Last week, 38-year-old Tokyo-based artist Makoto Azuma launched two of his botanically based pieces—a Japanese white pine bonsai in a metal frame entitled “Shiki 1” and an untitled arrangement of orchids, hydrangeas, lilies, irises, and other flowers—into space from the floor of the Black Rock Desert.

According to the artist, “I wanted to see the movement and beauty of plants and flowers suspended in space.”

You can read more about the extensive process involved when shooting gigantic art into space on the NYT Magazine Blog, but we just dig the final product. Well-done, crazy artist. Well-done.

Photos courtesy Makoto Azuma.

We just randomly came across this original logo concept sketch from 2008 for Park Slope yoga outpost, Bend & Bloom, and felt the need to share.

I keep a stack of all my old Moleskin notebooks just in case I need to harken back to a sketch or concept or just find some old notes. Searching through them just now for an IP address for a client, we stumbled upon this sketch, which actually ended up feeding pretty directly into the final mark. Also I guess we were planning a vegan cheese board dinner that night?

You can see the final logo in our branding portfolio.

Cool find…that also makes us feel very…very…old.

A favorite old Polaroid of mine of Coney Island’s Cyclone during the Village Voice’s old Siren music festival (RIP), thus the hundreds of hands in the air.

If I remember rightly, I think it was just before we moved to Brooklyn, 2002 or so.

We bought these tealights a while back, but the light was hitting them in such a beautiful way the other day as we were leaving the house, I had to take a minute to photograph them.

Designed by Amsterdam’s &Klevering, the tealights are made of a delicate, thin white biscuit porcelain that, while delicious sounding, is simply unglazed porcelain. They then paint the insides with in neon pink, a spring pink, bright red, neon green, neon orange, and neon yellow, all of which give off a great glow when paired with a lit candle or, as we’ve opted to use them, just setting them in a really well lit space during the daylight hours. That keeps them soot-free too, which is nice with such a clean-looking porcelain.

You can order the tealights and a wealth of other fine home goods from &k’s site, but we got ours at the somewhat unfortunately named home design store, Yolk, in Silver Lake. Which really is a great store, despite the name. …sorry, Yolk—eggs just kinda gross me out, for multiple reasons.

A couple weeks ago, I got a chance to catch up with an old friend of mine. We got on the topic of healthcare—a few years back, he’d dealt with the sudden, earth-shattering appearance of testicular cancer in his life. I’m happy to say that he’s healthy today, but, as he pointed out, that’s thanks largely to the relatively generous healthcare coverage he enjoyed at the time due to his corporate employment. We talked about that for a little while and reflected on how mind-boggling it is to us that some of our mutual friends feel it unpatriotic or unfair or what have you to work to offer that kind of life-saving healthcare to the general population, corporate job or no corporate job.

How can it be unpatriotic to try your very best to take care of your citizens? Longest-possible-term thinking, doesn’t that make for the healthiest, most functional society possible? Imagine if we were able to prioritize the health of Americans over all else and every single citizen of these United States no longer had to worry about any of that. Imagine everything we could get done, putting that energy elsewhere.

As we all know, though, that’s not at all the case. For many of us, sadly, we experience that reality first-hand.

Like our friend, Pam.

We met Pam years back in Brooklyn. She ran an Atlantic Street boutique called the Banquet with another friend of ours, Miranda Bennett, both of whom we did some branding work for back in the day. Last year, Pam moved out to California to be closer to her family and move her jewelry line, PLUME, to its next stages of development.

But shortly after arriving on the west coast, Pam was diagnosed with B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Leukemia. A little while ago, Pam found a bone marrow match + donor. That fact, and the fact that she has a broad, dedicated support network make Pam luckier than most. But she’s since been hospital-bound for six months and her healthcare is only partially footing the massive, massive bill.

Cue dedicated support network—our mutual friend, Allison Tray, owner of Boerum Hill’s Tres Belle Petite Medi-Spa, is hosting The Pam Give-a-Damn, an evening of light fare, wine, and awesome gift bags worth $500 each, all to benefit Pam. As Allison puts it:

“100% of monies raised will go directly to Pam. Busy that night? Not feeling social? Out of town guests?That’s fine, buy a ticket to help Pam and we’ll drink your wine.”

The event takes place Wednesday, July 23 from 6 – 9 PM at Tres Belle—105 Bond Street Brooklyn, NY. But, like Allison wrote, you don’t need to be present to win the raffle bags—winners will be announced by email on July 22 and each ticket you buy automatically enters you to win one of twelve bags.

Visit the event site Allison set up to see details and see the impressive list of raffle bag donors. But, clearly, we’re doing this for bigger reasons than gift bags, those are just a nice side effect of giving a damn.

Whether you know Pam or not, trust us, she’s good people and she’s in need. If you can’t afford a ticket ($45), please give what you can. And thank you so much.

Ending this week of odes to the Pacific northwest with an ode to the majestic mountains of that state and Washington.

I have no idea which one this is, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere over middle Oregon.

Have a great weekend, all.

The cultural window between something being cool and something being a clichéd commodification of cool is very, very brief. And, of course, it’s all a matter of opinion.

In this age of über-quick, Internet-powered popular culture, the window’s only gotten smaller, to the point that trends hardly even matter any more in many senses and contexts. Remember how long cupcakes were the cool new culinary trend that no one could get enough of? The pie trend came after but couldn’t enjoy nearly as much time basking in the warm glow of near-universal, Hey-Ya-esque societal approval before being deemed too cool to be cool (ice cold?). The internet—admittedly a beacon of light in many ways for a world seeking to open up communication and, hopefully, through that opening, understanding—makes us all jaded bastards.

But it’s nice, every now and then, to open one’s self up to the merits of coolness, even when we all know full well we’re boarding a hipster boat that’s long been sinking. Who says we can’t strike up the band and enjoy the ride all the same? They did it on the Titanic!

Case in point, our recent stay at Ace Hotel Portland. Yes, it unabashedly hits all the primary hipster notes; yes, it’s leaning heavily on a bygone era for its visual cues; yes, it was directly parodied in a Portlandia sketch, during which ultra-hipster staff hands out complimentary turntables and antique typewriters to guests.

But I like old typewriters and turntables; I like fashionably dressed, friendly staff; I like a hotel that doesn’t lift its visual aesthetic from some faux-granite-covered version of ancient Greece or a cheaply made Victorian era England; I like harkening back to a time when things were built to last. If I just decided that I don’t like that stuff simply because the overall artisan hipster Gestalt is made fun of or just more pervasive than it used to be, wouldn’t that be disingenuous? Any trend or genre or…anything, really, can go over the top and some would argue that the whole creative culture has gone there and then some, but that doesn’t mean we like the things we like for bad reasons.

Also, I guarantee Fred Armisen + Carrie Brownstein have stayed at the Ace and I bet they totally liked it. We certainly did.

The Portland hotel was the second to open, after the inaugural Ace in Seattle, opened in old Salvation Army halfway house in 1999 by friends Alex Calderwood, Wade Weigel, and Doug Herrick. The Portland hotel—opened second in 2007 with the help of Jack Barron—now serves as headquarters for Ace, who has outposts in Palm Springs, New York, Panama, London, and LA, the latter of which opened at the start of this year.

I’d describe the overall aesthetic as WWII military-industrial-speakeasy. Which, correct, makes very little sense. But, if a post-humous idea board were made for the Ace Portland, it’d definitely include heavy wooden sliding doors and window guards; accents of industrial hardware; army blankets and army green upholstery; dog tags; colonial libraries with roller ladders; witty signage wrought in old world fanciful fonts; random nautical nods; and yes—turntables and typewriters.

Below, all that stuff.

Balanced Rock is a non-profit based in California’s Yosemite National Park that addresses physical and mental well-being through inner reflection and connection with nature. They’ve been in operation since 1999, offering classes + workshops, short- and long-form hikes, camping retreats, and other activities building from yoga, meditation, and the creative arts, all among the majestic surroundings of one of the country’s most famously beautiful places.

For an organization with such a progressive mission, though, its roots are in the very basic effort to help a local community heal.

After 26-year-old outdoor instructor, Joie Armstrong, was tragically killed in 1999, fellow instructors, Heather Sullivan + Tana Leach, created Wild Women Workshops in an effort to bring the community together and take back the park. The modest beginnings of peak summits, yoga, and journaling proved so effective for friends of Armstrong and other locals touched by her violent death and the lost sense of security that came with it that the programs swiftly expanded in return.

From Balanced Rock’s Web site:

“Quickly recognizing that more people could benefit from life-changing empowerment opportunities in the outdoors, the backpacking programs were opened to the general public. In 2007, Balanced Rock co-founders Eliza Kerr and Heather Sullivan made the decision to expand programs to a wider audience, formalize the non-profit structure, and change the name of the organization to Balanced Rock. The name came from the last conversation Heather ever had with Joie, when Joie promised to teach Heather to balance rocks.”

The organization has continued to serve the local community and visitors from far and wide, even expanding to offer programs in Nepal, Tibet, India, Alaska, Point Reyes National Seashore, Red Rocks National Conservation Area, and Joshua Tree National Park.

After undergoing a complete design overhaul with their Web site, Balanced Rock approached our studio about following through to their print materials, including posters, seasonal class schedules, and their informational brochure (above).  We’re honored to work with such an earnestly service-centered mission that’s brought so many people more in touch with themselves and the world around them over the past 14 years.

You can read more about our work with Balanced Rock and see more photographs of it in our print portfolio. Read more about the organization and the classes they offer over at their beautiful new Web site, designed + developed by Michelle Martello at Minima Designs.

The other night, after attending some appropriately jovial birthday festivities with friends, we were beginning to settle in when we received a mysterious knock on our front door. It was our next door neighbor, Larry (AKA “Blue”), and he told us to follow him—we need to see something right away.

Prevailing over our inordinately cautious nature, we followed Blue and, I’m happy to report, we didn’t wind up waking in Mexico minus a couple kidneys.

Instead, we witnessed a once a year nighttime event—the blooming of these epiphyllum oxypetalum flowers.

The epiphyllum oxypetalum—also known as the Dutchman’s Pipe, the Beauty Under the Moon, and the Queen of the Night in various sundry cultures—is a cactus plant with night blooming flowers that only come out one night a year. As it happened, last Friday night was that night for most of the plant’s flowers. And they really are some of the most beautiful, gigantic, uniquely + alluringly fragrant flowers we have ever experienced.

These photos really don’t do the flowers justice, but we wanted to share them nonetheless. Bow down to the Queen of the Night!

Weekend before last, we hosted a party to celebrate Katie’s birthday with friends, more and more of whom have kids these days. At one point, someone unrolled a long stretch of kraft paper from the dispenser we have in our house and a drawing party ensued.

We especially liked this interpretation of our raven + crow feathers our friend Sara’s boy, Leo, made. He even labeled it so we’d know.

Other honorable mentions—cats in party hats, afrodelic Chewbacca, a very well-done horse, roommates disgruntled ghost and caped rooster, one million circles, and ‘yell’.

Lovely weekend to all.