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I’ve posted images for the exhibition catalogue for Iñigo...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:33:00 -0400

I’ve posted images for the exhibition catalogue for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With over on the portfolio. The catalogue accompanies Iñigo’s exhibition in our Building 5 gallery—an upside-down, half-scale replication of Mies van der Rohe’s House with Four Columns.

This book was a real pleasure to work on. It was an unplanned, crash project (we did the whole thing in about a month) and through curator and editor Denise Markonish’s fearless stewardship, we actually pulled it off. The book is simple, but full of heart and attention to detail. If, like me, you enjoy geeking out over specs, here they are:

Dimensions: 8.25 x 8.25 inches
Pages: 88+cover (five 16-page signatures and one 8-page signature)
Ink: three signatures at 1/1 (Pantone 433U), two signatures at 4/4 (CMYK), and one signature at 2/2 (Pantone 432U+Magenta); cover is 1/0 (Pantone 430U)
Stock: Finch Fine Bright White Ultra Smooth 80# Text, Mohawk Via Smooth Light Gray 70# text (screenplay), and Mohawk Loop Linen Pure White 110# DTC (cover)
Typefaces: Futura, National, Courier
Cover: 1/0 with a clear foil stamp

The book is for sale here. The exhibition is on view through October 31, 2010.

New Site for Kidspace

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:04:00 -0400

New Site for Kidspace:

Today the new website for Kidspace is live. I designed the site with assistance from the badass Jack Turner of jackadam.

New Site for SOMArts

Tue, 25 May 2010 21:26:00 -0400

New Site for SOMArts:

Over the weekend we launched a new website for SOMArts, the community arts center in San Francisco run by Lex. I designed the site with some help from my friend Fran at Durable Goods Design. We’ll be adding more content and features over time, but we think this a great step forward for the organization. Enjoy!

How to work from home (and not lose your mind)

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:31:00 -0400

When most people find out that I work from home they almost always respond with “Oh wow, that’s awesome. You’re so lucky.” I nod and say “yes,” but I know that they’re thinking of those snowy days where they work from home, curl up with their coffee and Snuggie, and lounge. Maybe they’ve turned your phone off. Maybe they’ve kept their pajamas on. Yeah, well, it’s not really like that.

In fact, working from home is absolutely nothing like that. After a few days the novelty of keeping your pajamas on all day wears off and you want to, well, work. If you’re used to working in an office, though, you have to change your routines. So here’s a few handy tips if, like me, you suddenly find yourself working from home…

Get dressed.
Yes, it’s easy to stay in your pajamas all day, but don’t. Shower, change, do you what you need to do to make sitting down at your computer to work the real deal.
Evening exercise.
When I worked in an office I would go to the gym in the morning, before work. But now, I go for my runs at the end of the day. It provides a clean break from work time to personal time and it gets me out of the apartment.
Chores.
Or any task really. I try to give myself one 10–15 task every morning and every afternoon. Nothing crazy—just a little thing to give me a quick breather. When you work from home there are no distractions, no pop-ins, no water coolers. It can be hard to step away. These little chores help me do that.
Remember how lucky you are that you don’t have to commute.
Ugh, commuting. I’ve had a number of different commutes in my life. (The worst being a 75-minute drive—EACH WAY!—from Northampton to North Adams. It was terrible, especially in the winter.) I know some people like their 30-minutes in the car or on the subway, but think about it: I take that time I’d normally spend chained to my car folding laundry or doing the dishes (see tip #3).
Don’t live alone (and I don’t mean roommates).
If I lived alone, I don’t know if I’d ever stop working, but when Lex comes home from work I shut it down.

There are more, sure, but I find that these five tips keep me sane and happy.

This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:08:00 -0500

This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the new Luc Tuymans exhibition. Go. It’s really great.

Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian painter who creates dreamy yet haunting scenes from source photography as well as his own memories. His work is almost always political—works in the SFMoMA show reference the Holocaust, WWII, the Congolese independence movement, and post-9/11 America—yet the activist messages can be subtle (though sometimes they’re not). You have to dig a little, step back, move forward, or return to a work. But that’s okay—you’ll want to linger.

The painting from the show that is sticking with me the most is the title piece from his Holocaust series Der Architekt (shown above). The painting—a portrait of Hitler’s chief architect, taken from a home movie shot by his wife—shows a man wearing skis, laying prone on the ground after a fall. His face is blank, a ghostly splotch of white paint. The audio guide references Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil,” and that is so fitting here. Absolutely mesmerizing.

The show is up through May 2, 2010.

Lex & Dan

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:56:25 -0500

Lex & Dan:

Oh, wedding planning. I could blog endlessly about you here, but I’ll spare my five readers. (We’re getting our wedding blogging ya-yas out here.)

