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.

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.

By Yayoi Kusama, at The Broad.

I mean, honestly, all we really want to do here is keep writing about David Bowie and what he meant to us, as it’s all we can think about or talk about or cry about. But we’re trying to keep it together here and get some shit done as we secretly continue to mourn under it all.

So, in that spirit…we just added some new web work we completed recently to our portfolio. The client was Fogarty Finger, a New York City architecture + interiors firm that focuses on the commercial, residential, and multifamily realms and just does some really great work. Our first priority for this work was to elegantly showcase the deep and impressive body of work the firm had to show for its years of practice—the prior site structure was pretty inflexible and really just a  poor framing for such visually impactful interiors and exteriors; it was throwing up barriers to appreciating the firm rather than presenting it with clarity and grace.

Our final design—beautifully put to work and developed by the team at Pel yet again—presents the firm in the light they deserve.

You can see more images below, yet more and a detailed write-up in our portfolio, and visit the site itself.

We just did some art and an invite for Positive Tails, a non-profit dedicated to helping the animals of New York. They’re throwing a fundraising celebration February 11th to celebrate the successes of their past year of work and help create even more in 2016.

The group works with Brooklyn’s Veterinary Emergency and Referral Group (VERG) to fight animal abuse, help displaced animals and over-populated dogs and cats, and give support to individuals and families who can’t afford veterinary emergency or illness care for their companion animals. So, good stuff.

If you’re in New York February 11, we’d recommend attending. The event’s being held at 501 Union in our old neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, and will feature passed hors d’ouvres from vegan chef Jay Astafa, desserts from one of faves, Vegan Treats, and an open bar of wine, beer, and signature cocktails along with a silent auction, raffle prizes, and music. Fun night, great cause.

Tickets and more information on the event via their Eventbrite page; more on Positive Tails and their noble work via their site + Facebook.

Our new studio in Los Angeles’ Arts District is coming together slowly but surely.

Our most recent addition—custom made shelves Katie built from wooden planks, 1/2″ steel piping, and steel flanges. Katie stained the planks with a walnut stain and then built the unit and assembled it laying down. We then stood the whole thing up against the wall and attached it with some long screws. Simple, elegant, and effective.

Next up, hammock chair!

We recently added some new work to our portfolio—book cover designs for Los Angeles author Christina Garner‘s young adult fantasy series, The Gateway Trilogy.

You can read more about the books themselves and see more images of the covers we design in our portfolio, but we wanted to write up a little bit about the process here.

After we worked with Garner to come up with a symbol for the series—something that plays into the plot of the books and needed to stay consistent with existing text—we worked with her to come up with a cohesive look and brand for the whole trilogy. In addition to focusing on the protagonist on the covers, we decided to create imagery that tied into the idea of a portal to another dimension.

To come up with the ethereal, cloud-like forms, we added drops of food coloring into swirling water within a white ramekin, photographing at high speed as the motion of the water moved the colors into swirling forms. We then chose some of the better shots, brightened the images, and selectively omitted the walls of the ramekin while brightening the overall white in the image. We then integrated the Gateway symbol with a slightly altered image of the protagonist (the model original had blonde hair) and chose color palettes for each of the three books that make up the trilogy.

A new studio + a new year = some much-needed spring cleaning; the latest victim—this old AS 3.0 Lomo 35mm Camera from Supersampler.

I came across it as we were unpacking some studio equipment and was immediately brought back to the year or so I was obsessed with this while living in DC, some 12 years back. The camera’s operated by the ripcord on the side which, when pulled, “samples” the subject infant of the four separate fixed-focus lenses on the cameras front.

Things like Instagram and, in a larger sense, digital photography in general have made this camera and others relatively obsolete for us (which is great since digital means not relying on gelatin-based, not-so-animal-friendly prints), but the spontaneity and lack of control inherent in the photos is compelling and fun in a way we can’t as easily revisit…like a lot of life looking back on life past.

Below, some shots from DC and a trip to Hawaii. And yes, Katie was a member in good standing of the Fig Newton Federation.