So I took a week off, and I fully intended to post numerous times during it, but then I mostly ended up ignoring my computer completely, which was pretty nice. The week featured Jane Bond disc golf, a picnic, rib/beer-fest and other things, as well as the beginning of a new project. Not bad.

Speaking of disc golf, I need to post a picture of the shirt design, and the special, limited-edition (10) disc golf sweat towels that I screened. That image up above is from the back of the shirt. Pretty happy with it.
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I always waver between thinking Best Made Co. axes are awesome, and thinking they're ridiculously overpriced. I guess if people will pay it, then they aren't over-priced, and either way, I can't stop loving the look and idea of them (as you may have noticed...). Here's a pretty good article on the founder of the company. I really like this line about him, and definitely know the feeling: “Peter is like a regular guy with an eccentric way of thinking, and he’s interested in things that function. You know he loves a Shaker table. He probably loves a yellow pencil or a bar of Ivory soap or a paper clip or a well-designed tube of toothpaste. It’s all about stuff that’s what it is.” I think you could add 'stapler' into that statement pretty easily.
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One of the cutest things I've seen on the internet in a while: Baby in a Watermelon. Thanks to Kaitlin for sharing that!
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Love this shorpy image of an old bar. They make the colored entrance lettering so cheerful!
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Did not know that this airplane rotary phone design was a Canadian design. That's something I would love to run into in a thrift store one day for sure.
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Speaking of Canadian design, this Hush-Shak oil can is very high on my list of things to keep an eye out for. I've always mostly avoided looking at oil cans while shopping, so as not to get into them and want to collect them, but now I've got to look, in case this thing is hiding in there somewhere. At least I can limit it to just wanting this right now. So pretty. Amazing colours. So perfect.
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Taking my dad to Hog Tails tomorrow, and taking my sister and he to try out disc golf at the arboretum on Wednesday. Definitely looking forward to both.

How cute is a clothesline that comes out of a birdhouse, that goes with clothespins that look like birds that get stored inside the birdhouse? Super cute. How do I get one? (from Canadian Design Resource)
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 I always love it when blogs I read feature things that I am kind of obsessed with, but don't really think that (very many) other people are. Case in point: the tent display at Canadian Tire.

Those mini tents pretty much make my day. Sometimes I go out of my way when in there just to go by and see them. That post sums it up nicely when it says "I was instantly drawn to this display. First by its cuteness, but then by its usability." I always want to own one of them. What I would do with it, I do not know, but you know me and wanting...
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Here's a handy little chart that helps you to compare the differences between Akzidenz-Grotesk and the typefaces that came out of it.

Perhaps more importantly, here are some pages that talk about the differences between Helvetica, and its bastardization, Arial.
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Lego disc golf.
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What a weekend! Picked up Conan tickets, went to Ikea, played glow in the dark mini-golf, ate at Chili's, and that was just Saturday.
Tonight I start week 4 of Couch to 5k. A little nervous about it, but also looking forward to it. I think this week is when I move from walking most of the time, to jogging most of the time....

"The First Diet Cola For Men"

I may have gotten a little of the ol' scalp sweats with my lunch today. It's not the hottest thing in the world, but Stagg's Dynamite Chili definitely has some bite. I do believe I'll be buying another can.
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I guess this commercial came out over a year ago, but I just saw it for the first time yesterday. I feel like I should hate it, but in the end, it's totally true for me. I am a pretty big Pepsi Max advocate. All the benefits of Diet Pepsi, but it doesn't taste (entirely) like aspartame, and it has extra caffeine? Yes, please! I'll drink diet if there's nothing else, but if you ask me, aspartame is not an 'artificial sweetener,' it's a 'make things taste like aspartame-r,' and that is not a flavour I really like. You get a bit of it in Pepsi Max, but not a lot.

"Men can take anything, except the taste of diet cola."
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This ad gives off a vaguely Addams Family vibe to me, in that it looks playful, but it also kind of makes me afraid to find out what's inside it. In the end though, I find it ridiculously cute.
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I just upped some new posters to my Gigposters page, if you want to check them out. I feel like I'm missing some, but I can't remember what. I'll have to check later.
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Kitchen photos should be going up on Flickr later this week if I have time, if you're interested. I'm excited to finally share!
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Patchy post at best. Feels like that kind of week. I'm already itching for it to be over...

Loving that image above. I bet the pass the national parks are using right now has nothing on this one. (via Canadian Design Resource)
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On Friday night, I was riding my bike home down Erb St., and I swear I saw a deer. It was the craziest thing. It came down Roslin from the direction of the rec centre, ran across Erb, and continued on Roslin. Weird. I wish I had thought to take a pic with my phone, but instead I text messaged myself to remember, and for proof. I wonder if anyone else saw it?
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This is an amazing chest of drawers. Great idea, and it looks really well executed.
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"Man Single-handedly Starts Dance Party" It's pretty hilariously amazing just how far this dance party goes. Seriously. (Headline stolen from my lj friend Jen)
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Tony Jr. is so cute! I love old cereal packaging design, and this is no exception.
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I've been doing a lot of downloading and movie watching lately. 2 of those movies were The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Not like I hadn't seen them before, and not like I didn't already know this, but young Diane Lane, who appears in both of them, was really cute. Not to say she isn't still attractive, but damn.