But I will share this: our wedding site is live. It’s dorky… but full of info!

About a year ago, after a walk through the Elizabeth Peyton...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:40:00 -0500

About a year ago, after a walk through the Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the New Museum, my friend Jessi and I popped into the SoHo WholeFoods to pick up beer for the evening. We were instantly grabbed by the Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout and decided to procure a number of other chocolate stouts and make a tasting out of it. We invited a bunch of our friends, decided to present the beers Model U.N. style, and voilà, Beer Club was born.

Since then we’ve sampled oatmeal stouts, IPAs, and a selection of beers from Berkshire Brewing Company. When Jessi and her boyfriend Will made plans to visit San Francisco this month we began plotting our first West Coast Beer Club gathering. We landed on coffee stouts, which, well, wasn’t a very good idea. Almost all the beers we tasted, with the exception of AleSmith’s Speedway Stout, were terrible. The common complaint? The coffee flavoring was overpowering, making the beers either too sweet or too bitter and basically drowning out all beery goodness.

Will has written more about the trouble with coffee stouts over on his new weekly column “The Draft” on GQ’s Forked & Corked blog, which, if you like beer, should be added to your feed reader.

She Lives Here

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:40:06 -0500

She Lives Here:

Lex is featured on the latest post over at i live here:sf. It’s a nice piece about how the arts have helped her find a footing in our new city. The post is accompanied by a really great (and quite glamorous, I must say!) photo shoot.

TBTL-athon

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:29:18 -0500

TBTL-athon:

Ahoy hoy.

Too Beautiful to Live is my favorite thing, and by “thing” I mean regularly-consumable cultural product. It’s up there with my favorite television and public radio programs. I’m a devoted Ten. I probably like TBTL too much.

TBTL is a daily podcast produced by Luke Burbank, who you might be familiar with from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. A few months ago TBTL was cancelled by the Seattle station KIRO. Since then Burbank has been producing the show from his home, and in my opinion, its only gotten better.

Obviously, I recommend TBTL highly, but you have to listen to it consistently for several eps in a row to really give it a fair chance. This week Luke’s been running a pledge drive to keep his “imaginary radio show” on the air. Listen to TBTL for a week and if you like it to, throw him a few bucks if for nothing else than because you care about my well-being.

Two weeks ago I finally got around to setting up our jerryrigged...

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:46:00 -0500

Two weeks ago I finally got around to setting up our jerryrigged television setup. The pieces were sitting around for over a month, and I wondered if we even needed them, but I couldn’t resist a good NFL playoff binge (Go Jets! Boo Favre!).

The setup involves a USB Adapter (Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid) and an HD antenna (Terk’s HDTVa Antenna Pro) running through my 20-inch iMac. (Affiliate links, y’all. Hope you don’t mind.)

The reception on the HD antenna is excellent, and one nice thing about HD signals is that they are either strong or nonexistent—all or nothing—so no futzing with static. This setup, however, didn’t work so hot on our Wii. Technically it “works” but the resolution is awful and there is a lag big enough to make playing a game like Super Mario Wii impossible. Oh well. One out of two ain’t bad.

More music metrics

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:24:00 -0500

I’ve been a Last.fm user for a while now. I don’t play the stations often, but I like having them there when I’m sick of my music, and I enjoy the metrics. Last.fm “scrobbles” your music as you play it and offers recommendations based on your taste. You can also view what your top artists and songs over various timespans. Here are two snapshots of the past 12 months:

Before it's too late: my 2009 music wrap-up

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:24:00 -0500

This is a little late, but since it’s only January 17, I deem a post like this still acceptable. It’s hard for me to look back on 2009 and pick my favorite music, and a year from now, my favorite 2009 album could be something I don’t even own yet. What I can do is analyze my iTunes data—particularly play counts and star ratings (which I obsessively keep).

According to iTunes, of songs that came out in 2009 these are the ones with the highest play counts. My two favorite songs of 2009 are “Lalita” by The Love Language and “Walkabout” by Atlas Sound and Panda Bear, neither of which cracked the top 10.

1. Bat for Lashes, “Daniel”
2. Bon Iver, “Blood Bank”
3. Grizzly Bear, “Two Weeks”
4. Bon Iver, “Beach Baby”
4. Grizzly Bear, “Ready, Able”
6. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, “Doomsday”
7. Built to Spill, “Hindsight”
8. Delorean, “Seasun”
8. The Dodos, “Fables”
8. Say Hi, “Maurine”

There were dozens of great albums this year. These aren’t my favorite albums of the year, but they are the ten albums with the most 4★-plus rated songs in my iTunes library.

