One of the many windfalls of moving our studio to the downtown Arts District is the wealth of local small businesses in the neighborhood. Amongst the bike shops and cafes and many, many third wave coffee joints, there’s also a high-end market.

Most of the businesses in this neighborhood are new and all of them serve a clientele—ourselves included—that simply didn’t exist here even a few years ago. The area was largely anything but residential until recently, filled with vast warehouses and shipping centers, mostly, but now, after laying empty and dormant for years, those same spaces are being converted to living spaces and working spaces and the change in the area is undeniably evident. Yes, it’s gentrification, but it seems like mostly a victimless gentrification with so few residents in the area to begin with and one that’s mostly welcome. Maybe that’s naive or simply wishful thinking, being on the end of it all that we are, but it feels like an exciting time to be in the area and, though a lot of the businesses popping up might be a tad over-precious, we enjoy most of it, especially when it comes to lunch time.

Case in point, said high-end market, the Urban Radish, as they put it “a 21st century Mom and Pop community food store”. They’re local—as they say, they can see the market from their living room, and the market itself is pretty great, carrying some of our favorite harder-to-find vegan-friendly items like Mother in Law’s Kimchi out of NYC and even some vegan cheeses from Miyoko’s. Think a tiny Whole Foods or, for anyone from back east, Union Market.

The market also offers a kitchen and cold + hot bar, with a decent amount of vegan options like fresh salads, noodle dishes, and sandwiches. Best among them, the vegan shiitake mushroom banh mi, with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, a sriracha almond butter, cilantro, pickled carrot and radish, and english cucumber on a soft grilled baguette. Everything on the sandwich is great, but the spicy almond butter makes the sandwich, lending a beautifully creamy base to blend with the bread and provide a great contrast to the pickled tartness and savory umami tastes of the other elements of the sandwich.

Hanco’s will always have our hearts when it comes to bahn mi, but with that place 3000+ miles away, this is a great, likely healthier and very tasty alternative. Keep it up, Radish!

Light-leak-filled, slightly scarred Holga print from a trip to Italy some time back.

Going through old files, we came across these two album cover design drafts we did for my old band, Speedwell. A few years back, our old drummer, Jon, had a bunch of songs remastered and released as limited edition discography through Coolidge Records.

We’d designed these two cover options that, in the end, we didn’t end up using, which is totally understandable—I think they both convey much more our current-day design aesthetic than they do the sound of that band in the nineties and early aughts. The final design came from Jon’s now wife, Laura, and convey that time and sound much better. We like these nonetheless, removed from that sound, and thought we’d share.

You can listen to and download the tracks from the album via iTunes and Bandcamp and read a way too long interview we did with everyone on the event of the release back in 2013.

Moon reflected on ocean, flipped.

We just added some print work did with UNICEF’s polio team to our portfolio.

We’ve been working with UNICEF for a number of years now on communications strategies to help end polio worldwide. Though the disease is now only endemic to three countries in the world—Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan—differences in culture, lack of education on the disease, and lack of access have made it extremely difficult to address in those countries. In an effort to help UNICEF and their partners eradicate polio worldwide, we created this ‘Passport to a Polio-Free World’—an education print piece that, along with its inserts, follows the theme of an oversized travel passport, with stamp-style callouts, passport-like page imagery, and the distinct rounded page and cover corners.

You can read more about the piece and see additional images of the finished product in our print portfolio.

One of the many things I didn’t quite realize before moving west was that there are many, many craft breweries that don’t quite reach all the from coast-to-coast, or at least aren’t as prevalent in Los Angeles as they are in, say, New York. So, these days, I try to coordinate all east coast excursions with both a focused indulgence  in some of my favorite hard-to-finds—Avery, Founders, Captain Lawrence—and some exploration into new (to me) breweries. This past trip back to Virginia in December, I came across one local beer at Richmond’s reigning health food/veg-friendly champ, Ellwood Thompson’s—the Virginia Black Bear Russian Imperial Stout from Lickinghole Creek Brewery.

Now, admittedly, I mostly bought the beer because of the very cool illustrated label, but I’m also a fan of imperial stouts—dark, heavy, boozy beers that balance malty sweetness with an earthy bitterness. This one, it turns out, won the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild gold medal in the imperial stout category, and the win was well-deserved. Ten specialty grains comprise the backbone of the beer and high alpha American hops lend a slightly floral bitterness characteristic notes of dark chocolate and coffee. So this, yet again, is an instance of actually being able to judge a book by it’s cover: cool label; excellent beer. We’ve written to this effect many times before, but it just goes to show that, when you believe in a product, it’s worth it to follow through and show that in every aspect of that product. Did you go to all the trouble to make an awesome beer? Don’t phone it in and give it a shitty label, man.

