Posts in Uncategorized

Caleb Owen Everitt

Caleb Owen Everitt is one of those designers who has such a dialed in style, you can almost instantly recognize his work when you see it. Not to mention, he has some of the coolest clients in the game from Hufnagel to Deus Ex Machina and many more. His work is always a great source of inspiration for me.

Posted by Tav Calico

Land Rover Defender XTech

The 2012 Land Rover Defender XTech. In the United States, we can’t get our hands on these and that’s a tragedy. In my opinion it’s one of the best designed off-roader / SUVs ever and now there’s an XTech version which is much more rugged and has a new engine. I’m not sure if I like the original or the XTech version more, but it definitely brought me around to posting about the Defender.

The thing that I truly admire about the design of this car, it’s simple and done right. There’s no weird pattern in the seats, the instrument panels are symmetrical and the exterior colorways are that of a machine. Sure there are a lot of technological enhancements and the glaring safety features missing. No airbags keep it from coming stateside. However, it has a timeless appeal to it. Of course, it’s diesel and weighs A LOT and with what we’re all paying for gas right now it’s not really an option. However, I’d ride my bike to the studio during the week and take this out on the weekends to offset my carbon footprint.

Matthew Hilton






I’ll admit I’m easily excited when it comes to fine woodworking especially if it involves great design, add some furniture into the equation and I’m hooked. I stumbled onto Matthew Hilton today and I believe I have a new favourite designer.

http://matthewhilton.com/

posted by hallwood

The Importance Of A Good Crop

I’ve been taking pictures with my iPhone for about a year and half now and I’m continually surprised at the things I’m learning and new techniques I’m discovering.

I barely used to crop at all, especially when editing my DSLR photos. I was always (overly) concerned with resolution and making sure I didn’t lose any.

Enter lower resolution iPhone with a fixed focal length…

As I always have my iPhone on me this is how I take most of my photos these days. I often find my self on the other side of a river, across a huge field or just a little too far away from a mountain. This has literally forced me to crop in closer to get the photo I want. Because apps like Instagram publish quite a small image I don’t care as much about resolution anymore (although this can be frustrating later).

Having this “freedom” of no longer caring so much about resolution has encouraged me to crop more and often I find myself revisiting photos that I had written off, only to discover post crop a new favourite photo. Where I was concerned about resolution before I’m now concerned about the final composition. Now I just need a 50mp camera thats fits in my pocket!

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All images taken and edited on the iPhone and posted on Instagram by Seth Hardie.

Find me on Instagram here: @hallwood

Crystal Eyes

Back it on Kickstarter and get some crystals

Apolis Global Citizen





It’s hard to pin down what Apolis Global actually is. One part clothing shop, one part advocacy group, they guys at Apolis are certainly a versatile bunch. I’m writing about them mainly because of how impressed I was with their overall branding. They’ve got their visual message down. I placed an order through their shop and received the awesome artifacts above. It took me a moment to open the box because I didn’t want to destroy it.

I actually found Apolis by way of their logo, which I absolutely love. You can find out a little more about it here.

Atmostheory // Christopher David Ryan

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Atmostheory is the one-man design studio of Christopher David Ryan… a Portland, Maine-based graphic artist, daydreamer, pseudo-scientist, wanna-be astronaut and untrained intellectual who tends to find inspiration in pretty much anything… especially music, the universe, the human condition and natural phenomena.

1930s Swiss Travel Brochures

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Found a few old Swiss travel brochures via travelbrochuregraphics.

Klaus Haapaniemi

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Last week I noted that this reminded me of some fractal-like plate designs but I couldn’t remember the source. Joshua Gajownik was kind enough to fill in the blank.  The second image is a plate from Klaus Haapaniemi’s Taika series for Iittala. The detail in these is amazing.

Nitsche

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John Coulter sent me a bunch of wonderful Erik Nitsche images.  This is the first of many to come, so amazing.  I think this sort of illustrative design style is something that our generation has lost.  You rarely see anything quite like this anymore.  Most of the true illustrators these days stick to the sort of fanciful, handmade-looking things that you would expect and most pure designers stick with the computer producing things that sometimes feel a little too perfect.  This is an example of how great things can be when you create graphic design by hand, in the real world.  I know it’s not really practical in most commercial settings, you would hardly be competitive with other designers if you were trying to make everything by hand. But still, it would be nice to see a little bit more of this around.  What’s really amazing is that this work of art was commissioned by a defense contractor, my how times have changed. I wonder if companies are just placing less emphasis on the printed form as they migrate to newer media, or if people simply don’t see the value in quality design like this anymore.  Either way, it’s images like this that make me lament the passing of the golden age of design and the fact that I was born too late to be a part of it. I suppose that’s why I’ve always put so much emphasis on selling my work directly, by circumventing the world of client-driven design it’s still possible to create images with these ethics intact.