Finding a Canvas in Everything

House Industries (yup, the font people) produces this scrumptious alphabet block set, featuring the art of the great multi-versatile designer Alexander Girard, famous for his work with Herman Miller and La Fonda del Sol, a restaurant he dressed from head to toe: matchbooks, dinnerware, linens—everything he could get his hand on. It's lovely to see all the iterations of his design in items one can use in daily life, but I do appreciate an item such as this, that has no utilitarian purpose but to delight. And I would have to agree, after designing in every other medium (airplanes, sugar packets, bags, dolls..), AG probably would have eventually made his way to blocks. Yummy.


You can find more Girard products here. This little number retails at $100 USD. If you're on a budget, Chronicle Books offers a boxed notecard set for $13.95 USD, and a new set, one showcasing La Fonda del Sol, will be released in Spring 09.

Also, if you should find yourself in Santa Fe, NM, the Museum of International Folk Art has an entire wing dedicated to Alexander Girard.

Chemical Party

I absolutely love this video. I want to make short films like this. Please watch and just try not to smile :) ........or comment!

(video pasted along by Jessie, thanks buddy)

Offensive?

I'm curious to hear your opinions about California-born artist Douglas Stanley's Twin Tower version of the classic arcade video game Space Invaders. It's a multi-player game that requires individuals to work together to fend off the invaders. With some work, a team can actually beat the game.

This piece offended so many people that the artist decided to take down his installation at the Leipzig Games Convention in eastern Germany last month; and Taito, the creator of the original Space Invaders, is considering a lawsuit. . . which begs many, many questions. Among them: When is it not too soon anymore? Is there a calibur of tragedy in which it will never be okay to make art that is less than mournful? And, whose measuring stick do we use?

Creative Reuse: Good Design for Do-Gooders

These handmade products are the harvest of an earnest set of environmental ethics combined with aesthetic sensibilities and a nomadic lifestyle. Skinwalker (one-man production line, Bryan Kwee) takes his craft as seriously as his eco-friendly lifestyle, gathering scrap materials from the places he roams and meticulously transforming them into these fine creations. With a good deal of imagination and elbow grease, he turns one person's waste into another person's bounty—proving that less is definitely more.


Wallet made from salvaged sushi boxes, bicycle inner tubes, transparent packaging material, and keyboard circuit boards.

Wallet made from keyboard circuit boards, aluminum foil, frosted white binders, bicycle inner tubes, & a trade show exhibitor badge.




Check out Skinwalker's complete portfolio and etsy shop.

The Kite Runner

Have y'all seen (or read) Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner? We finally did. If you like type (and I know you do), you'll enjoy the film titles that The Ebeling Group created:

And, I must mention the story, too: Whoa. Amidst the intensity of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the film manages to reveal a Kabul that is universal in its everyday make up of good and evil. I am not very familiar with this culture (I've never even flown a kite), but I absolutely felt our kinship as a species. I know some of the scenes are difficult to watch, but necessary, I think. Rather than allowing you to just be an observer, the author broaches the subject of honor vs. shame in a way that injects the moral directly into your blood stream. Pretty effective from my perspective. Your reactions?

*For those of you who don't know the story, I hate to ruin it, but it must be acknowledged that the rape scene caused so much controversy, the actors were actually threatened and had to be relocated to an undisclosed city in the United Arab Emirates before the movie's release last year. What's surprising to me is that the family that experienced the most grief was that of 12-year-old Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, the boy who played the victim. In Afghanistan, the victim of a rape is often ostracized. (And, not that it should matter but: Fearing their community's response, Ahmad and his parents actuality refused Ahmad's participation in the rape scene. A body double was used.)