings and the ease at which one can get lost and be unable to scratch your way out.

Finally, I always like to clip a bit from a site’s “About” section that defines a website’s purpose from the mind of the creators. It’s important to know what their goal is and know if they lived up to their promise (or went in a different direction and seriously need to update something, somewhere). This is what they have to say about themselves:

“The idea is to showcase the agency’s abilities, provide a forum for creativity and experimentation in writing, design and commerce and to test new technologies and tools. The site requires modern browsers, with all the usual plug-ins. We use Safari and Firefox.”

It is short and to the point, which I like. But there is such a thing as being too short and too to the point. I feel like this doesn’t quite cover all the crazy-ass (that’s a professional use of “crazy-ass” right there) stuff they are creating and experimenting with. There are 16 different sections of the site in the only vaguely permanent navigational feature (it disappears on some pages). There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of other things they’ve done, things they’d like you to know they’ve done, and things they want everyone to know they set in motion. Two sentences does not do them justice. They really do provide a place for creativity and experimentation and they are doing wild, wild stuff here. Like I said, woefully inadequate “About” section. Woefully.

Nevertheless, I have to hand it to them. This site makes me feel creativity down to my toes. It makes me want to try out my own limitations and experiment with breaking them. I am inspired and I could waste (or kill) days of my life exploring this site. I could potentially be undone by this site’s possibilities because how can I work on my own creations if I am wasting away locked in the labyrinth of theirs?

“Losing my helvetica” has never felt so good

Because this blog isn’t just about how awesome I am, I think it’s high time I told you about how awesome someone else is. For a change. My husband will be proud that I can be selfless. Well, once in a while.

I stumbled on Strange Attractors Design a while back but I had a hard time getting through the site. It’s sort of like going to an internet rave, all that’s lacking is bad poppy-thumpy X-addled music. Wherever your mouse touches, colored graphics appear shooting in a half dozen different directions, getting bigger and noisier as they go. I suspect that Andy Warhol would have been proud.

The site itself makes me feel like I have motion sickness (which I don’t) but I can’t get past the fact that it sure feels edgy. I half expect there to be a button that says “Buy Party Drugs Here” or at least sport some high fashion, heroin chic models lounging around the “About” button. I hate the constant movement and overlapping colors, the extended menu often covers the graphics I’m trying to see, and I find that it sometimes crosses over edgy into absurd and back again one too many times. That being said, once I get passed the sensation that I’m tripping out, the designs this company is producing are startlingly fabulous.

I am giddy over this design, probably because it plays on fonts and a bit of tongue in cheek wink toward another fun subject. A lot of their designs look like this, very young, hip, and graphical. There is a tangible quality to all of their designs that literally feels like it jumps off the page (and into your heart, awe) and I like that. They hail from New York and the Netherlands, so I can’t be too surprised by how the designs make me feel. They seem to be the kind of company that Urban Outfitters would rip off. I am a little surprised by the discomfort that the website induces in its viewers, which I would assume would turn potential customers off, but hey, maybe it works for their clientele.

Here’s one more jab at them that I can’t help, being that my expertise is in writing and not design: Their “Studio Info” is just too much. Someone had a lot of fun with their thesaurus, but instead of successfully turning us on with words, it makes me cringe a little. Like someone who uses the “facetious” or “touche” as often as possible to prove how well spoken and academic they really are. The truth is, they don’t need to weave extra fun words together to sound hip and visually inspiring, their work speaks for itself!

“Our work acts as a bridge, giving form, representation and physical tactility to the tangible, conceptual, digital and ephemeral. Craft, calligraphy, ornament and abundance in concert with technology, history, theory and criticism comprise the common tools we utilize to reach this goal.”

Ouch. The lists just go on and on and on and on, don’t they? This may sound like smooth alternative magazine talk, but honestly it doesn’t really say anything useful about their artwork. People get lost in lists, use them sparingly. Adjectives are the friend that will offer you wine after spiking it with arsenic if you’re not careful.

One of my favorite designs is that of Little Yellow Writing Hood, a short film for ‘FiFFteen’ an exhibition for FSI FontShop International. It is a story about fonts, comprised of 300 fonts, and its a visually orgiastic fontapalooza (love).  An expert from their website describes it fiercely:

“When Mom sends Little Yellow Writing Hood away to surprise her busy Grandmother with a pen, a little pot of ink and a new python script, a wolf tricks the innocent girl into taking a roundabout way. Little Yellow Writing Hood finally arrives at the foundry and realizes that her Grandmother’s pixels seem a lot bigger than she remembered…”

Oh pleasure! Oh rapture! Now that’s fine writing, right there. If you have problems with seizures, I would stay away, but otherwise check out what else these people are capable of!