A hearty congratulations to same-sex couples in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin who may now be legally wed due to the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear cases from those states seeking to keep their same-sex marriage bans in place. And an equally hearty thanks to the Supreme Court justices who catapulted those states into the cultural, ethical here-and-now.

What’s more, this ruling may clear the war more similar ruling in other states. According to CNN:
“Experts say its refusal to hear the cases from those five states also means that six more states — Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, West Virginia, and Wyoming — could soon have to lift their bans on same-sex marriage, because they are covered by the same circuit appeals courts that initially struck down the prohibitions.”

We’re digging into our own graphic archives for this tribute, way back to the summer of 2011, when New York State passed the Marriage Equality Act.

So welcome to the 21st century, Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. We’re happy to have you.

Tomorrow, our first major labor of love since founding our own company comes to fruition.

Tomorrow we officially open the doors to MooShoes Los Angeles, the first expansion for OG purveyors of vegan shoes and longtime friends + clients, Erica + Sara Kubersky.

Obviously, the company itself is a longtime passion for Erica + Sara, with origins in the sisters’ shared childhood compassion for animals. But  now, after nearly ten years of growing MooShoes’ brand professionally and spending just as many years building lasting friendships with Erica + Sara, Katie + I have excitedly taken MooShoes Los Angeles under our wings as our own, choosing the lines we carry, designing the space, and working to create an identity for MooShoes here that reflects both its universally compassionate roots and Los Angeles markedly…Los Angeles vibe.

So, correct—no rain boots.

In short, we’re excited about this, folks.

MooShoes Los Angeles is located at 3116 Sunset in Silver Lake and opens for the first time Saturday at 11AM.

Come by and see this guy if you get a chance.

I’m not saying we’re World War Z-esque Brad Pitts or anything (how cool that the protagonist in that story is a UN worker though?), but we have done a good bit of work with the United Nations over the years.

We told you a couple weeks back about the print + Web publications we created for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; even more recently, we wrapped up a longterm print project for the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund—their 2013 Annual Report.

We started in on the concept for the piece way back at the beginning of this year, working with their communications team to envision a more image-forward, streamlined publication that could more easily be digested by their audience. Meaning leaner on text content, heavier on attention-grabing photos and the visual real estate dedicated to them, and a lot more creative translation of data to understandable graphics.

You can see more accurate, less arty photos of the report in our portfolio, where you’ll also be able to find some of our other work for various UN offices.

Okay, for the sake of newcomers or any souls who’ve been graced by the absence of our life stories of late, quick recap—Katie + I have been working over the past few months to open MooShoes Los Angeles for longtime friends + clients, Erica + Sara Kubersky, who started their vegan footwear + accessory store MooShoes in NYC way back in 2001.

For anyone interested in the minutia, feel free to take a look at our original announcement back in June, complete with official press release. Here’s a succinct list of answers to anticipated questions for everyone else:

• Yes we will still be pursuing and even expanding our primary pursuit and longtime company, raven + crow studio, the Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-based graphic design studio that excels at not being jerks;

• No, we have not, in fact, had much time to sleep, hang out with friends, or play Super Mario Brothers lately; yes, this saddens us greatly,but we believe it to be for a greater good;

• Our principal role at MooShoes Los Angeles is that of Creative Directors, so we’ve designed the space and worked with the contractor to make those ideas into real world environments, expanding the MooShoes brand we’ve worked to grow for nearly ten years now;

• Additionally, we’ve hired an awesome staff, so come by and say hi; we’ll definitely be at the store from time to time too, especially early on, so come by and give us a hi-five and/or slice of vegan pizza;

• No, we do not anticipate hosting an inordinate number of stray cats at the store—all cats should be shipped directly to the New York location;

• Yes, you do look good in those pants.

One of the tasks we took on with the new space was designing a custom wallpaper for the store featuring hand-illustrated lettering and images of animals from the wild kingdom along with a couple of our favorite companion animals—former NYC store cat Bowery + co-owner Erica Kubersky’s dog Libby.

Last week, we got a request via Instagram to make digital wallpapers for smart phones, tablets, and the like out of that wallpaper. Here, we’re kindly obliging.

Click—or right-click to download—the various icons to the right according to your desired device. These are clearly pretty iOS-/Apple-centric, but what do you want? We’re graphic designers, man.

