New Babies

As you may already know, Jenna and I brought home a new baby into our home recently. Finnegan is a Bichon/Sheltie cross, and we love him, even when he's being crazy. He starts puppy school tonight, and he can already sit, fetch, and shake a paw, so I've got high hopes for being able to teach him even more.
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At work, my new baby is the aforementioned Art, Design & Architecture series. I've been wanting to put together something like this for awhile, and after the success of the Draplin talk I organized, John finally caved to it. I can't wait for it, 'cause it's all documentaries I'm dying to see. Lets hope other people are too, and it all turns out alright.

Most exciting to me of all is the film I'm presenting myself, Just Like Being There. As a gigposter designer myself, it was a natural fit for me to take it on. So, if you only make it out to one of the screenings, go to that one. But if you can, make it out to all of them, and buy a series pass, so your tickets are cheaper, 'cause all seats are $10 for these, whether you're a member or not.
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In the world of BRFC, I'm working on moving into paper goods. First up are these Hello Dolly postcards. Thanks to my good friend Celene, who asked me to do some sort of Dolly art for her, these postcards are now on sale at Dots & Loops in Lunenburg, and White Elephant in Hamilton. And, of course, from me at the next Stitch 'n' Kitsch.

The plan is for this to just be a start. Greeting cards should be coming soon. But it turns out a puppy eats up a lot of time, so there may be some delays...
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There also some new freelance babies that I should be able to share soon. Not sure what the clients' plans are, so I'll hold them back until I know what's up. I've been doing some work that I'm pretty happy with and proud of.

Busy times = no blog posts, but I wanted to update to say hi to anyone coming by from The Wall: Inside the Poster Studio's Facebook page. I couldn't be more honoured that Tom asked to feature me in both of the books he has put out recently. To look at the list of poster artists appearing in each one, and to see Bearface in there? It's a crazy feeling.

If you're interested in the work I've been doing lately, I've been keeping my Flickr account decently updated, and I've been updating my Dribbble too.

Some logo projects in the works right now, and an Art, Design & Architecture film series at the Original Princess is in the works too.

If I were to give out awards for favourite movie poster of the year, you can be pretty sure that the poster for A Serious Man would be right up there near number one. The tones are really, really nice. It's just a nice, subtle poster. I hope the movie is good. I'm going to try to get out to see it here at the Twin. Opens tomorrow!
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Blog worlds collide today! A Continuous Lean gets featured on High Snobiety!? I guess this is pretty much the most street wear-ish item I've seen featured on or come from ACL, but it still struck me as pretty crazy. Do I want the ACL hat? Yes I do. Do I want to pay $60 for it? No I don't.

You gotta love ACL though. I haven't had time to fully browse his shop, but things seem to keep popping up on there. Not that I can afford any of it, but you know. Also, if you do love ACL, I recently started reading Kaufman Mercantile, which I would say share's some of ACL's ideologies. Here's their tagline: Many products move from factory to garbage dump with little time in between. Poor design, low quality materials and bad food infiltrate our lives. Let's enjoy the good things instead.

Being discussed over there today? Kitchen towels. Good stuff. From our cute Orla Kiely for Target ones, to this classic that I'm always tempted by at Ikea, I do love a good dishtowel.
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Speaking of things featured on High Snobiety, this shirt is a bit of a burn. I appreciate the message, and the execution, but definitely not a message I could get behind wearing.
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Speaking of wearing, I don't wear any manly scents, but every once in a while I think maybe I should, or I see a product that makes me say 'hey, if I were going to wear a scent, that sounds like the one for me'. Vintage Black from Kenneth Cole is a case of the latter. The name alone is great, and the vaguely ink bottle look and the simple, bold label pull me in further. The scent description "top notes of fresh green lime with a dry oakwood to create an icy tequila accord" minus the tequila reference, sounds pretty okay too.
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HA!

These pictures are from this great NY Times post Marc mentioned the other day. (Though I actually ended up finding it on my own, and realising it was what he was talking about...)
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Skipped taco's this week for various reasons, but got some work done on the Starlight's New Year's poster. Sending an early vers. to Shane now to see what he thinks, since he is DJ'ing the night and all. Want to get it done by Dec. 1, which is surprisingly close!

