iJunto

A most excellent friend and artistic collaborator of mine, Ms. Eml337 makes the most hilarious and existential magnets on the planet. So in the spirit of our iJunto, (a Franklinesque organization of the digital age that ponders morals, politics, and philosophies of contemporary culture–usually in art form) I used my newly revived laser printer to create stickers from her totally excellent magnets: because what says 2009 like taking something original and one-of-a-kind and mass reproducing it?!

* Up top is a scan of the OG magnet, the photos directly above are of my sticker sheets, before being cut down.

Micro-loans will save the world.

Fact. A good friend of my family started her own organization called the Liberian Widows Initiative that raises money to give loans to Liberian widows living in a refugee camp in Ghana (where there are zero opportunities for anyone to make a living, let alone widowed mothers) to start their own small businesses.

I helped Kate design her business proposal back when she was just getting the organization started, and I didn’t even know how to use InDesign. Luckily those designs are lost to the world, but this is a flyer we jut put together last week for a woman in Kansas who is donating a huge percent of her Mary Kay sales to the LWI.

Check out lwinitiative.org for more about the organization.

Another from the vault.

I hope to soon only be posting current work, but there is just soo much old junk lying around here, so I figure, ‘Why not?’ These are painting/installations I created for a friend who was licensing Danish houseware products at a trade show in New York. All he knew is that the products had to be used, the pieces had to be easy to hang, and they had to be made and shipped from LA to NYC in a week for cheap. So I created some light, fun, everday images out of the products. It was going to cost an arm and a leg to have them shadow-box framed, so I purchased some canvases streched on 1x2s and just painted the back of the canvas and wood to make a faux-frame. I think they came out decent and are still in tact despite being lost by UPS for about a year on their return shipping from NYC to Austin, TX, where upon they unexpectedly arrived at my doorstep. Talk about mail art!

More pcards.

I’m going to add a couple of postcards I’ve received in the mail from my most favorite mail-art buddy, Emil337. She always finds and makes the best things to send in the mail. More to come First Post, the post that hurts the most.

Big girl job.

So it only took me a year, but I have finally helped produce some real graphic design. I can take about 0.2% of the credit for said design, but the folks where I currently intern were kind enough to let me put my grubby hands on a couple of projects they were working on. I’ve learned more through working on production of these projects in a few months than the whole of my life and am super grateful for that.

* The first project I’ve added here is a brochure for the Austin Film Society

Old school.

Digging through design archives of yore, I came across the LMU student design publication, Avant 360. My final semester at that fine institution,I was featured in Avant 360, and although most of my conscience is screaming to keep these old designs hidden—the article where I interview myself is too ridiculous not to share.

PicWheel.

This is a slightly old project, but fun nonetheless. I was visiting an old friend in Los Angeles who has an amazing balcony cactus garden. Sitting on her balcony is really like being on another planet, not smoggy hell-A. But I digress. I always try to bring a small token of appreciation when I crash on couches, so I made said friend a pinwheel out of photographs I had taken with my Diana camera of her and our friends on my previous trip to LA. I haven’t made another since, but custom pinwheels are definitely on my list of things to make as gifts in the near future.

Celebrating America.

Over the 4th of July this past summer, I took a beyond epic roadtrip to the heartland of America, Kansas. Lawrence, Kansas to be exact. The trip was filled with fireworks, slip and slides, anti-abortion billboards and transexual anarchists. It truly made me love this country. Unfortunately my camera broke. I managed to fix it, sorta. It took photographs, but the LCD screen died and a viewfinder is non-existent on my camera. Nonetheless, I snapped away as fast as I could during one 20 minute interval on July 3 and created this poster out of every photo that I took, regardless of how bad. And alot of them are really bad.

 

Reviving the post.

Alot of good things have been happening, and thanks to inspiration from my friends and former “art school” classmates, I’m getting it all on the netz. The first round of images I’m uploading are of lo-fi postcards I’ve made to send to said friends. For some reason I am much more on top of making, collecting and sending postcards than I am updating this newfangled technology. (Get off my lawn you darned kids!) I’ve always collected ridiculous postcards throughout my travels, both perplexed and enamoured by the outdated photography coupled with horrific typography. I’ll eventually scan all of those collected ones, but for now, here are my attempts to make mailboxes worldwide a little brighter.

* Sidenote: The ‘Free Roman’ postcard was Ms. Emily May’s and my first attempt to see if we can manage to get any postcards sent through the US mail censored. So far, no luck.

**(Sidenote)2: The black and white postcards are all xeroxed found images and quotes from the wonderful novel ‘Shantaram.’  The reverse side of the chupacabra image shows the written side containing all of the Wikipedia entry on ‘chupacabra’ that would fit.

Reviving the Game.

I almost forgot about the best job I’ve ever had.  Tory and I became the defacto golf cart decor girls at Coachella and Stagecoach. I wish I had pictures of more than these two, but once I track them down, I’ll add them. These two animals, however, took the cake.

We pitch Pebble Beach and Lion’s Municiple Golf Course later this week.