Honestly though, they should translate decently to Windows devices too. If they don’t, drop us a line and let us know what you’ve got—we’ll make an adjusted version and let you know when it’s up.

We’re hoping to do more with the pattern down the road, so stay tuned.

And remember—MooShoes Los Angeles opens this Saturday! Come on by if you’re in the area!

There are only a few bands that I feel I associate with my coming of age as an early, twenty-something adult in New York City. One of them is definitely Bishop Allen.

From the start, band founders Justin Rice and Christian Rudder rooted their sound in solid, hook-filled songwriting while filtering it through the indie, twee stylings trademark of the early aughts. As those genres grew and evolved though, bands had to find their footing along the way, some faltering, some finding even more substantial avenues for their music. After a significant hiatus, Bishop Allen’s proven that they fall soundly in the latter camp with their most recent release, Lights Out, allowing songwriting to take a front seat to stylistic choices.

We got a chance to check in with frontman + primary songwriter Justin Rice (above, second form the left) as they prepare to play Los Angeles. Read on to learn about the band’s evolution over the years, Justin’s view on the Web’s impact on music, and our mutual infatuation with obscure British 90s punk. And give a listen to literal album opener, “Start Again”.

raven + crow: So, first question’s gotta be one you’re fielding a lot lately—where have you guys been?

Justin Rice: From 2002 until 2009, we had extreme band momentum—every show was followed by another show, every tour by another tour, every album cycle by another album cycle. It was great, but there wasn’t much time for the ins and outs of daily life. So we took a year off. Turns out band momentum works the other way, too—a year off made us a body at rest, and one year quickly became three.

We reconvened, reassessed, gathered our strength, gave a big push, and started writing Lights Out two years ago. We finished it in December, it came out in August, and we’ve been back on the road gathering steam since then.

That strikes me as a pretty common thread that runs through bands who’ve come of age just as the whole industry was beginning to shift…but also, I fell like, just a manifestation of growing past your twenties and getting your shit together, whether you’re in a band or not. So, was the stepping away from Bishop Allen also a stepping away from music for most of you, or were you working on other musical projects independently too?

Darbie and I recorded songs as The Last Names. We put out an album—Wilderness—and released 40 covers in 2012. I scored two movies and a TV show, and helped record and mix songs for other bands, including a great Trummors record. Darbie started a line of jewelry and paper goods—Field Guide Design—which you can find at various boutiques, at craft fairs, and on Etsy. Christian sold the company he co-founded—OkCupid—and wrote a book called Dataclysm that came out a few weeks ago. Michael recorded and toured like crazy with Yellow Ostrich.

Okay, that’s a lot of information to process, but firstly—Bishop Allen Christian is that Christian‽ I had no idea.

But great work with Over and Around the Clove, man—Anne + Dave from Trummors are longtime friend and it’s awesome that they just so happen to be an awesome band.

Thanks! I’m a huge Trummors fan, and helping them with their record was a privilege and a great experience. We’re thrilled that they’re joining us for our West Cost shows, including the LA show at the Bootleg. It’s going to be fun. Also, we’ve got a night together in Big Sur, which feels like a real Trummors-esque place.

Oh, Big Sur is super-Trummors. We’re also really big fans of Yellow Ostrich—did an interview with Alex a little while ago about how great that most recent record is. And love Darbie’s work. In short, great job being excellent as not Bishop Allen, Bishop Allen.

Back on the whole issue of struggling to make a living off of music as life shifts around you, I guess it should be obvious, but it’s so much harder to make time for music—traditionally something that doesn’t pay that great for most of us—as we start getting older and, say, want spend our money on things other than instant ramen and gas money for a show two states away. But it’s kind of a bummer too, right? That that’s a reality?

I never got the memo about growing up. Making music is a definitely a struggle, and that struggle does indeed become more sharply defined as I get older, but I can’t imagine *not* doing it. It’s a strange compulsion, akin (and related to) toe-tapping—if you’ve got the nervous energy to do it, you find yourself compelled to no matter what. If the consequence is months of ramen, which it often is, then you can curse your impulses, but you can’t necessarily curb them. Writing a new song—making something from nothing—is a kick for me, and chasing that kick is ever deeper ingrained, and so I always find myself adjusting my life and my expectations to accommodate music. Damn the torpedoes!

That’s the best possible response to that question. You pass the test, Justin!

