The culmination of months of design, photography, and development have been assembled together and launched onto the information superhighway....and its name - Neela Bags. Neela Bags is a new, reusable bag venture for those who want to be environmentally friendly and stylish at the same time. When Neela's founders approached us to create their web site and provide art direction they were looking for a way to show off their stylish bags and demonstrate the company's commitment to environmental issues all within a clean, modern design. We're very happy with how things turned out. Jump over to Neela Bags and let us know what you think.

I'm often asked where I find all the music for each month's soundtrack to my life. It used to be a pretty straight forward process; I spent most of my day in a cube working on my computer and jamming away with my headphones on. I was a regular reader/listen of a handful of music blogs and podcasts such as; Daytrotter, Sterogum, Gorrila vs Bear, KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, KEXP's Music That Matters, and the KEXP Live Performances. But lately I don't spend much time in a cube which has made it harder to keep up with these great sources.

Another great source for music are the soundtracks of TV shows and movies. Showtime's Weeds has provided me with at least a half dozen songs over the past few seasons. And while Weeds is a great show - and if you have not seen it I highly recommend dedicating an entire weekend to watching the first three seasons - my favorite song from this soundtrack comes from a moment of TV weakness. I stumbled upon MC Solaar's La Belle et le Bad Boy while watching MTV's the Hills......it's freaking embarrassing to admit that I was watching the Hills but I heard this song playing in the background and it was sooooo good I had to add it. I feel a bit better getting that off my chest......a bit of cathartic healing.....now onto this months combined February and March sOUNDTRACK to mY lIFE.

Continue reading "sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE [[[ Feb & Mar 2008 ]]]" »

Last weekend I headed down to Grouse Mountain and did some night riding for Mel's birthday. Grouse is located in the mountains around the city of Vancouver giving an amazing view of the skyline while you enjoying some night skiing. I was a bit skeptical when the idea of night skiing at Grouse was first floated. Understandable, why would a group of Whistler locals want to drive away from the best Mountain in North America to visit a local mountain with only two lifts and a handful of runs open at night.....and to top it off a storm was bearing down on whistler promising to bring 12+ inches of new snow.

As it turns out Grouse Mountain is a great time if you want to mix a bit of skiing with some late night festivities. The group had a great time messing around on different equipment (a handful kept it real with snowblades). And then we danced the evening away while still in our ski/snowboard gear....including boots. While the Polaroids have been censored to protect certain parties I did receive permission to release a few photos.

Continue reading "Grouse Mountain, Where the Whistler Locals Ride" »

Great web site design concentrates on the small picture as well as the big picture. Little things like icons and graphics turn a web site into a memorable browsing experience. The next time you're looking into a new product that you might purchase take a look at the company's web site and look at their visuals. More often than not, if they have great images or icons they probably have a great product - look here & here. The thinking is if you're going to spend hours, days, and weeks obsessing over the graphic imagery of your web site, you've probably spent twice as long designing a great product that will satisfy you're customers.

I just returned from a trip back to the Bay Area to help one of 2 Out of Three's clients with this idea - delivery on the small things. We spent four marathon days capturing creative and high quality product and lifestyle images for the Neela Bags' website, which will be launching in the next few weeks.

We went into the four days of shooting with ideas for eight different types of shots at six separate locations around the cities of San Mateo and Burlingame. Everything from detailed product shots, to lifestyle shots, to images of the company's founders we're taken. It's fun to look at some of the numbers involved in our 4 days of shooting.

• 1 lightbox
  
• 1 malfunctioning Nikon SB 800 external flash (probably user error)
  
• 2 different rolls of white photo paper
  
• 2 lifestyle models
  
• 3 fluorescent lights with stands
  
• 6 locations
  
• 7.5 Gigs of data generated
  
• 8 different bag styles + 6 different colors
  
• 1248 digital images captures in both jpeg and RAW format
  

From all the images shot, we will most likely use less than 50 for the different mediums of web, print, and a few places in between. I'd love to show a sneak peak of the pictures, but I don't want to spoil the web sites launch. In the meantime here are a few shots of the us working on the small picture.

Continue reading "Pay Attention to the Small Things" »

What's it take to get the first track on the sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE? Songs usually have to make an emotional connection or just plain get me movings. Which is what happened to January's soundtrack. MGMT seems to psychedelic hippies (see their video for Time to Pretend) living in the hipster ground central city of Brooklyn that was formed at the yuppie school of Wesleyan University. Their song Kids has been in heavy rotation in my iTunes and every time I hear it I start tapping my feet or bobbing my head. And that's what it takes to get the first track on January's sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE.

As for the rest of the tracks in January they seems to have jumped out of the 70's. An abundance of synthetic keyboards and funk seems to ooze all over this edition. Take a listen and let me know what part of the ooze you liked.

Continue reading "sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE [[[ Jan 2008 ]]]" »

2 Out of Three recently finished a project for our former Electronic Arts colleague Nitzan Wilnai and his new video game social network VG Views. Working closely with Nitzan - and the 2 Out of Three engineering team - we created a site we're very proud to show off. We also thought it would be fun to take you through the design processfor VG Views; showing you some of the wireframes, rejected logo designs and the multiple stages of web site design.

For each project it's good to try and get to the core of the product or service that is being offered. In the case of VG Views we did not have to do much research as we have been working in the video game industry for over six years. So when it came time to find a design metaphor that encompassed the variety of different video games and gaming platforms we quickly gravitated to the idea of pixels. All video games - from low fidelity cell phone games to the graphic intensive games found on the "Play Station 3" are made from pixels - therefore, it just made sense to create the logo and website design for VG Views with pixels in mind.

Continue reading "VG Views - Evolution of the Design" »

A dash of Manu Chao, a pinch Gabrielle & Rodrigo and top with Thievery Corporation - bake at 400 degrees and 20 minutes later you have Federico Aubele. The Argentinian musician has been dominating the speakers in our Whistler apartment which earned him two tracks on December's sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE. The music feels very international with Aubele's guitar mixed into stylish lounge beats and enticing vocals. The smooth sound is no coincidence as the album is actually produced and distributed by Thievery Corporation's ESL Music label.

While Aubele was my favorite artist of the month my favorite song of the month goes to M.I.A's Paper Planes. M.I.A. is another artist who combines a variety of different musical genre - I don't know if I'm listening to indie rock, dub reggae, hip hop or something in between. However you want to classify it, it's one of the best songs I've heard all year.

You can listen to both Aubele and M.I.A below. Let me know what you think of all the songs for this month's soundtrack.

p.s......did you notice that December soundtrack was released on time?!?!?

Continue reading "sOUNDTRACK tO mY lIFE [[[ Dec 2007 ]]]" »