An Evening in Provence Art Sale Preview Tonight 5:30 to 7:30 @ Southwest School of Art & Craft. Featuring brand new work from artist Henry Stein, Gary Sweeney, Chuck Ramirez, César A. Martinez, Cynthia Myers among a host of other great artists + one of my latest speaker pieces, above, Tread Water 061.
I'm excited and honored to be included with such amazingly talented folks - hope you can make it - it's early and free!
Sad news. Mr. William Safire died at a hospice in Rockville, Md. this morning. He was 79.
My first real introduction to the New York Times was William Safire's On Language column during my senior year at Madison High School in San Antonio. Our teacher, Mr. Bob Richmond, sent me to the office one morning with a progress report stating that I was the master of the double entandre.
Huh?
After looking the meaning up in the dictionary I talked to Mr. Richmond about how I'd always been facinated by lyrics with double meanings, slang and word origins. That's when he pointed me to the New York Times and Mr. Safire's column.
After reading today's NYT article I was suprised to learn that even though William Safire was a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who also wrote novels, books on politics and articles on language, he was also a college dropout.
The iPhone browsing experience is quite different than the regular browsing experience. The buttons and hyperlinks have to be bigger because our fingers are not as sharp as the mouse pointer. Optimizing a website for iPhone is not rocket science. It’s the same HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you already know. The only real major difference is the screen size.
Smashing Magazine is featuring a nice showcase of websites specifically optimized for iPhone. You'll also find some useful tools and tips to help you optimize your website for the iPhone.
iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s a perfect tool to see how your web creations will look on iPhone.
Excellent use of type on this packaging for Terrazzo Prosecco, from the Veneto region of Italy, imported by Monarchia Matt
Check out more recent and excellent work from New York-based graphic design firm Louise Fili Ltd, one of my absolute favorite designers specializing in food packaging, restaurant identities, logos, and book design.
La Charcuterie is a Vancouver deli/restaurant hybrid known for serving up sandwiches filled with awesome deli meats. To play off this, business cards were created to look like cold cuts then were strung in netting similar to the way salami’s and other cured meats are hung in delis.
Rethink also printed meat stickers for the letterhead and envelopes made of butcher paper - the same paper they wrap their sandwiches in.
Smart stuff with an awesome execution - can't wait to visit this place and get my hands on both some samples of the new branding as well as a one of those sandwhiches!
Check out the rest of New Zealand illustrator and designer Toby Morris's daily drawings on his life in Amsterdam. I really dig his man on the street perspective of everyday life in one of the world's most amazing cities.
He does these when he's not designing gig posters, eating cheese and drinking beer in sunny Amsterdam.
Good stuff, rock on Toby and thanks for making me laugh!
Ok, my laptop is officially dead and I am officially behind and will probably remain so for the next few days while I scramble to get back up to speed. Fortunatley I knew this was coming and I have everything backed up! It was, afterall, an almost 7 year old iBook G4 that's literally been around the world and survived two, count'em, two motherboard transplants.
When was the last time you backed up all your important stuff? Do yourself a favor, save some time, frustration and money and do it now!
Speaking of time...
Successful time management can be challenging, especially to those who are new to freelancing or being self-employed.
When you have a boss telling you what to do and when to do it by, it’s much easier to prioritize and figure out what needs to be done and when. But when you’re not only dealing with client deadlines but also all of the day-to-day parts of running a business, on top of trying to maintain some sort of life outside of work, time management gets a whole lot trickier.
The smart folks at Smashing Magazine are sharing sixteen tips to help you better manage your time and find the time to participate in the things that are important to you. Also included are some further resources to improve your time management.
The vintage Z560M Nixie tubes, used in former East-Germany in the mid 20th century as numeric displays, were the inspiration for the design of Daniel Kurth's Nixie Concrete.
The Luxembourgish designer enclosed the shiny orange Nixie tubes in a reinforced rough concrete body which can optionally be wall mounted. The strength of this design lies in the application of 'retro technology' and its interesting combination of components and materials, where one is easily fooled as to what is old and what is new. All electronic components in this fully functioning prototype are assembled by hand.
Unlike other clocks that make use of Nixie tubes, this one does not read like a traditional display. Kurth experienced that clocks - regardless of their esthetic value - sometimes form a disturbing factor in one's house, since being constantly reminded of the time can be stressful. By rearranging the display, one can enjoy the playful interaction between the 6 different tubes without realising straight away what time it is. A short focus will however allow you to use it as a 'normal' clock. The time in the picture reads 10:23:54.
SPIN Magazine has a sweet little list of The 100 Greatest Bands You've (Probably) Never Heard and they totally nailed it with the closest thing Taco Land ever had to a house band with San Antonio's answer to the cement city Beach Boys, the mighty Big Drag!
Directly from SPIN:
BAND NAME: Big Drag A trio from San Antonio who embodied neighboring Austin’s slacker ethos to a fault, the band melded the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fuzz and the Ramones’ three chords to sunny surf pop to create three-minute koans in the early 90s. Making believers of Yo La Tengo when they rolled through town, YLT appropriated Big Drag’s cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” (right down to the one-note guitar solo) for their own I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.
