BruceHartman.net

I realize you’d be paying for the design as much as the product itself, but 136 Euros seems pretty high for what this is.

I do, however, really like the idea of it.

It makes think about picking up a cross stitch needle again. Yeah, I said it… I’ve been known to cross stitch. And none of this counted, pre-patterned cross-stitching either, I’m talking full-on freehand, baby—live without a net. I don’t have anything I did, but I do remember a particularly intricate bible-versed bookmark I made during my church-going, missionary’s-daughter-dating days.

How about I try and string together a few more hyphenated words?

Via Design Milk

A friend from work has started a side business making cakes. She’s been doing it for a year or so already and her skills have gone from good to great in that time. I’ve been hosting her site since she started and had intended to help out with a logo and other design work but just hadn’t gotten to it until now.

I did most of the work yesterday and just now finished up the back-and-forth over the last couple of details. Here’s the progression…

This was the very first draft. The colors are all over the place and the typeface I used for “CAKE COMPANY” is too… I don’t know. I sent this to her just as a “this is the direction I’m going” kind of thing. She replied that she liked the direction. And shortly there after I refined it to this:

As far as the colors go, we hadn’t really talked about specifics for the logo, but we had discussed colors for the website. She said that she liked pink with blue or brown. I decided to stick with brown to play up the idea of chocolate. The other thing I was going for, as I said to her, was the idea of an old-timey sign that you might see hanging above the door of a shop in a small main-street sort of town. She replied:

Yup definitely like this - I like the brown so if we could do brown and pink that would be awesome

I went back to work. I started by making the outside border a lot stronger and modifying the text of Batter Up slightly (I think I rotated the p a hair to the left, and pushed the letters in Batter around some too. After I finished up, I sent this:

She replied:

I don’t particularly care for the white (cake company and the design to the left and right of it). Let’s try it with all brown with the pink background and then brown background with pink writing.

So I sent this:

She wrote back the the flourishes should be brown as well. I purposefully didn’t send them as brown the first time around because I felt like they would overpower the text. I told her so, but sent the change along anyway.

I still think the flourishes should be white, but in the end, it’s her logo. I’m still happy with how it turned out, though. It reminds me of a carton of Neapolitan Ice Cream… :)

Now to begin rebuilding her website.

And I still have no idea exactly what I’ll do with them, but the one thing I do know is that they are really neat.

Of the four, one is almost one solid color of green while the others vary in density, like a filigree of avocado skin over a lighter shade of green. I prefer the filigreed shells as the texture is more pronounced. For all I know, those are the lesser quality shells.

The thickness seems to be about 1/8 of an inch or so (there’s a 1/4 hole drilled in the end that was used to empty the contents). I imagine it’d take a pretty serious wallop to crack one of these monsters open.

I think I’ll need to get a Dremel (yeah, crafty guy that I am I don’t own a Dremel) before attempting to carve these things.

For all I know everyone else on the planet has been using Amie Street for ages now and—as is usually the case—I’m just now showing up to the party… far later than is fashionable.

I found it after searching around for a friend of a friend who happens to be an extremely talented singer/songwriter (Molly McGinn if you’re interested). I had a few of Molly’s tracks on my computer from her MySpace page, and was interested in seeing if she had anything else available. Sure enough, I found a link to her page at Amie Street where she was selling a full album. If you like folky, Americana type music, then buy the album now, it’s worth plenty more than the $8.88 I paid for it.

But I digress… the Amie Street concept is a little different from your usual online music store. Seems anyone can list music for sale. A track starts at free, and as it grows in popularity the price increases to a maximum of ninety-eight cents. There are incentives offered to users as a means of helping to promote the newer music, which ends up benefiting both the user and the artist. It’s a really clever system that takes the continually expanding social networks concept into a new direction. Personally, the socialization of Web 2.0 has only managed to reinforce how socially inept I am, but for the vast majority of folks online who’re maximizing these networks, Amie Street is a great example of a truly useful site that provides a real return to its user.

I’m not sure if something like this would serve any sort of practical purpose…

… but damn if it isn’t a beautiful piece of kinetic art.

via No Commercial Potential (the guy behind the Octophant)