The Hot Hatch Cometh

Well, in approximately 2 months it'll cometh. I'll let the *boy fill in the details but here are the pictures of our 4-Door, Carbon Gray Steel, VW GTI DSG w/ Tiptronic Transmission (that's fancy talk for automatic).












It has tartan plaid seats and red accent stitching on the wheel — my favorite part.

Jobs on Taste

Taste is one of those intangibles that design school ignores or likes to corner with style because while taste is something that you have to learn and continue to study and evolve, it is not something that can be taught and relies heavily on intuition and ego. You either have it or you don't.

...In his Palo Alto home years ago, he said that he preferred uncluttered, spare interiors and then explained the elegant craftsmanship of the simple wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, the 20th-century furniture designer and father of the American craft movement.
Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

Via NYTimes

Everything In Its Place

michael johansson

All We Need is Love (and Nice Type)

In these discouraging days of war, strife, and struggle — both near and far — it is so wonderful to see an American city embracing love. Imagine what a world it would be if we only considered loving one another first.

This stunning, hand-painted typographic mural series is titled "Love Letter" and encompasses 50 building walls across several dozens blocks in Philadelphia — all visible from the elevated mass transit train. Much more on A Love Letter for You.

Spatial Effects

Ghost Stories by Nendo at MAD

5mm circular stickers...

For the Love of Crayons

All crayons are hand cast by the artist, Christian Faur, creating custom colors to achieve these inconceivable gradations. Lovely.

From the artist:
My earliest memories of making art involve the use of wax crayons. I can still remember the pleasure of opening a new box of crayons: the distinct smell of the wax, the beautifully colored tips, everything still perfect and unused. Using the first crayon from a new box always gave me a slight pain. Through a novel technique that I have developed, I again find myself working with the familiar form of the crayon.

Because of the three-dimensional nature of the crayons, the individual surface images appear to change form as one moves about the gallery space. The images completely disappear when viewed from close up, allowing one to read the horizontally sequenced crayon text and to take in the beautifully colored crayon tips -- all the while being reminded of that first box of crayons.

My Husband, The Architect

The worlds of graphic design and architecture have so many delightful tangents that make my relationship with *boy's career — and his with mine — infinitely interesting. We speak the same language but work on completely different scales and schedules, allowing each of us a unique perspective on the other's work. Usually this dialogue consists of process issues as we each navigate the waters of making design manifest. However, this past week has been full of completions.

My projects begin, live, and end in the span of half a breath compared to *boy's work. As I assembled my portfolio last week and surveyed my completed projects from the last 2 years — over a dozen — the one project *boy has been working on since before we even met was finally drawing close to the finish line. In a way I feel like I've been on this years-long journey with him, remembering looking over his shoulder at a sketch-up model, a design in the making...

The first completed photos from the Hershey Cancer Center at Penn State: