Number 4 in our series of old Polaroids, a viewfinder at Niagara Falls, American side, 2002.

Polaroid Archive no. 3—a palm tree (then, a foreign, mysterious thing to us) in Kawaii, 2002, as a storm approaches the island.

A Polaroid from our collection of a costumed stilt-walker in drag on the Coney Island Boardwalk, 2001 or 2002.

We’ve been meaning to dedicate a week’s worth of posts to our old collection of Polaroids for a while now and this week seems as good a time as any.

In our college days, we would tote our old accordion-style 240 Land Camera around most everywhere we went. We’d bought it second-…maybe third- or fourth-hand at a thrift store years back, likely ’97 or so—obviously long before the prevalence of digital cameras.

The Polaroid still works to this day—older things like this with so few moving parts last ages, it seems—but the film that remains for these cameras is made in the traditional manner, meaning it uses gelatin, an animal byproduct that’s far from vegan. So our days of peeling back photo paper to reveal our oft-blurry, light bleed-filled, randomly and inadvertently arty photographs are behind us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the images we made way back when.

Apologies in advance for the lower resolution of some of these Polaroids—I scanned most of them in 2001, when the world thought that 1500 pixel width was the height of high resolution.

Above, daisies in a field near Harrisonburg, Virginia. Below, the 240—a magical number for cars and cameras, it seems—retired to a quiet life living room beautification.

Nearly two years ago, social media totally paid off for us in a tangible, direct way that we could see plainly, drawing an unbroken line from action to reaction. That instance involved a salad.

Not any salad, mind you. It was a really, really good salad from a vegan café around the corner from our old design studio in Brooklyn, Sun in Bloom, a place we miss dearly in our work days now. It’s a massaged kale salad and it’s topped with this great raw, vegan, house-made burger, which, to some of you sounds great, I imagine, and sounds disgusting to others. But I swear, naysayers, it is a great salad and a great café.

But I digress! As I’m wont to do, I posted a photograph of our lunch to Instagram that cold day in January which, as you guessed, was that salad. Aimee, the owner of Sun in Bloom, shared the photo on Facebook and thanks our studio for the shot. A couple of days later, we were contacted by the owners of the boutique real estate firm, Garfield Realty, who frequent Aimee’s restaurant and saw the photo on Facebook. They got in touch to see if we could help them take their newly acquired company in a new direction with their branding, design materials, and overall messaging.

Thus started our work with Garfield Realty, focusing in on an ad campaign at first and then evolving that work into other projects, the most recent and largest of which—Garfield’s site redesign—was recently completed.

You can see more images from the site and read through our breakdown of the work in our portfolio; visit the site itself to see it in full. When you do, be sure you do some searches for homes that’ll result in zero hits—you’ll get some relatively witty, rotating text that we wrote.

But we just wanted to use this space to let everyone out there know that, yes, indeed, every now and then all that time and work that goes into a social media presence that sometimes…most times feels 100% futile…sometimes it’s 100% worth it.

Actually, not only did that photograph that Sun in Bloom shared result in a new client, it also resulted in us meeting Paul Singh, a friend of Elizabeth’s and, now, one of our best Web developers, with whom we’ve worked on Web sites for the United Nations and many other clients, Garfield included, and through whom we started working with A Better LA.

For anyone interested, here’s that salad.

I’ll be the first to admit—most days, I’m much more a coffee person than a matcha tea person. But, like being a cat person or a dog person, preferring one doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the other. I look to coffee most mornings to help those synapses along in the whole firing + functioning thing, but there’s nothing like a soothing, gentle cup of warm tea when you’re looking for that cozy unwind on a chilly evening or sitting out on your porch taking in the slow, early morning awakening of the rest of the world and not quite looking for the shock-to-life coffee often gives.

So, tea, for me, is more of a luxury; something I don’t have often but, when I do, something that I truly appreciate in a way I don’t think I would if it were everyday for me.