To be continued...
For the complete list of 100 artists, check out the August 2009 issue of SPIN.
Do what you gotta do to do what you wanna do. We all gotta work.
The above video features reasons 1-25 as to why I could never and will never work in a corporate environment. With all it's challenges and against all odds of ever being rich, whatever the hell that means, I truly love the freedom of working from home. And it's a good thing that I've always liked PBJ's and grilled cheese!
Sure, we all have our Monday mornings regardless of where or what you do to keep your lights on and days that never seem to end due to something technical, mechanical, unforeseen or having to do with dealing with clueless idiots that just can't quite grasp this thing we call communication and never miss an opportunity to drop the ball at the worst possible moment.
The above is my version of Hell. Not because of the fact that all this poor guy wanted to do was print out a copy of the page on his screen. As we all know too well - technology can be totally frustrating at times. The Hell to me is the opening shot. From the sterile, energy sucking bland white wall Orwelian environment, complete with fluorescent lighting and 24-7 cameras monitoring your every move to the cubicles, recycled air, unhappy coworkers, battling lame radio stations, gossip, nebulous deadlines, egos, upper management hacks, time sucker meetings, politics, bad coffee, long pants, ties... Ahhhhhhhh! That's right, Hell!
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among women, and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen
I am feeling so lucky and blessed to be doing what I'm doing and where I am doing it right now. For anyone still stuck, remember, there are options.
Sure, the cubicle you spend 40-50 hours a week in means financial security, but really, how secure is anyone's job/career/life right now? Once you do the math - adding in your commute time, you begin to realize that out of the 5 days or 120 hours that makeup our ridiculously wasteful 5 day work week that you are in fact spending at least 65 of those hours (2.7 days!) every week doing something, being somewhere or spending time with people you pretty much dread!
If you like what you're getting, keep doing what you're doing, if you don't like what you're doing....
There's never been a better time to reevaluate everything, that's right, everything right now and follow one of your long forgotten dreams. Make a plan, including some hard cold sacrifices and take the first step to taking some serious control over your life - you can do it and trite as it may sound - Life really is too short to be anywhere that makes you unhappy.
Anyway... Don't forget to fill out your time sheet!
Very cool idea from Esty shop Nothing Elegant. I'm really digging this way cool ephemeral looking masking tape made from traditional Japanese "washi" paper.
This unique multi-use masking tape looks flat-out gorgeous. Ideal for color coding, labeling, school and art projects.
I love stencil fonts, always have. And according to Steven Heller, one of my favorite design gurus, stencil lettering never really went out of fashion, yet it’s coming back in style.
In the same way that booming martial rhythms have been incorporated into classical and popular music, stencil-lettering style has long influenced sophisticated typography and graphic design.
The top logo is something I did back in 2001 for the Sabas Trio featuring my friends Joe Reyes, Greg Norris and Mark Rubinstein. The District 9 poster is by Ignition Print and below is the poster and GUI for the iPhone app I did for the Rackspace Cloud Lounge Party. This was in collaboration with the wicked smart and cool folks at 2 Pixels + GetApp for SWSW this past March, 2009.
Learn more about stencil fonts from Mr. Heller's latest design article for the New York Times: Stencil It In.
That's Right,
HMK
Steven Heller, a former art director at The New York Times, is a co-chair of the M.F.A. Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and a blogger and author.
Finally! Searching through the 50,000 + apps in the iTunes app store is much easier when you’re not using the iTunes app store.
Freshly launched today, uquery.com aims to be what iLounge is to the iPod and serve as the Go-To site when it comes to safely and effectively guiding you through the deep, dense dark jungle of the app discovery process.
The site uses its own system of algorithms called “AppRank” to make it easy and fast to find the right app for certain tasks. Search results appear in a easy to navigate center column along with options to refine your search.
With a couple of apps in development I'm apt to visit uquery.com quite often.
I love Dutch design! Kubikids is an inflatable, square bath tub for children. It works by placing it in the shower stall, and then filling it with air, water and children, in that order.
It’s not uncommon for tiny Dutch apartments to lack a bathtub, in which case this device could add a luxury to an otherwise cramped place for at least part of the family.
The Wine Stele, available exclusively from Design Spray of Germany, is a minimalistic wine rack with a capacity to hold up to 18 bottles; that’s equivalent to three cases, which the slender column can pack into a really tight space.
Howdy, my name is H. Michael Karshis, first son of Henry & Mildred and the oldest of six boys. Yes, my mom was a stay at home Saint. My dad retired from Randolph AFB in 1976 as a Chief Master Sergeant in the Air Force Chaplains Division. I was born in the U.K., educated in both Beantowns - San Antonio and Boston. I am a Creative Gun For Hire currently living the good life in beautiful San Antonio, Texas. But enough about me. Check out my
work and the blogs and you'll get a pretty good idea about what gets me out of bed in the morning...
Peace and thanks for looking.
hmk@sharkthang.com
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