Friend and great photographer, Sarah Renard has launch an amazing line of  bags, Le Renard. Each bag is handmade in Los Angeles of individually dyed linen with all the right details, in all the right places. From the site:

Le Renard is based on a journey to the satisfaction and individuality of making something with your hands, creating a product that is intrinsically unique and ages with grace to become a better version of itself.

Each Le Renard bag is made in Los Angeles, using only natural Indigo to dye and is one-of-a-kind.

Pick one up for yourself, or that favorite person in your life.

George Louis is a very polarizing designer and personality for me. His work is undeniable. His personality is blunt. If you’ve read this most recent book Damn Good Advice, you know what I mean.

It’s great to listen and watch him talk about his work and career at Creative Mornings NYC.

My good friend and incredible artist Todd Francis recently teamed up with Equal Dist. for a very special holiday project. Tis the Season for Suicide is a black-humored, four-peice ornament set illustrating different ways to off yourself during the yuletide. I put my order in and received them just in time to go up on this year’s tree.

They’re available at Equal Dist. Put up a set and watch the reaction of your straitlaced friends and family.

More of Todd’s work can be seen here & here.

I was lucky to have found my course of life that follows this thinking early on. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my daily life that would give me such a reward.

video via chase heavener

Just wrapped up another project with Port. This time it was a video short to promote the new release for a collaboration between Element and Port.

After talking with the owners of Port, we decided that the video should be fun and different than what others had done previously to promote cruisers.

The concept came to me on the homeward drive from a road trip I took up to Salt Point State Park. When I got back, I pitched the idea to my good friend and creative collaborator, Ryan Dearth. He and I then fished scripting and storyboarding the concept and pitched it back to Port.

After the creative process, it was time to produce the video. We lined up dates, people, talent, etcetera. We were lucky to be able to work with Element team rider, friend and Long Beach local, Levi Brown. Who I had worked with many times before on Element photo shoots. Other close friends were called to help out with the shoot including photographer Jay Diebel, who was on hand shooting behind the scenes photos of the day.

We broke the shoot up into two parts. Part one, was to shoot everything that included personalities. The second part of shooting would come later, when we didn’t need such a big crew and Dearth and I could handle everything on our own.

Dearth went into the cave to get the first edit together. Then after getting the final shots we needed, he I spent a day working out the final details and worked on the final edit together.

It was a fun project and a great time working with so many good friends. Many thanks to everyone involved in making this happen.

More of Jay’s behind the scenes photos can be seen over on Port’s site.

Simple is smarter. Simple is better. Many people know this. Many people think they know this. Others know this, but don’t practice it. Ensuring that something is simple is not an easy task.

There was probably no one better at simplification than Dieter Rams. His tenth principle of good design is the most reflective that simplicty is better.

“Is as little design as possible – Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.”

What’s so amazing about the information in this video, is that the extrapolated data that proves there is money in simplicity. And that people are willing to pay upwards of 4% more for a more simple process, product and design.

Looking at the top US brands, Publix is #5. If you’ve spent any extended amount of time in the south east, you already know that Publix is the best supermarket. Hands down. I dream of the day that they head west and open their first shop in southern California. My mouth is watering, just thinking of an American sub, on white, with extra yellow mustard.

The presentation for this video is up here. Interesting information.

And to quote John Berger:

“Like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself.”

Element has sent me to some pretty amazing places to art direct photo shoots—Alaska, Seattle, New York and more. Although I had never been to Seattle or New York. Alaska was seemingly a long shot. The Last Frontier. It was a wild idea that worked perfectly into the campaign at the time, so it all worked out. Here are some pictures from my two trips up there. The scouting trip, by myself and the trip for the photo shoot. This is still one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. It’s still my desktop image.

Then, last year, the talks started to go to Chile. To shoot the Keep Discovering campaign. With the regular crew of knuckleheads and misfits.

I had been to South America one other time. To Peru, to visit my better half—Tracy–when she was there for 3 months, teaching and traveling. I got a good taste of the culture and the itch had been there to go back. Luckily, this trip came along.

We were in three parts. The cities of Santiago and Valpariso, for the skating side of things. Then into an area of the Andes, Yerba Loca.

Santiago was nice, but Valpariso and the Andes were by far my favorite parts of the trip. Valapriso is the San Francisco of Chile. Costal, hilly, bright victorian style houses. Great food and site seeing. It was so good, we made two separate trips there from Santiago. There was a two hour drive—each way. If that says anything about the beauty of the place.

The parallels between Valpariso and SF were amazing, we couldn’t help but continue to comment about the similarities while we were. The most surprising though, was that both cities were hit with devastating earthquakes in 1906. So similar, that the death tolls were almost identical. Pretty eerie.

This was a trip of trips. The cities, the people, food and mountains were all incredible.

Last week, Element released the video from the trip, edited by Kirk Dianda and Mark Stewart and filmed by Kirk and Cole Mathews. The photos from the shoot by Brian Gaberman.

Enough of my chatter … check out the video and photos.

Among all the other amazing things I saw on the interwebs today, this is the one that stopped me, right were I was at. Long exposure photos of the Space Station by Don Pettit, absolutely incredible.

via

It’s been about a year since I started sailing… I’ve been on a race team, sailing the seas of Long Beach almost every week. But my fondness for all things nautical started long before that. My grandfather was a sailor—which I guess makes me a Son of a Son of a Sailor—and I always admired him for it and his sense of adventure.

This stack of Sailboat Logos, by C116Man is incredible. A day could be had just staring at all things that are great here.

via { Draplin

On a related sailing note… if you haven’t seen Deep Water yet, I suggest you put it to the top of your queue and watch it. Intense movie.

I read Josef Albers’ incredible book on color theory, The Interaction of Color. And it was an incredible and expansive way of thinking about the learning of color and color theory… then followed that up with Radiolab’s newest episode Colors.

The book is not short on amazing passages and it’s also not short on mind-bending theories and concepts. One of my favorite quotes from the book is:

Colors appear connected predominantly in space. Therefore, as constellations they can be seen in any direction and at any speed. And as they remain, we can return to them repeatedly and in my ways.

Reading Albers book for the first time—yes, a little late to the party on this one—has me leering at the full version with the 150 silkscreened plates that illustrate the theories… but now, I’m thinking I might get a pack of Color-Aid and re-read the book completing the exercises the next time through.

If you haven’t read Interaction of Color yet, I would highly suggest it.

Update:
Today, looking around some more about these theories, I came across this nicely done video from Dwell about Albers and the Albers Foundation.

This is an incredible, glue-less printing technique that uses quarter-folded paper… Great simplification and execution.

via

A little on the set tour of Moonrise Kingdom with Bill-fucking-Murray.

Great short film about the artist John Baldessari and narrated by Tom Waits. Commissioned by LACMA for their first annual “Art + Film Gala” honoring John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.

A Sunday in Hell is an incredible Danish documentary about the famous one-day ride in France. The Paris Roubaix. One of the oldest professional rides in road cycling. The first edition of the race was in 1896. Famous for it’s rough cobblestone sections that are no longer used for driving. The race is challenging and treacherous. Claiming many inner-tubes from its challengers.

The documentary is incredibly well done. Not only a great cycling documentary, but a great movie in general. Directed by Jørgen Leth. The film chronicles the 1976 edition of the race. The movie gives great sense to the ride and atmosphere from all aspects of the race.

Watch the film in it’s entirety here.

Cheers.

In honor of the Day of Green, here are some Vintage Irish Books. I could spend all day here, looking at all the amazing archives, but I’ll have to come back to it, because I’m off to enjoy a pint of Guinness for breakfast.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. Slainte.

I can’t remember the last time I anticipated the release of an app for my phone. I’m not a huge app user, I have my favorites, but I’m not always on the fox hunt for something new and amazing. Then, came along Clear.

These are some of the best use of the multi touch gestures I’ve seen in an app. The design is simple and void of—seemingly from the video—of any, or many nuances.

So, I went from never being to NYC, to going three times, in three months. It ended up being a pretty intense summer of traveling, between those three trips and some others that went down.

We went with Nick Garcia and Donny Barely along with the creative team of Kirk Dianda, Marc Falkenstien, photographer Brian Gaberman and myself.

Here’s the video that just released and some selects from the shoot.

This is the kind of part that gets me excited about skateboarding.

Not much you have to do to get me excited about a new Wes Anderson project—it’s no secret that I’m a fan of his work. When the trailer finally landed itself in front of my eyes, I sat back in anticipation and the thing that caught me right away was the departure from Futura.

For all you Tumblr’s out there… be sure to follow Port’s newly created Port Life, full of “Beers, Sports, Babes”.

Came across this photo, while editing my Aperture library, of The Black Keys from December 2010, when they played The Holiday Hootenanny.

The Boston Public Library’s Print Department is home to more than 350 vintage travel posters, most dating from the 1920s-1940s, the “Golden Age of Travel.”

Found this link while cruising the Coudal section of the internet this morning and was blown away by how absolutely incredible this collection of posters is.

The Great Britain poster above, is one of the most well designed pieces I’ve ever seen. It’s so good, that it prompted me out of my blogging-sabbatical. I also posted some of my other favorites on the ole BS Report Tumblr.

Take the time and check them all out.

This morning, I learned the work of photographer Toni Frissell.

After chasing some image links across the corners of the internet, I found out that she shot this amazing photo that I posted the other day. When I posted that picture, I did it quickly and without any research—the kinds of gun slinging posting that I regret later…

From her bio:
Toni Frissell, or Antoinette Frissell Bacon, (March 10, 1907 – April 17, 1988) was an American photographer, known for her fashion photography, World War II photographs, portraits of famous Americans and Europeans, children, and women from all walks of life.

Her work is polarizing and inspirational.

Need some olive drab inspiration? Lucky you, there’s Fuckyeaholivedrab. A subsidiary of the lads over at Cork Grips.

This is kind how things went for me today at the Flat Bar-B-Q.

This is skateboarding.

via{coudal

I will never tire of time lapses.

via{coudal

Margaret Kilgallen has long been one of my favorites. Her bold, flat colors and folk typography from a different era get me every time. There’s nothing but authenticity when I see her work.

Her work is on display at San Francisco’s Ratio 3 gallery for the summer. And if I knew what was good for me, I’d find a cheap flight up there to check it out.

Favorite music video of all time. The song came on shuffle today, and had to go watch this again.

Memorizing.

Better believe that this iPhone dock will be on my side table come September.  Designed by Jonas Damon, be sure to check out more of his work.

via{coudal