Just finished that poster above earlier tonight. Not sure if it's printing as is, but I felt like sharing. Definitely a show to look forward to as well. I've been itching to see Angus and Brad's new project and Ace Kinkaid is always enjoyable.
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Back on my very Canadian day, when I was at the NFB I was looking around, really hoping they'd have a shirt with the classic NFB logo on it. They didn't then, but it turns out that now they do! Wish it wasn't on white, but I might need one...
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Bunny garbage bin. Cute.
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Speaking of cute, at work today I was looking up stuff on upcoming movies and found Paper Heart. SO CUTE. Seriously. There's some other stuff I'm looking forward to coming up (Brothers Bloom, 500 Days of Summer [could be crap, but Zooey Deschanel is a big draw for me. Actually Joey Gordon Levitt is a pretty good draw too...], and of course Away We Go [though Jenna says I just am excited for this because I think John Krasinski looks like me in it]), but none of those trailers have made me smile nearly as much as this one did. Adorable.
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I have come to realize that sometimes the images on the front are old patterns are amazing. This is one of those cases. I have an even better one saved up for potential future use that maybe you'll get to see. Mini Magnum is all I have to say...
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I never knew that they made Chuck mids, but now I really want a pair. Nice.
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I'm sadly pretty excited to buy my Miracle Whip in this new packaging. Really hope that this part of the write up about it becomes more and more true as time goes by: "Apparently all the thrift shopping of vintage stuff by the 18- and 34-year-olds has finally paid off and that oldish look can feel new again." Seriously, all a company really needs to do is just reintroduce their classic packaging and will be so looking forward to buying it. Sad but true.
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Big things to come next Friday. Can't wait.

The above image is stolen from Draplin. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Long time no post. No good reason why, except that sitting down to start a post keeps feeling daunting. Ridiculous, really.
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I've long been pretty into materials related to the Canadian centennial, particularly the logo for it. When we go to antique stores, it's definitely one of the things I have an eye out for, though I don't think I've ever actually bought any of it yet. There's actually a house near to us that is #100 on its street, that has the centennial logo on the front of it. Clever.

Anyway, all this is to say; look at these amazing coasters. If I ever found these, I would pick them up in a second.
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I think this is probably pretty obvious, but I have to say that I find axes to be a very appealing form.

This company has gone and made them even more appealing, but made them far too expensive. But still, pretty. Could probably do something comparable for much less...

The first image I saw for them was the one on this page, and it sells them pretty well and hard.
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Staying on the whole manly tool front, I am intrigued by this exercise idea. If I already owned a sledge hammer, I'd be starting on it already. As it is, going out to buy one just to throw it around for the sake of exercise that I might just give up on in no time anyway seems kind of ridiculous. We'll see though, we'll see. I really need to get on doing something...
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Handheld NES. For realz.
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The newest Tony Hawk game is going to be controlled using an actual board on the floor. I can't decide if this is cheesy/stupid/ridiculous or awesome. I guess I'll have to wait until it actually comes out and I get to try it. I am kind of looking forward to trying it, I can't lie.
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If I knew where to buy this bread, I would buy it on adorable packaging alone. Can't beat the fact that it is Canadian either...

Let me know if you know where I can get it.
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Speaking of Canadian: Canadian Barbie. How amazingly cliched!
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Went to see Star Trek last night, which is pretty amazingly awesome. Can't wait for more to come from this whole new timeline they've created.

Seeing Simon Pegg who took the nerdy funny in the film, and then made it broadly funny, made me want to watch Spaced again. I recently gave the box set to my sister, but didn't get a copy for myself, so I had to find streaming copies of the episodes. Luckily I found all of season 1 here, and all of season 2 here.

If you haven't seen Spaced, you should go watch it.
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As far as Beartato and Reginald go, I have to say this comic made my day, and more so. (literally, the day it first went up, I went back to it like 10 times, just because I think it's so adorably endearing.)

Special Delivery

While I haven't come back to post here in almost a month, I do keep returning to the above picture on Shorpy. Just a great image. Check it out real big. I can never say enough good about Shorpy.
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So I've been in what I call "cocoon mode," where things are just a little too hectic, so I pull back and avoid anything and everything that I don't HAVE to do. Of course, "have" does include spending time with family and friends, but you know, I gots my priorities.

For the quick Christmas re-cap, I had a great one, that included a hard fought for Wii (Jenna's parents both lined up separately before stores opened to pick one up), and this amazing piece by Timber that she managed to find and buy before I even knew it existed. You may know I love Timber, and I usually buy anything I see from him that I like as soon as I see it, so yeah, good score. Big surprises, awesome presents. The rest of it was great too, like having family over here for Christmas chili, getting to see my mom, and lots of time spent with The Suze and Big Ronnie T.