One interesting tea company we discovered early this year and revived some excitement in tea for us is Adventure Tea, who pairs a uniquely captivating product with an organically storied backdrop and wonderful hand-done packaging artwork. As they put it:

“We spent most of our lives seeking awesome experiences to offset the awful experience of our 8-6 jobs (whatever happened to 9-5, anyway?)…. Finally, it hit us: the glowing computer screens, tightly clenched steering wheels and rampant aspirin abuse were the polar opposite of what we wanted our lives to be. We wanted to explore, to create, to seek what the modern world insists is a child’s fantasy.

Just as adventure is created through exploration, memories are built at the dinner table. Our best experiences centered on the joy of sharing food and drink with other people, whether they hail from next door or across the planet. We wanted to create something that could unite people from around the globe in their innate desire to experience the exotic, and tea was the obvious choice. For millennia tea has been the favorite drink of emperors and explorers, poets and farmers; it is the culinary common denominator that all of humanity has always agreed upon. Tea has started revolutions, catalyzed the exploration of the deepest corners of the globe, made and lost massive fortunes, and inspired some of the world’s greatest minds. Perhaps we love tea because when we drink it we can sense the thousands of years of cultural, geographic, and historical identity condensed into each leaf. Or maybe it just tastes good. Fueled by a few dozen cups of Guayusa, we ditched our dead-end jobs and launched Adventure Tea out of a 700 square-foot bungalow in West Los Angeles. Our mission: to bring the exotic to your tea cup, spark a little adventure in your life, and resurrect the identity of a beverage dominated for too long by passionless mega-corporations.”

Again, I’m no expert on tea—at all, really—but the teas we’ve had from Adventure Tea really do seem to tell a story all on their own when you take the time to step away from the hectic nature of your daily life and listen. Along with tasting notes, each tea comes with a backstory as to how the company founders discovered the tea and what makes it special for them.

They also come packed in these lovely little wooden boxes with sliding lids and really well-done handmade artwork specific to each locale (done by the wife of the the husband-and-wife founders we’re told).

Plus you can hide your weed in the used up boxes. Obviously.

So, next time life’s giving you the run-around, as it does us all, and you’re ready to scream, step away, assure yourself that this seemingly insurmountable problem will be there when you get back, and take some time to brew up + enjoy some tea, says this coffee-drinker. My bet is that things will look a little more surmountable when you take a second look.

A few of hundreds, at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits—cooler than you’d think.

Be sure to check out the jungle courtyard in the center of the building if you visit.

Longtime favorite artist, Nikki McClure, just announced her annual calendar, again full of beautiful paper cut artwork, inspired by the natural world and peaceful, familial life.

McClure’s been producing these calendars for buyolympia.com for years now, along with producing cards, shirts, prints, and other, similarly themed products, all derived from hand-cut paper pieces done from a single sheet of paper.

You can read an interview we did with Nikki back in 2011 to find out more about the process and the artist herself.

McClure also announced a coming show next spring at Los Angeles’ Giant Robot, details to come.

Below, some excerpts from the 2015 calendar, which you can order from buyolympia.com.

Just came across this shot from a photo shoot we did for MooShoes in south Brooklyn way  back in 2008 and it struck me, both in terms of how long ago that now is and how great the light is in these shots.

The light falls so differently on the wets coast than it does in the east, I’ve found. This cool, winter light makes me miss New York and the east coast a little bit.

That winter coat…makes me not miss it so much.

No idea who made that bag or which shoes those are—maybe Neuaura?

Anyway, consider this out Throwback Thursday.

We worked up this illustration—based off of the wallpaper we did for MooShoes Los Angeles—and the poster below for the just announced holiday party we’re holding at the store in partnership with LA-based gourmet food company, Spork Foods.

Owned and operated by sisters Jenny Engel and Heather Goldberg, Spork Foods offers organic vegan cooking classes, in-home healthy eating consultations, private cooking parties, corporate trainings and demos, team-building cooking classes, and more. Plus, they’re both super-nice, genuinely talented people to boot.

In addition to a night of in-store holiday discounts and a seasonally inspired menu from Spork, we’ll also have complimentary sparkling lime rosé from Pampelonne, complimentary snacks from Setton Farms, merchandise for sale from our friends at PETA, and excellent tunes from our in-store DJ.

So mark you calendar now, LA—Friday, Dec12, 6-9PM.