Shaun Kardinal embroiders everything from vintage postcards to books. I alway love looking through vintage postcards but i’ve never really done anything with them besides put them away in a box, glad someone is getting a little creative and reworking them into something that isn’t a cut up collage for the first time in the 21st century.
Roland Sands and BMW Motorad recently teamed up to re-imagine the original BMW R90S It’s a near perfect marriage of old styling, modern engineering and hand made craftsmanship. It combines custom work (like a hand hammered fairing and many other custom parts) and years of larger scale motorcycle engineering, the result is a modern race bike that looks AND performs. It’s so good to see a resurgence of classic motorcycle styling amongst modern day motorcycles.
With my love for trees and my love for prints I think Bryan Nash Gill’s Woodcuts are the perfect marriage. I love the complete organic nature of his prints. Be sure and check out the video as well, as it shows some of his process.
I recently acquired some concrete art form Concrete Cat. They keep impressing me with the things they are doing in concrete. From a clock collaboration with Furni to Matt Heide’s Concrete Tactile Painting to larger furniture and counter tops. I love seeing an artist evolve with their craft as they push the limits of its intended purpose.
I just recently finished a five day intensive Typography course called Crafting Type. My head is still spinning a little from being so immersed into the realm of type design and fonts. I was surprised at after learning a few techniques for sketching and drawing how quick it was to get some decent ideas down on paper. I highly recommend the course if you ever get the chance to take it.
The course was led by Dave Crossland with Eben Sorkin and Octavio Pardo. Dave is a firm believer in “Libre Software” (free software) and is now creating Libre fonts. He is currently working as ‘Font Consultant’ to the Google Web Fonts project and has contributed many fonts to it. He also is a large contributor to FontForge and set each of us up with his own customized version to design our fonts.
The interesting part (that I didn’t realize) about Libre fonts is you are free to edit them and improve or make variations of them, providing you contribute them back into the Libre community. This is completely opposite of the current commercial type model (philosophically and financially). It was an eyeopener for me into the possibilities of this movement.
As web designer having fonts that I can use freely in my designs (on the web) is huge. Thinking back even a couple years, it was almost an impossibility due to Licensing. Some might argue that with the free fonts there is less “quality control” and a model more like Typekit is a better solution (both for users and font designers). Either way with a player as big as google building its free font library its exciting for me to see the flood gates on type and type creation opening up, even just a little bit.
Never thought I would ever really be fascinated by moss…but somehow that all changed as soon as I came across Mosser.
Mosser is a small glass terrarium filled with a simple round moss ball crafted by NY based designers Jennica Johnstone and Noah Atkinson, who I found out by speaking with them, personally cultivate, jar, label, package, and ship all units individually. They are very easy to care for and only need to be sprayed once every two weeks with filtered water.
Here are a few words and images Jennica and Noah were kind enough to share with us about Mosser, how it was conceived, what goes in to producing each unit, and a few ideas we can hopefully expect to see in a near future:
Mosser is about capturing simplicity and and keeping it alive in ones space. We recognize the need to have something natural at your fingers tips in this day and age.
The project had a very natural and unplanned start, one day we just decided to make a terrarium and not much has changed since that first one. There was no point in the beginning were we thought that we would end up creating a brand and selling these things.
Keeping it simple is key. Let the moss shine, it is such an intriguing plant. Its one of the oldest plants on earth and it can tolerate so many elements, yet it is rootless.
For the future, we would hope to have different customized containers to hold the moss, maybe a wooden base with a glass lid or a rectangular glass container.
Jennica and Noah have also launched a new project by the name of Co/Labs which intends to bring the design community together in many different ways.
Many of us artists/designers/musicians love dreaming about our ideas becoming a physical piece that you can hold, touch, gift or make available for others to have. I really appreciate the printers, warehouses and studios that have to deal with our minds and files. So here’s to CutLaserCut, a well branded youthful laser cutting company that I dream of using someday soon, check out their Flickr and keep these physical type of companies close, I hope to see more creative uses of what they offer in the future and thats up to us.
I’m always looking for new eyeglass frames, I think people think they’re usually too expensive to be replacing often but if you dig around the internet there are soo many quality choices. Recently i’ve been checking out the rounder Warby Parker frames that seem to be all around $95, which is a steal. Any others you guys like? besides Oliver Peoples ;)