Now on to a tonne of links I've been meaning to share for awhile now...
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A beautiful Calgary manhole cover. From another favourite, of course, the Canadian Design Resource.
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Orla Kiely does some real pretty work, that keeps popping up in different places. The water bottle here is just cute.
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Luggage tags seem to be a huge colletibles market. This one might be my favourite I have ever seen around the old internet. The colours, the drawing style, the clean crisp typeface, the nice script, the shape, everything. But really, the illustration and colour especially. Perfect.
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Here's some interesting stuff from box vox, both related to chocolate, which I'm sure a lot of you, like me, have a lot of sitting around right now...
The Canadian $.05 chocolate bar revolt. In 1947 candy bar companies tried to raise the price of a chocolate bar from 5 cents to 8 cents, but Canadian kids were not having it. The Five Cent War is definitely a movie I wouldn't mind checking out.
And trust the Germans to make chocolate (more) evil: A "chocolate grenade," yes, a grenade disguised as a chocolate bar... Apparently there was more than one type of this in WWII. Evil.
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Finally, you gotta love Lincoln. Well, Obama rightfully does, and he and the democrats seem to be taking Lincoln away from the Republicans. Good call. I never even realized he was a Republican, but then, it was a whole different party back then, from what I hear.
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If you're not doing anything tonight, DJ Bearface! will be playing tracks all by his lonesome at the Jane Bond (that is, minus DJ88), so come by and say hi.

The pic above is for my mom, if she stops by. Yet another grab from the Canadian Design Resource. Are you seeing now why it should be one of your daily reads too? Apparently I've already gotten at least one person hooked, a good feeling for sure.

I love this postcard for the fact that it would have been sent out blank, in order for the sellers to add their own place name to the card. A ridiculous idea, but efficient, and one of those older practices that I have a real spot in my heart for.
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The Pelican Collection. Tonnes of materials, real nice to see. Makes me wonder if there's something similar for Penguin paperbacks. Gotta love 'em. (via Draplin)
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If I was going to buy another laptop anytime soon, and for some reason it wasn't going to be a Mac, it'd be this one right here. It's a thing of beauty for sure, and trying to make the world better at the same time.
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Pretty much every year at Christmas I make a joke about buying someone inappropriate a flask. This is really because I have always wanted a flask. I am pretty sure that I would rarely, if ever, use one, which is why I never buy myself one, but the comment is always rooted in the fact that if someone ever bought me one for Christmas, that would be pretty great. This one here is pretty ideal. Not the traditional flask shape I love, but at the same time, I love this one for it's shape, you know (and finish, of course).
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This may be my longest awaited Criterion Collection dvd. I remember renting this as a new release when I was hunting through the Rogers video store near my house, and saw only one copy of it on the shelf. Pretty standard practice for me at the time. Renting all of my movies at a big movie store, I always looked for things they only bought one copy of, always more up my alley than the big blockbusters. Not that I haven't watched it again since then, but I've never bought it because I knew they eventually had to put this one out, so that at least the first 4 Anderson movies could be a matched set, even if his current contract means following ones won't be (from what I hear at least...
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Recently, Meet Your Printmaker featured a local artist, which was quite surprising! Seems like a real nice guy, who, thankfully, seems to do real nice work. Looking forward to maybe seeing him at the zine fair.
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Just a couple more days until we leave...

No, I am not in Montreal, but you have to admit that that's a pretty amazing postcard. I really don't know what to say about it first. Okay, how about the question of who exactly wants to send or receive a post card that highlights an airport? 'Look, I'm here! But this is as far as I've gotten...' It's not like the building's are even interesting, like at LAX or something; looks like just a big sprawling building and a parking lot.

At the same time, from my personal vantage point, look at that sprawling building and parking lot! And the cars! Just the idea of making a postcard of that image is pretty awesome to me, you know? And the layout? Well! 'How should we arrange this text?' 'Let's just slap a white box over the sky and put the text in that!' 'That's a great idea!' It sure was, but if you ask me, I can only see that being the case in retrospect, looking back from now. At the time, really? (from the Canadian Design Resource)
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This is a great idea. Now if anyone says 'I'll just have anything,' they can really have it! Or whatever too!
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Here's something that's been making the blog rounds like wildfire: Font or Typeface? Good little read, and a good addition to the personal knowledge base too. I'm always happy to have newer and clearer definitions of things. I was never really too sure of what the difference was before, and now I know.
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Seems like every couple of weeks or so it's someone's turn to mention the FedEx logo and it's 'hidden' secrets. Now it's my turn. Seriously, have you ever noticed it before, the beauty of the FedEx logo. I didn't until someone pointed it out to me, as I feel the need to do every time I see it. Check it out, and read an interview with the designer here.
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Trips getting real close. 9 days. Super excited. Can't wait to take a break and see a thing or two. I'm a little nervous about a thing or two, but we'll deal with those when we get to them. Get ready for this thing to turn into a trip blog. I'll be hoping to post most nights from the road, hotel web access, time, and tiredness permitting.

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.