It seems like, for most of its existence, Bishop Allen’s always been a band that revolved around that initial partnership between you and Christian. Do you feel like that’s still mostly the case or has the band’s core grown beyond the two of you at this point?

Every record and every tour is a reinvention. For this record, Christian had less time to give than before—he was busy writing his book—but Darbie Nowatka and Michael Tapper contributed more. Darbie helped edit the lyrics and hone the songs; Michael helped not only with the drums, but with every aspect of the arrangements. We also enlisted Dave Lerner from Trummors, who played bass, and Matthew Cullen, a friend of ours from Kingston, who produced, mixed, and played a fair amount of guitar. So much of the work is done alone—writing, coming up with and refining parts, practicing—and we’ve never been a band that sits down altogether to jam things out. So, while there’s always a lot of participation and collaboration, it’s never quite the same people taking on the same roles.

That makes sense and seems like a natural way to positively evolve a band’s sound along with its circumstance. And yeah, it’s great to hear Michael had a lot of input on this record—we’ve always greatly admired his creativity as a drummer and—more generally—as a musician. His drum set in Yellow Ostrich is nuts, man.

Michael was a big part of making this record. We’ve been playing together for a while, and I imagine we’ll continue to do so for a long time. He’s awesome.

Here here! We’ve asked this a lot lately, but—not to harp on an issue—but what are your thoughts on how the music industry changed with this whole Internet thing?

I’ve never quite felt like a part of the music industry. Music has always been about working with close friends in little rooms, seeing what we can come up with that’s interesting and satisfying to us. The Internet has allowed us to get our music out there and to find willing ears despite the fact that we’ve never sought the blessing or imprimatur of any kind of executive or gatekeeper. We came of age with the Internet, and without it, it’s hard to imagine our music making it much further than the club on the corner.

I applaud your use of the word, ‘imprimatur’, sir. Do you think it’s helping or hurting creativity in music though? The Internet, not the word ‘imprimatur’.

The idea that you can make music that other people might hear helps inspire creativity, as does the ability to seek out cool songs from all over the place. That said, the amount of music out there and the constant, shifting chatter of endlessly new material can be overwhelming. There’s a lot to take in, and it’s easy to feel lost in the chaos. Some days it helps; some days it hurts.

Well-said. How about New York—am I correct in thinking I heard you all moved upstate recently?

We moved 100 miles North of New York City to Kingston, a rough-and-tumble town on the banks of the Hudson and at the feet of the Catskills, four years ago.

How do you like it up there?

It’s great up here. There are a lot of cool neighborhoods—ours is all stately-yet-shambolic Victorians—and tons of artists and musicians. I actually know more musicians now than I did in Brooklyn. It’s a little underpopulated, and there’s a raw potential that’s exciting and inspiring. We can also hike amazing trails, go canoeing, tubing, or flyfishing, and buy fruit and vegetables right from the farm.

Christ. And to think I moved all the way to California for that shit. Do you miss Brooklyn at all?

When we moved here, we were worried we’d fall off the map—New York City felt like the center of the world, and when we left we were concerned we’d end up isolated and alone. A few months after moving here, we realized that fear was unfounded. We’re so much more productive, and we’ve met so many great people, and though Brooklyn is still a quick train ride away, we find ourselves heading down there less and less. Honestly, I don’t even think about Brooklyn that much anymore.

Man, if you haven’t already, you should read Goodbye to All That. It’s this anthology of writers who lived in, loved, and left New York City and what you just said strikes me as so that book. I just feel like—especially in the past few years—we’ve seen a lot of change in NYC and Brooklyn. There’s been such a dramatic shift in the economics that’s become so much harder to ignore. Do you think it’s gotten harder to live there recently? Or we all just getting old?

It’s definitely getting more and more expensive to live in Brooklyn. When I do visit the neighborhoods I lived in during my ten-year stint there, they’re almost unrecognizable—our old practice space, for instance, is now million-dollar doorman condos. And places where I once sought refuge are dressed-up, developed, and incredibly crowded. There are a lot of reasons—the rezoning of the waterfront in North Brooklyn, the creation of the water taxi, the waves of development that follow artists’ reclamation of dead industrial spaces—and they’ve all combined to create a really high rate of change. It’s not just us getting older—whole neighborhoods have been rewritten dollar by dollar. I’ve noticed the same thing happening on other tour stops—Fishtown in Philly, for instance—but in Brooklyn, it’s extreme.