If all goes to plan, next week we'll have a main floor bathroom and 2 new closets! So close to getting to take 'after' pictures to go with the 'before's.
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Penny Farthings! Somehow the possibility of this never occurred to me before, but here's a company that makes classic Penny Farthings (and some awesome other stuff). And here's a modern Penny Farthing. I'm sure there are more companies that make each, but I was just excited to realize that these exist. Old timey. Neat stuff.
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Speaking of old timey neat stuff, I may have mentioned this before but, I love the fixtures and shades made by Schoolhouse Electric. So nice. But too expensive! I'm not sure if I like the new 'artist series' ones, but the classic looking painted ones are a nice touch.
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McSweeney's Internet Tendency started running a feature recently called Flip: A Column About Skateboarding. Not surprisingly from a literary based website, it features more grown up discussions about skateboarding. I just started reading this article, and before I even finished it, decided I should share: Ed Templeton: Professional Skateboarder/Atheist.

While I'm not necessarily an atheist, he did hit part of my beliefs right on the nose here:
"My belief system is that I believe you can do good things, and reach out to people and have morals and God can have nothing to do with that."

I also like how he says that he feels atheism shouldn't be in the closet, and that he's being more outgoing about it, which is something I've been struggling with some lately. I keep wondering why I feel bad about putting my beliefs out there when someone who has strong religious beliefs likely would not, and being annoyed by my fear of offending people by publicly not believing. I accept that both believing and not believing are entirely valid opinions, and even if I didn't, I feel most believers would have no fear of offending me by publicly declaring belief, I'm afraid of their backlash to my own non-beliefs.

How's that for a topic that came out of my reading a discussion about skateboarders/skateboarding? Only from McSweeny's.

(Speaking of Templeton, if my aforementioned attempt to get Objectified to show at the Princess works out, we may also feature this awesome looking doc. that Templeton is a part of, and which I've been dying to see.)
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Finally, if you loved that bear shirt I posted about as much as I did, there's a reprint coming, so keep an eye out here. (I emailed them before and it turned out they had one extra XL, so mine's already on its way!) No wearing it at the same time as me though!

Getting Back to Normal

Jenna sent me a link to an US Weekly slide show of pictures of celebrities on Sesame Street (if you didn't know, I love Jim Henson). She originally sent me to this Jonah Hill one, which is awesome, but I just love Bert's expression in the picture above. He looks so shocked and honoured to have Brian Williams interviewing him about his bottle cap collection.

I wish there was a way to just see the celebrity appearances on Sesame Street. There's just something about when you surround a celebrity with puppets. It's always interesting to see how their interaction works, and it can be so cute! Like when Feist was on!
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Been a busy week, with lots of work at work, as we printed the film guide this week, and then some poster and ad making at home when I was not at work. But I'm starting to feel back to normal, so I should be back to regular posting. I've barely kept up with my blog reading, let alone my posting! By the way, if you ever feel like seeing what I do at work, just pick up a Princess Cinemas film guide, or check out posters I've made here.
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This here's a pretty great shopping bag. It's a great idea to create one with an attached pouch, for sure. And the grenade styling, well, I do enjoy that!
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There's been a lot of stuff going around lately about sweet business cards, and I'm sure I'll post one later, but this one for a divorce lawyer is so clever! Of course, the pertinent details are on both sides too, so each soon to be ex can have their own copy.
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The Canadian Design Resource is an excellent blog to check out for fine examples of Canadian design smarts, like that card above. It can really make a fella proud to be a Canadian.
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Been meaning to post this one for a bit: A robot that is controlled by living brain tissue! Crazy!
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Plans for this year's DIY Not? zine fair are well under way. I need to get a poster done by the end of the weekend, and the event itself is on October 25 & 26. Should be a good time. My goal for it (aside from showing people how to do cheap and easy "screenprinting") is to set up a screening of Beautiful Losers at the Twin on the Sunday evening. That would make me real happy.

