thegirlsownpaper

Don’t even get me started.  SO many great magazines… all gone!

Gourmet… (Food & Wine is still my fav, but Gourmet was interesting, too)

Dominio… (even though, I think they gave up long before the end)

House and Garden… (but I was at war with them just before their demise so I don’t feel so bad about them)

And Blueprint… oh, Blueprint… please come back, Blueprint.  (Yes, in many ways it was a silly little magazine focused on silly little things that silly little people thought they needed wanted, but the art direction was stellar… STELLAR!)

And the funny thing, I STILL have most of these magazines filed away (all of  Blueprint with the exception of the first one… somebody help a sister out), ready to flip open for instant design inspiration (well, NOT House & Garden)

But here’s one most of you may have forgotten about (or perhaps it was never even on your radar at all)

IKEA: Space.

The year: 2000!  2000?  Sort of blows your mine, doesn’t it?

I still remember the day the check for my subscription came back in the mail… UNCASHED… with a note saying that the magazine was folding.  oh noes! *whine* But, I loved it.  So sad.

I’m sort of having fun flipping through SPACE here on a snowy night in Virginia.  It’s kind of funny to look at these photos now.

In light of the iPad launch, that aqua-coloured iMac is sort of cracking me up.  And that two-inch thick mac laptop is hysterical.  Oh, we we so virginal and naive back then.

But one thing you gotta say about IKEA, the lines of their stuff is still pretty classic: Style never goes out of style!

However,  I can not forgive them for that white faux fur of the back of those puffy leather sofas.

No, just no!

Here…

First, the inspiration…

Now, my version…

Now, all I need to do is, hang it up over my work station and wait for the motivation to happen.

Yeah, probably not.

BTW: Happy New Year… and get up off your ass!

It doesn’t take much to entertain me.  And creating silly gift tags for office parties with fonts that I never use for anything is especially fun!

If you don’t know, a Yankee Swap is sort of like Secret Santa, only more cut-throat.  You open your gift, but if you decide that you don’t like it, you can swap with anyone else in the room who has already opened their gift.  Hence the cut-throat aspect!

Biographer…

Hate the name, but the font is beyond gorgeous!  Now all I need to do is find something to create using it!  Is it too late to use it for my (already late) Christmas cards?

Funny as HELL! Who knew that conversations with your client could be so much fun!

Watch out, though.  A certain illustration might not be safe for work… I mean, it’s definitely NOT safe for “my” work.

I wish I could say I thought of this, but I didn’t; I saw it first on Moo.

Hmm?  Rounded corners made with a cheap little corner cutter.  I never thought of that.

I then wondered if that same rounded corner technique would improve my business card (i.e. my blah business card).

It did.

Ergo, if that worked then surely it would improve my horribly staid corporate business card.

And it did.

Hmmm?  This rounded edge cutter thingamajig just might have an honored place right next to all my other previously thought useless office supplies.

Thanks to Moo (via twitter), I have just been made aware of this amazing blog, Mattson Creative, which showcases some amazing work.  I mean, I am in hysterics over how BEAUTIFUL the Pocono Modern Identity is!

Why wasn’t I paying attention in art school during that stupid logo design class?  I so suck at logos, yet other people can just churn them out like butter.  But no, I was too busy being the STAR of the figure drawing class.  Figure drawing? I haven’t drawn a figure in years.  A word of advice for you young, impressionable, new designers: drawing figures does NOT pay the bills!

That’s right, you mess with my favorite television shows and I show you no mercy.  I am still not over the fact that NBC canceled Life (staring the amazingly intelligent, entertaining and witty Damian Lewis).  I mean, how could they; one of the last (and I do mean last) of the intelligent, entertaining, and witty cop shows)… and Law and Order doesn’t count because it is neither intelligent, nor entertaining, nor witty!

But, I digress…

And then they had to go and pick a new font to use for their identity this year.  For some strange reason I felt drawn to it.

At first I thought it was Bree.  It sort of looked like Bree, acted like Bree, but it didn’t exactly smell of Bree. (*snort* Smell of Bree, get it?  Man, I crack myself up sometimes)*  A little more digging and research and I finally figured it out.

Houschka!

Hello.  Want!

I can’t help it, I think it’s beautiful.

I just might let NBC slide this time around and start watching their programming once again and just think, it was all because of a font.

There’s just something a “little bit” wrong about it to me. I feel I ought to be paying someone (yes, font addicts know these things) or that I’m cheating or that I’m a font whore or something.  Most the time if I see a free font, I just skip right by it to avoid my feelings of shame.

Plus, nine times out of ten I never use the free font in or on anything… until today.

Hello, Resonance Bold; Hello, Lavoisier.

Nice!

For this basic menu design, I think they actually work very, very well together”  Two, lonely, free fonts, working together cohesively for the good of all.

Quite frankly, I have no memory of where Lavoisier came from (sprang up out of a hole, perhaps?) but I downloaded Resonance from Ascender Fonts… I think. Geez, what a forgetful designer I have become; I really need to write this stuff down.

UPDATE: I believe I got Lavoisier here… I think.