It makes me sad, in one sense, but what makes me more…just worried is that kind of thing spreading to all of the urban centers in America. I feel like American cities are going to be exclusive to the über-rich in ten years or something. We’re going Hunger Games, people!

Back to you though, you recorded your forthcoming album, Lights Out, upstate too, right? Do you feel like that had an impact on the writing or the sound of the album?

We recorded Lights Out in our attic studio, and mixed it in Matthew Cullen’s studio a few blocks away. The record was written and recorded after our move here, and thematically and sonically, it was heavily influenced by our new digs. A lot of the record is about what it means to move on, and about what you can discover by committing to a change. Some of the songs are metaphors, but those metaphors are also literal: “Why I Had To Go” is about why we left New York City, for instance. We also took advantage of musicians we met here in town, and their contributions really shaped the sound.

Where does the album title come from?

We had a giant list of possible titles. We liked the ring of Full Moon Fever, the Tom Petty record, and Deserter’s Songs, the Mercury Rev record (Mercury Rev also live in Kingston), and we wanted something that had a sense of longing, transition, and abandon. Lights Out is a moment of change, and it can either connote bed time or party time—an ambivalence that seemed appropriate.

I like it. We really, really love “Why I Had to Go”. It got us excited to hear the rest of the album when we first heard it. What’s with the video? It’s really fun, but any deeper meaning there? I know Dave + Anne (Trummors) are featured in there—was it basically just a bunch of friends getting together and having fun?

The video features everyone who worked on the record plus a bunch of our friends in and around town hula-hooping in slow motion. Not only did hula-hooping seem to enact the lyrics of the song — it’s “an endless repetition of an action” — but it gave people an all-consuming task that made them unselfconscious in front of the camera. We were hoping to get natural expressions of innate character, and to show the humanity that comes out in commonplace activity. It’s like dancing, but with a giant hoop to distract you.

I think it read that on the original hula-hoop packaging. Are there any other great new bands that you’ve been listening to a lot lately?

I like the new Parquet Courts record a lot. In the 90s, I was obsessed with an under-appreciated Scottish band called The Yummy Fur, and Parquet Courts are a dead ringer. Minus the brogue.

Holy fuck, dude. I loved The Yummy Fur. I still have “Hong Kong in Stereo” in one of my regular playlists. Those guys were awesome and you’re so right about Parquet Courts filling their shakily awesome shoes. We have to hang out and talk about them and Milky Wimpshake and Pussycat Trash and Huggy Bear all night next Tuesday.

How’s the tour going so far?

We just finished the first three-week leg of our US tour, and we’re about to embark on the second. So far, so good—it’s been great to get out there, stretch our legs, see the country again, reconnect with friends and fans. There’s a rhythm to touring that’s mesmerizing, and, though it does wear you out after a while, it’s also very satisfying and very soothing. You’re with a group of people, and your lives are intertwined, and if you get along, which we do, it’s a great opportunity for camaraderie. Good time and great oldies. And audiobooks.

Mmm, John Grisham reading John Grisham. Well, we’re really looking forward to next week’s show at the Bootleg. We really like that venue and can’t to see you all live again.

Thanks! We’re really looking forward to it, too. LA is an amazing place, and we’ve heard great things about the Bootleg.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you can get tickets to Bishop Allen’s show with the oft-mentioned, awesome Trummors next Tuesday at the Bootleg; rest of America, check your local listings. World—get their new album, Lights Out, via iTunes or digitally or in physical form via SC Distribution.

If you’ve been a guest at our house in the past months, you might have noticed a new addition to our home decor—this elaborate, extremely heavy, handmade quilt in our guest room. No, it’s not a faux antique we paid hundreds of dollars for at Anthropologie, it’s actually a bit of a family heirloom that my maternal grandmother maybe made for me?

You see, this past year, as we ventured out to move our lives cross-country to California, my mother made a much-appreciated trip north from her home in North Carolina to meet us along the way. She’d asked me beforehand if I’d have any interest in taking an old family quilt off her hands and, being a lover functional family keepsakes AND pre-Etsy hand-made stuff, I’d happily agreed.

After a lovely couple days of lunches and slightly embarrassing childhood stories, my mother suddenly remembered the quilt. Not really remembering what the thing looked like at all, I was expecting something pretty tame. But the thing she produced and handed over was much less a bedcover to keep warm in the night and much more a piece of hand-crafted art that even the most crafty of crafters would be lucky to call their own work. By my eye, that is. I don’t know the first thing about quilt-making, but I do know that this quilt is awesome-looking.