Five 2009 albums I loved which aren’t on this list (probably because I was too busy rocking out to rate the whole thing) are Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors, Bird-Brains by Tune-Yards, Fever Ray’s self-titled record, Now We Can See by The Thermals, and Songs of Shame by Woods. Ok, the list (number of 4★-plus rated songs in parentheses):

1. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, s/t (8)
2. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (7)
2. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest (7)
4. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes (6)
4. AA Bondy, When the Devil’s Loose (6)
6. St. Vincent, Actor (5)
6. Antony & the Johnsons, The Crying Light (5)
6. Dark Was the Night (5)
6. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career (5)
6. Fanfarlo, Reservoir (5)

I’ve lost my taste for coffee. My daily intake is just a...

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:50:00 -0500

I’ve lost my taste for coffee. My daily intake is just a way for me to get through the early morning (where I go about three steps from my bed to my desk and immediately log into work—which is already buzzing on east coast time). A couple years ago I just started drinking espresso because I didn’t like the taste of coffee so much that I couldn’t bear to sit and sip anymore.

Moving to San Francisco and having easy access to wonderful roasters—like Philz, Blue Bottle, and the nearby Ritual Coffee on Valencia—has revived my interest in coffee. So I’m taking action.

One Saturday morning at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market I noticed that Blue Bottle coffee uses a pour-over method, and after a little research it didn’t long for me to stumble upon Chemex coffee makers. I threw one on my Amazon wishlist and shortly after received one from my future in-laws for Christmas.

Game on.

It took me a couple tries to get my technique down (the video above was extremely helpful), but I can happily say that I thoroughly enjoyed a few batches of Chemex (affiliate link) coffee this week. I hope it stays that way.

"Imagine what great work people would be doing if they weren’t a bit afraid of the community jumping..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:47:23 -0500

“Imagine what great work people would be doing if they weren’t a bit afraid of the community jumping out and hating on them for something. Imagine if all of these ‘followers’ were creators. Instead of getting caught up in the next mob lynching, they were busy creating something they truly love for us all to use.”

- Tom Watson, from an essay titled Unfounded Anger. A lot of what he’s saying here really resonates with me and my frustrations with the design community.

Eat Real Festival, OaklandAugust 28, 2009

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:41:00 -0400

Eat Real Festival, Oakland
August 28, 2009

"If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to..."

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:55:00 -0400

“If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer—We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!”

- I love this interview with Jim Coudal on Design Glut. So inspiring. (via Simplebits)

SF Scorecard

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:02:00 -0400

On June 29 I moved to San Francisco. Three days later, Mat Honan published this article outlining guidelines for moving to San Francisco. Two months later, let’s see how I’m doing…

1. Live in San Francisco

Check. We’re living in the same studio that Lex found when she came out here last fall. It’s in the southeasternmost corner of Noe Valley—not exactly my favorite spot, but our proximity to the Mission, Bernal Heights, Glen Park, the J line, and many convenient Muni bus lines has made it very easy to explore the city.

2. Jump in the water

Haven’t done this one yet and don’t really plan on it. I’m not much of a beach guy. (I’ve been in the Atlantic Ocean many times. Does that count?)

3. Eat the food

Good god yes. Check. I’ve done a bunch of the greatest hits—Burma Superstar, Greens, Papalote, Goat Hill Pizza, Slanted Door—and there are so many more on our to-try list. The food here is insanely good.

4. Get a bike

I have a mountain bike, but have yet to ride it in SF. I want to trade it in for a road bike, and I’ve got to do something about that ASAP. (I have taken up running in a serious way since moving, and that’s occupied most of my recreational time. I love running in SF.)

5. Make real friends

I don’t work in the Internet/technology sector, so apparently this doesn’t apply to me. That said, since I work from home I don’t get out as much as I could. I want to work on that, too.

6. Be real yourself

This is the kind of west coast hooey that drives my sarcastic, skeptical New England side nuts.

After two months, I’m still adjusting to living in a huge metropolitan area for the first time in my life—not to mention making up for all the lost long-distance time with Lex and working hard to transition into telecommuting. I give myself a B- after two months, with lots of room for improvement.

This Is That Way

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:47:00 -0400

This Is That Way:

My friend Dan-O has a new show on WFCM Williamstown, Wednesdays 8:00–10:00 p.m. (EST). If his debut show this week is any indicator, this is a can’t miss.

We had a great Fourth of July. Ferry Building Farmer’s...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:04:41 -0400

We had a great Fourth of July. Ferry Building Farmer’s Market then caught an afternoon game at AT&T Park. Here’s the view from the right field upper deck. Great view of the stadium, score board, Bay Bridge and marina. More pics are over at Flickr.

Later on, North Adams.

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:51:00 -0400

Later on, North Adams.