Happy Birthday to my best chinchilla friend, Sasparilla! He’s 10 years old today.
If you haven’t already seen it, check out The Chilla Fix.
Many happy returns, little buddy.
Just launched, new work for SARA (Sharing America’s Resources Abroad), a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Ohio Conference of the United Church of Christ that distributes medical supplies, equipment, and expertise throughout the world.
The SARA group was looking for a site redesign that would be a better showcase (in words, photographs, and video) for their outreach efforts, as well as a driver for donations and a way to generate interest and cooperation from similar organizations. Existing Flickr galleries were incorporated into a photo page, and Wordpress installations drive the News and Events sections of the site. Other pages are edited using the lightweight Perch content management system.
The blues, golds, and light browns of the color palette represent the global medical background of the organization without appearing too clinical, and are a nod in the direction of the U.N. Type consists of New Caledonia for the logotype and printed text materials, with DIN complementing.
Grady Sizemore at Progressive Field, a gift for a friend. Acrylic on Aquabord, 11 × 14 inches.
Detail:
Following a website redesign, Troutman Vineyards’s entire range of wines will be getting new labels to match. The revised identity leverages the Troutman family’s rich agricultural and viticultural history, and makes prominent use of family photographs. The colors take their cues from the imagery as well as a refinement of the original identity’s palette. The elegant workhorse typeface Bulmer has been paired up with Adobe Jenson.
First up, the popular Farmer’s wines:
Long before the grocery store bread aisle the wheat was harvested using horses and the skilled hands of our friends and neighbors. When the weather was good there would be enough flour to put bread on the table for the year. Now when the summer is warm and dry we make wine for the table. ¶ Farmer’s Blush is a sweet rosé made from a blend of lightly pressed red grapes. Best enjoyed chilled with a fresh loaf of bread.
Grandpa Ralph kept his horses long after he bought his first tractor, and we still grow Concord grapes long after more fashionable grape varieties have come along. Maybe it’s a way to honor the past, or maybe it’s just stubborn farmers being stubborn. ¶ Farmer’s Red is a sweet red wine best enjoyed chilled with peanut butter sandwiches.
In the fall of 1907 the Troutmans gathered with their neighbors to harvest potatoes, pausing long enough to take a photograph. Over one hundred years later the horses are gone, and now we gather each fall to harvest acres of grapes. ¶ Farmer’s White is made entirely from Ohio-grown Vidal Blanc grapes. Aromatic and fruity, this semi-sweet white wine is a perfect match with soft cheeses or an apple pie.
Next, a selection of varietals:
And for the fruit wines, vintage botanical illustrations were repurposed to fit the historical theme.
Two more ink bottles for my collection, found in an antique store over the weekend. The first is Carter’s Midnight Blue-Black. I’d like to find more of these in different colors and in better shape like the ones in the photo below (from Pendemonium.com).
And second is a bottle of Higgins American India Ink still in the box.
A while back, I joined the Winery at Wolf Creek/Troutman Vineyards folks for a meeting with the Maize Valley Winery staff to discuss joint marketing opportunities. Since three wineries were to be involved, the idea of a “threesome” emerged pretty quickly. After the giggling and jokes subsided, the concept was refined, if I can say that, to the slogan, “Are you up for a threesome?” And since the owner of Maize is an avid texter, it was decided that the slogan should be written out in chat lingo, which, according to www.transl8it.com would be:
R U ^ 4 a 3sum?
Okay, that was fine, that was something I could work with. But then things went a step further, and what we ended up with is something I’m still not entirely sure about. To make the slogan more of a puzzle, the “sum” part was to be a sigma, referring of course to the AutoSum button in Microsoft Excel. Everyone would get that, right?
I don’t believe everyone will get that. But at least the people I’ve shown the design to seem to get the message in context, even if they aren’t aware of AutoSum (I wasn’t, even though I’d used it before to set up some spreadsheets). So you’ll get that message when you go to the splash screen of the microsite I set up, and you’ll have a choice of whether or not you are, indeed, up for a threesome.
Some really lovely house numbers found, surprisingly, at our local Home Depot.
I left Facebook this week. I won’t go into great detail over the reasons why I made the decision, but suffice to say there were plenty. Privacy issues were the most concerning, but also, I just never really got comfortable using the service. The interface didn’t make any sense to me. There didn’t seem to be any discernible logic behind what Facebook decided should show up in my News Feed (and I never understood the necessity of News Feed versus Live Feed). Personal settings were difficult to access and those settings continually changed. Also annoying was the constant barrage of mindless updates from friends who weren’t really friends but felt it necessary to be connected to me. And again, privacy issues.
I really like this poster for the 2010 Cannes Festival. Featuring Juliette Binoche photographed by Brigitte Lacombe.