But rather than pass along some endearing, heart-warming tale about how each square represented a segment in time in the lives that led up to my own or how the images were linked to iconography in our family’s history or something like that, my mother unceremoniously told me, handing it over: “Your grandmother made this when you were born. So, I guess she wanted you to have it?”

…cool. I’ll take it!

She did mention that my grandmother had made it over the course of a long period of time leading up to my birth and that it was what was called a Cathedral style quilt, made using Cathedral Windows.

According to the all-knowing collective consciousness of Wikipedia:
“Cathedral Windows is a block type that uses reverse appliqué using large amounts of folded muslin, and features modular blocks of an interlocking circular design that frame small squares or diamonds of colorful light-weight cotton. The volume of fabric is high, and the tops are heavy. Because of the weight and the insulating value of the base fabric, these tops often are assembled without batting (thus need no quilting stitches) and sometimes have no backing. Such a quilt may be called a ‘counterpane’ and may serve mainly as a decorative ‘bedspread’.”

Wanting to show the thing off though, we skipped that decorative counterpane bit, making common use of it when guests visit in the colder nights that frequent us in all but the warmer months. I think my grandmother would approve.

She might not approve so much of the fact that our very elderly, slightly oozy cat with chronic ear problems, Allister, has adopted the quilt as his own, making a beeline for the guest room any time the guest bed’s made and the door opens.

But who are we to deny an old cat one of his few pleasures? That thing’s probably easy to clean, right?

Right?

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The New Pornographers have, for me, long been one of those bands whose musical skills I’ve admired but whose music I’ve never been able to fully embrace because I’ve never been able to get past their particular individual style. Like The Decemberists or, in my high school days, The Connells. They’re all great bands, they’re just too…them.

But this new single from the most recent New Pornographers album, Brill Bruisers, keeps catching me by surprise, in that “wait, who is this, this is awesome” kind of way. “Champions of Red Wine” definitely sounds like The New Pornographers once you know it’s them, but, for me—a self-admited New Pornographers cynic—it proves what the band can accomplish when it reaches for the furthest corners of its collective creativity while keeping a foot or two in their solid song-writing and trademark sound.

Give it a listen below while you can (it’s a third-party link, so best of luck) and then give the album opener a try with the band’s pretty cool interactive embed. The album’s title track is definitely stock New Pornographers in sound, but I feel like “Red Wine” gives me  slightly deeper appreciation of the band’s contemporary approach to pop.

You can purchase Brill Bruisers via The New Pornographers site and all the various other usual suspects.

• « Previous Track

Another photo from our archives that’s no longer part of our design site since we phased out the photography section of our portfolio. This one’s a shot we took of a daylily back in Brooklyn.

When I was younger, we always (incorrectly) called these tiger lilies. As an instructor at a wilderness camp, I told our students that they were edible. Which is slightly confusing, because these more common daylilies—hemerocallis fulva (pictured above)—are edible and really pretty tasty. Whereas proper lilies like the Easter lily and actual tiger lilies can be toxic if ingested by animals and not so great for humans either. So…sorry for the confusion, kids!  Hope you’re still alive!

Here’s a pretty interesting article from someone who’s way into edible daylilies for anyone interested.

We just made our first Caprese salad using the newly revamped Kite Hill nut cheeses, and we have to say—pretty awesome.

The cheeses themselves aren’t drastically different—they’ve changed packaging and recipes slightly in an attempt to bring the price point down a bit and make them available more widely in Whole Foods nationwide—but this just happens to be our first attempt to do anything other than eat the cheeses with crackers.

We just tossed the sliced Soft Original cheese and Soft Ripened (the Brie-like one) with sliced farmers market cherry tomatoes, Lunchbox peppers, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, and salt + pepper to taste and it was pretty perfect for a summer-never-ends first day of fall lunch in Los Angeles. Give it a go if you get a chance.

You can read the review we did last fall of Kite Hill’s White Alder cheese (now renamed Soft Ripened) and use their product locator to find a Whole Foods near you that carries them.

Now, to hold our breath as we await the new line of cheeses from Matthew Kenney + chef Scott Winegard (check out Scott’s Instagram post).

//