Black Collar Café

The boys over at Camp 4 Collective continue to astonish me with their storytelling, creativity and execution.  Layer on top that they’re pulling it all together on a laptop in a tent at 6,000m on the roof of Nepal and transmitting from a sat phone and they truly stand alone.  Check out the trailer at Camp4Collective.

A video from Chase Jarvis’s excellent talk on creativity to the Art Director’s Club of Denver.  The hour long presentation is definitely worth a watch for Black Collar Workers anywhere.

File this under “wish I’d thought of that”, Dag Soderberg recently left a creative director post to release a version of the Bible, illustrated (and thus interpreted) with modern stock (read abstract) photography.  I’m not a religious person by any means, but a chance to lend your influence to easily the world’s most well read book sounds like a pretty daunting yet rewarding challenge.  Check out more at http://bibleilluminated.com/

In the last 15 years, laptops and the internet have fueled a new generation of freelancers, telecommuters and entrepreneurs. Many have turned to home offices, cafes and occasionally, executive suites, while they hammer away at the next Google, the next Amazon or the next TiVo. While most love the freedom and flexibility of being on their own and being their own boss, some miss the camaraderie and creativity of an office environment. Unfortunately there is large financial and logistical jump from the home/cafe space to leasing your own office, so a new school of thought is jumping in to fill that void, “coworking”. Deemed “a cooperative for the modern age” by the International Herald Tribune, coworking sites are cropping up around the country and across the globe.  These spaces are often outfitted with just the simplest of trappings, workers renting simple desks, WiFi connections and an almost mandatory caffeine source.  Armed with laptops and cellphones, this highly mobile workforce comes together to share ideas, talents and resources. Sound like something you’d be interested in? See if there is a coworking space near you. Different coworking sites offer different flavors, but the common ethos remains the same: a space where independents, entrepreneurs and creatives can assemble to stoke the flames of the next big idea.

Being in the image business, I’m always keeping an eye out for cutting edge work and spend a lot of time looking at other photographers’ work and new commercial campaigns coming down the pipe.  Often the most breathtaking work is met with a “How’d they do that!?!?!” and the answer in reality is quite often “in post”.  Digital imaging retouching is an art-form all in itself, and I’ve stumbled across a great one in Christophe Huet. The site features plenty of great visuals, some of which you may recognize from recent campaigns, but one of the most engaging features is the Making Of section, featuring step-by-step illustrations of the different stages of the retouching process.  Fascinating.

I’m not one for urban living, I’d be left longing for greenspace that urban centers always have in short supply. But even where space is not at a premium, I wish the thrust of today’s architecture more often focused where modern design intersects with efficient use of space, and smart.space by design firm Avro | Ko is brimming with plenty of both.

Adam Kalkin’s Quik House format has been adapted by Illy Cafe as a temporary installation, the Illy Cafe Push Button House, in NYC’s Time Warner Center for the month of December.  Formed from recycled shipping containers, modified to serve a higher purpose (hence “upcycling”), the one-off installation transforms at a push of a button to a fully-functioning, brilliantly designed cafe space in under 90 seconds.

Welcome to the FLOWmarket, a conceptual store created by Mads Hagstroem. The FLOWmarket was created to showcase “scarcity goods, imbalances in the 3 FLOW dimensions (individual, collective and environmental flows) transformed in to physical products.” Sound weird? It is, but it’s also thought-provoking and the exhibit as a whole is rather fetching. The site is quite interesting, but try to catch the exhibit at one of it’s installations worldwide.

I read a lot of magazines, probably too many. To the point that it’s a separate line on my Schedule C. I really enjoy British mags, there’s something about British writing that is far superior to their American counterparts. Maybe it’s the slightly wider world view, not being the world’s 500 pound gorilla. I happened across a new one recently while walking through Dulles, Monocle. Official tagline is “Briefings on global affairs, business, design and culture,” all brought to you by Wallpaper founder Tyler Brulé. Pick it up (if you can find it) and take a read.

excerpted from Arena Magazine, penned by Andrew Mueller

“It would be a worthwhile, and overdue, maneuver for people to disdain most things they’re encouraged to regard as fun, and experiment instead with such disregarded virtues as probity, courtesy and application. It might actually make them happy.

For the wretched reality of the hedonist, invariably, is the they’re attention-seekings dickheads who want everyone to believe they’re having an enviably fantastic time, in order to compensate for the loneliness and boredom eating them alive from the inside.

The solution is not the imposition of a regime of Cromwellian abstemiousness – however appealing that may seem as one trudges through the wreckage of a Friday night in any high street. It is, rather, a collective discovery of the fact that having things, be they flat-screen televisions or prolific sex lives, does not engender a fraction of the satisfaction of doing things, or making things. Anything great human beings have done has been an act of creation, not consumption.

Though few corporations would profit from encouraging people to write things, build things, learn things, think of things, accomplish things – or failing all that, to sit around quietly with friends and discuss stuff- the challenge of confronting the ennui we sublimate in idiotic distractions is worth rising to. Living for today only increases the likelihood of tomorrow being just as bloody awful.”