Getting past just the great beer though, Lickinghole seems like a pretty fucking cool brewery that I totally want to check out next time I’m back. As they tell it:

“Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery is a water-conscious, biologically friendly farm brewery carefully crafting unique and innovative beers. Set on a 290 acre farm in the heart of Virginia. LCCB grows hops, barley, herbs and spices for use in our Estate Series of beers. Lickinghole Creek is a water-conscious brewery. We brew with well water drawn from the deep. Our wastewater is purified on site and returned to the Lickinghole Creek watershed.”

And they give $1 for every barrel sold wholesale and $10 for every barrel sold for on-premise retail to hyper-local non-profits of the month in the realms of historical preservation, sustainable agricultural, cancer research, and the like. Brewery founder Sean-Thomas Humphrey let us know that all of Lickinghole Creek’s beer are vegan-friendly too, thus the bear’s peace sign, I guess.

Now that we’re well into to the new year and most of our friends, family, and clients have gotten our annual new year’s cards, we can safely write them up here.

We’ve been sending out holiday and new year’s cards for years now, first making them by hand, then, as our business grew, beginning to source out printing through various traditional letterpress shops that we like working with. Over the years, we’ve refined them, pulling from lyrics from some of our favorite songs and illustrations that reflect our love of animals.

This past year, as many already know, we lost our beloved cat of nearly twelve years, Allister (who was likely around 17 years old himself). We took that loss very, very hard. Honestly, we still think about him every day and our hearts still ache for that furry feline with such an impossibly big personality. So we clearly had to honor his memory with this year’s cards.

Along with our illustration of Al, the cards feature the chorus from Mr. Little Jeans‘ “Oh Sailor”, a song that served as kind of an anthem for us as we drove cross-country from Brooklyn to Los Angeles with Allister and our dog, Owen, in the back seat. The lyrics seem fitting to us.

You can read our 2014 interview with Monica Birkenes—AKA Mr. Little Jeans—and leaf through our various posts on the majestic cat that was Mr. Allister Mcvittes.

Happy new year, y’all; appreciate what you got and hold on to it tight.

A huge thanks to all the friends who came out this past Saturday to help celebrate my 40th, and an even huger thanks to Katie, who planned the whole shindig, held at Kombucha Dog, complete with DJ + dancing, food from Blue Window, liberal libations, and a beautifully vulgar peanut butter chocolate cake from Clara Cakes.

I’m officially wise! Or wizened. Either one.

Coming hot off the heels of our December 2015 wrap-up and best-of mix, this month’s mixtape also marks our year anniversary of putting these compilations out. In all likelihood, this project’s ended up being as beneficial for us as it has been for anyone else, if not more so, putting us on a more deliberate, scheduled path of musical exploration that definitely and rewardingly takes us out of our comfort zone, but we nonetheless hope others have enjoyed this music too. At the end of the day, these mixes are about finding great new music and we’re happy that they’ve been accomplishing that on any level.

This month’s mix benefits from last month’s being a yearly retrospective, essentially giving us two months of new music to pull from, so it’s a pretty great one. We’ve got a really amazing track from Oakland’s Waterstrider (who have an equally amazing video for the same song); a chilled out, beautiful new song from opera-trained New Zealand musician, Andrew Keoghan; a song from the newly reunited Brazilian Girls; one from a Seattle band we’re liking a lot, Deep Sea Diver; and we’ve finally made room for a fun new collaborative effort between Los Angeles’ own TOKiMONSTA + Gavin Turek.

We’ve also got a track (featuring Rhye‘s Milosh) from a Brooklyn-based musician known as j.viewz (née Jonathan Dagan) who is blowing our minds. His DNA Project gives us an in-depth look at how every song on his album is created, step-by-step, as it’s created. Visiting his site, you might come upon a song that’s completed and essentially how it’ll appear on the final album, or you might come upon a snippet that’s destined to become a song, and at points along the way, the artist shows you the inspiration or individual sounds that make up songs or parts of songs. It’s a beautiful and inventive way to think about song-writing and album-making and, to top it all off, it’s presented via one of the most gorgeous, exciting websites we’ve seen in a long time (skillfully designed by the team at Hello Monday, who you should hire…I mean, if you don’t hire us).

So, yeah, we’ve got musician AND designer crush going on.

Give the whole mixtape a listen below; below that, a quick video from j.viewz’ site on creating a beat out of a river, a dolphin, and some leaves.

Clearly we went to The Broad again.

Turns out we missed a great deal when went shortly after the new museum opened, chiefly, for me, Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance art piece, The Visitors. For the piece, Icelandic artist Kjartansson invited friends and fellow musicians up to a dilapidated, gothically beautiful mansion in upstate New York and recorded them all performing an hour-plus long song in unison, each in different rooms of the mansion. The result was personally touching for me—it brought me to tears and, once I walked into the room where the piece is running, with nine dedicated HD projections and associated speakers, I couldn’t leave.

It’s beautiful, haunting, emotionally stunning, and any words I write or images I post of it will, in my opinion, fall far short of it as a work of art. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to make plans to experience it as soon as humanly possible. It’s now one of my favorite performance pieces ever.

Oh. And one of the instruments that makes up the song is a cannon being fired.