Rain Rain Go Away

nursery rhyme print

Very lovely nursery rhyme print. I should have bought this in June!

Buy a t-shirt and plant 20 trees

holiday matinee artist series tshirt

Does your t-shirt lower your carbon footprint and improve air quality and reduce your utility bill? This t-shirt does. This shirt is part of the Holiday Matinee Artist Series, which means they donate 100% of proceeds from every t-shirt sold to Plant-It 2020. That means every time you buy a shirt you plant, maintain, and protect twenty trees. It’s that simple, plus all shirts are tag-free and 100% organic. How’s that for a designy do-good-feel-good gift?

About the artist: Nikki Farquharson is a left-handed designer living in London, England. She’s obsessed with letters, lines, patterns, shapes and colors. For this project, Nikki wrote a poem where every word ends in the same sound of Holiday Matinee.

Tree of Charge

tree of charge

Tree of Charge: While the cell phone, digital camera and mp3 player charge their batteries under the tree, the bothersome main adapters are hidden inside. The tree functions as a key rack and magnet board. and with the photos of your loved ones, it becomes a family tree. Made me smile.

Baby in Table

baby-in-table

This ingenious table is the subject of my latest post over at Nesting, Cookie Magazine’s blog, where I am a contributor: Baby in Table! Now that baby #2 is on the way, this table seems perfect! And the fact that the chair doubles as a step stool is simply brilliant.

(via spoon tamago)

Attitude Chair

attittude chair

New York designer Deger Cengiz has created a chair with an extra support that swings out when the chair is tipped back: Attitude Chair. Made me smile.

Plunger

plunger

I love this plunger. A perfect housewaming present!

Blossom Baby Mobile

Blossom Baby Mobile
Blossom Baby Mobile

Babies love Mobiles. Uhm, mommies too, especially if they are as minimal and designy like the Blossom Mobile, handmade and ‘one of a kind’ and signed by Australian based Pukapuka.

Pig Mug

pig-mug

Spoon Tamago featured these Pig Mugs by Kenjiro Sano. Made me laugh.

Debbie Millman on spec work

Daivd Airey currently features a post with some quotes by Debbie Millman, the newly-appointed AIGA President, on the topic of spec work:

I am personally vigorously, passionately and fundamentally AGAINST designers being asked to do work on spec and neither I nor my firm will ever participate in speculative work. I have said it before and I will say it again: Speculative work denigrates both the agencies and the designers that participate. If we give away our work for free, if we give away our talent and our expertise, we give away more than the work. We give away our souls.

Read the full interview over at NO!SPEC with Debbie Millman.

In his post David points to a great list of no-spec articles:

Don’t design on spec, by Jeffrey Zeldman
Spec Work Arithmetic, from the Speak Up Archive
Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring, by Andrew Hyde
Spec Watch on design contests, on Logo Design Love
More logo design contest nonsense, on The Logo Factor
An interview with SpecWatch, on Web Designer Depot
Pay the Designer, on 8164
The Personal Cost of Designing on Spec, by Mark Boulton

AIGA President Debbie Millman on spec work.

Far Foods

Far Foods
Far Foods Receipt
Far Foods is an alternative packaging concept for supermarket produce, highlighting the distances that some foods travel from and the resultant carbon dioxide released during the journey. The receipt features a boarding card style tear-off strip. By James Reynolds.

IKEA Kids Slide

VIRRE Slide with Guard Rail

During yesterday’s very unsuccessful trip to IKEA (what I wanted was discontinued or out of stock) I did come across a new product that would make our daughters heart jump: VIRRE Slide with Guard Rail. I actually have a feeling that the back could also function as a small desk. Living in small NYC apartments, you have to think multipurpose…

Last Suppers

Last Suppers, by James Reynolds, is a series of photographs documenting former Death Row prisoners’ requests for their last meal before execution.

4_cones
4_cracker
4_fruits
4_olive

Narigudo

Narigudo

Our little Ella was lucky enough to get one of these little balancing toys, called Narigudo, made my ubertalent Andre Da Loba a few months back. I am so happy to see that he is selling them now in his shop.

If you’re in need of an extremely talented and yet humble illustrator, make sure to give Andre a call!

No Days Off Shop

Seven Days Too Long
Famous in 15minutes
Tick Tock
Mondays

I just discovered the Shop over at No Days Off. Some of these prints made me chuckle.

Deposit Checks via iPhone

The Future of Banking? Deposit Checks via iPhone:



(via Mashable)

Lemonade

More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this “Great Recession.” Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.

(thank you Emma)

Delusional

delusional-tube-470

Delusional Paper Towel Tube, by Marc Johns. (I finally know why our little Ella is do drawn to these!)

Tim Brown

If i… from Tim Brown on Vimeo.

”If I… is a short film that explores the idea of a young woman with an over exaggerated sense of imagination. The charecter poses a series of rhetorical questions to the viewer that she then tries to visualize by any means possible.” A short film by Tim Brown.

(via fabulous it’snicethat)

Print Factory

Print Factory Logo

I just fell in love with the logo mark of Print Factory. Who designed it?

Call for entries….

call for entries

Want to launch your design career? Enter Apartment Therapy’s Design Showcase 2009 competition: They just put out the call for great, new designs by independent and student designers that promise to make our homes more beautiful and inspiring places to live.

Apartment Therapy will post the best submissions, allow their readers to vote and then give six finalists an unprecedented chance to feature their design and themselves by building their own original post on their site during prime time in September. Oh, and I’ll be one of the judges. Wheee!

More on the competition here.

iPod in Tape

080709_ipod_tapes

This made me smile: Use an old cassette tape as an iPod case. Yay for retro.

A Pencil Rainbow

pencil rainbow

500 pencils = 25 colors x 20 months

wave books

wavebooks_3
(Design by Mary Ruefle, with J. Johnson)

The BookArchive in their post on Wave Books:

Wave Books is an independent poetry press based in Seattle, Washington. Dedicated to publishing the best in American poetry by new and established authors, Wave Books was founded in 2005. They’re doing an exemplary job of treating each of their books as a unique experience, with a huge amount of care put into each title. I can’t help but feel that books like this are a glimpse into the future of publishing. While most popular titles will go straight-to-digital, there will be a steady market amongst bookophiles who cherish the physicality of their collections, rewarding publishers like Wave Books for their infatuation with the printed word.

Everyday East River

everyday east river

Our lovely studio mate Chesley Andrews started documenting our studio view onto the East River with a tumblr blog called Everyday East River.