"His memory's admissible as evidence"

Apparently they've printed a new 35mm copy of RoboCop. I tried to convince John that it would be a good idea to run it, but I'm pretty sure I'll get back to work down there and see that it is not on the calendar. I had no idea that there was a new one in the works, to be directed by Darren Aronofsky... Interesting
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We do have Wall•E on calendar at the Orig for a few days though, which is a great idea. I haven't really talked about it, but I think Wall•E, and it's subsequent, not beating you over the head, but being being very artistic and clever marketing and aftermarket campaigns is awesome. This review of it is pretty much bang on to how I feel about the film itself, and I used a pared down version of it in the quide, to try to attract the crowd I think we should try to attract. As to the marketing/aftermarket campaigns, check out these promo post cards, and this book. Oh, and this Little Golden Book, done, more or less, in Little Golden Book style too!
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Society in Decline - Awesome roadside signage on flickr (via Draplin)
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Katamari baby! (via Northern Nests)
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EA Sports responds to YouTube video about glitch in Tiger Woods game with: YouTube video with Tiger Woods? Awesome. (Via Mike Reed [whose Mailer came today, which I have to say, is awesome])
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Turntable watch.
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I should probably get down to work now...

Today was Marc & Celene's "baby fiesta." That's the poster I made for it up above. Definitely an enjoyable time. Celene's mom got me to dump a big pail of ice water on Marc. I ended up bonking him on the head too though, resulting in a playful scolding from Marc's mom.
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Managed to squeeze in the viewing of a couple of doc's this weekend.
The Tri-City Roller Girls are hosting a special screening of Hell on Wheels at the Twin this Thursday, but the dvd came in on Friday, so I borrowed it to run a "test screening." Good movie. Interesting stuff about the rebirth of the roller derby. Gotta love the Texans for that (amongst other things). The derby seems to be a great thing for a lot of the girls who play it, and you can't go wrong with that.
Yesterday and today I watched Punk's Not Dead, which was pretty good too. It never really judges about just what punk is or is not these days. Some people in it do, but the film seems to give respect to what the newer bands are doing.
2 films in one weekend! a far better showing than the 3 weeks or so it took me to get through Crumb. Which was not because it wasn't good, but moreso that I just didn't seem to have the time to really sit down with it, or when I tried to, I was too tired. The movie is really interesting in that it almost becomes more so about the mental states of his two brothers than about Robert Crumb himself.
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Might have to buy this one. Jenna found it. I already own basically the same model in black, but it doesn't have the clip, or the staple remover. Looks real nice in green too. I think I paid $.50 for the one I currently have 'cause it was jammed when I found it at ValueVillage and I convinced them it was broken. Love the fact that it locks shut for travelling. Clever.
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Finally did some planning for our New England trip. Gotta make sure I can get the days off. Oh, and finish planning. And book some rooms.
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Seems to be some pretty great ingenuity behind this bike is pretty sweet. Solar panel wheels, genius. (via The Canadian Design Resource)
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Well, I was hoping for daily on this, but I missed two. Still better than my livejournal has been for a long time...

Oh, taco tuesday. Both renowned and reviled as "my favourite day of the week." Looks like a great day out for patio sitting and beer sipping though. And what day isn't a good day for tacos?

<< This, of course, is a costume that I think I need, or at least to make my own variation on. Marc and I discussed a whole set: Taco, ramekin of sour cream, ramekin of salsa, bottle of hot sauce. That would be awesome.
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Here's a movie I've got to tell John to try and get. That's if/when it gets Canadian theatrical distribution. Great collection of artists in that one. The trailer's on the main page, so be sure to check it out. (via Wooster Collective)
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Jenna had a good point last night, I totally have to stop looking at t-shirts on the internet that I could totally make myself, and get back into totally making t-shirts myself. It's not even that I don't have the ideas, it's just the straight laziness and not wanting to do more work when I'm done work. That's something I need to work on...
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This is a pretty great shirt from Threadless that I could not make myself, and wouldn't mind owning though.
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And finally, a big thanks to AceJet170 for talking about Mike Reed yesterday. A quick glance through Mr. Reed's site, and particularly his miscellany resulted in seeing a ton of cool stuff. Like this, which describes how a Large Hadron Collider works via hip hop. And he's super nice too! Apparently there will soon be one of these in the mail for me. Looking forward to getting that one, and you can believe you'll hear about it when I do.