News

Cindy from Favorite just delivered the bulk of Eun-Ha's 2008 Milky Elephant Postcard Calendar and we are super excited about them! The full-color is awesome and everything looks amazing. The postcards really tear out and the binding works, which is such a relief because you never quite know for sure when you're thinking of things theoretically. Eun-Ha did such a great job with it that I just wanted to preserve it as a book so it was hard to bring myself to tear a page out, but I had to make sure it worked and it was made to be used, so I just kind of had to remind myself of that. Luckily we have the liberty (i.e., inventory) that will allow me to save one and use one. Hooray for being the publisher!

Cindy also dropped off sample pages of John P's 2008 Gordon the Fox calendar (which is on its way to get spiral bound and will hopefully be ready at the beginning of next week) which was quite a thrill in itself. It's going to be a fun calendar and mini-book (we designed it so that you cut off the dates once the year is over to have a little "book" of Gordon going through the year) and I'm pretty stoked with the way the colors came out (not to pat my own back--although they do look pretty nice--but more like "phew! I didn't mess it up!"). At any rate, the pages looked really good and we can't wait to have it bound and in-hand.

On top of our four fabulous 2008 calendars, we're going to be adding one more to the mix. Well, it's a bit different. Lart drew the reference calendars for 2008-2010 for her Come Along planner (which will be done soon!) three times, which is a crazy crazy amount of work! She showed me one of the unused ones on our subway ride in from JFK and it was so cool that it would have been a waste not to do something with it. Jeremy concurred once we got back to SF and so the plan to print it was set in motion. Of course there are always snags and it had to be rescanned when Lart got back to Berlin, but it's finally ready to go to the printer. It's going to be like a small poster of color pencil extravaganza that will be great for an office or desk. We're also making some new bookmarks by Lart, Simon Evans, and Scott Barry, as well as our first artist print in celebration of LO50 (wow, can't believe we've made so much stuff already!), which is an amazingly detailed drawing by Lart. You will be awestruck by what she has done with a Micron. Insanity.

Speaking of insanity, I'll be going to another trade show at the end of the month. But it's going to be ten times more fun than the Stationery Show (besides Lart not being there and the joy that is Manhattan vegan eats) because we'll be sharing a booth with our pals from McSweeney's! So come visit us at booth A510 at Pool, August 27th-29th. Let me know if you have any food tips for me in Las Vegas/Henderson. I hear there are vegan Boston cream donuts...

On a non-work note, I must mention that we are so happy that one of the greatest tv shows ever, Twitch City, is now on DVD. Even though the quality of the images and the extras are lacking and Mark McKinney is not nearly as good as Bruce McCulloch in the role of Rex Reilly, Twitch City is still a remarkable show that you must see if you have any sense of humor. We heart Don McKellar. And hey, even though the late night shows have been saturated by promotion for it, Superbad still looks awesome.

It's been a little while since we've posted, but thankfully it's because we have so much going on! I just picked up our great new grid notebook that we worked on with Jason Munn (see pg 108 of the June issue of Metropolis--it's all about him!) and some silly little notepads I drew from our friends at 1984 in Oakland. Very exciting to finally have those in hand. In the meantime though, we've been working like crazy getting a new batch of projects ready to turn in.

Lart kicked ass when she got back to Berlin and did an amazing job wrapping up her Come Along planner. It's hard to work with someone half a day away from you, but she was a champ and stayed up late many nights just to talk to us and get it done. Martine's been kicking down some extra work time too to finish up the Annual Vol. 2. She's added lots of little touches like scanning in security envelope patterns to use for borders and making small tree drawings to use in distinguishing the months. It will be the "cleanest" planner we've ever made, but still has our personalities poking through. Jeremy and I came up with a whole new batch of questions for every week, often crossing the line between thought-provoking and stupid. Hey, they're supposed to be fun right?

Last week we turned in Eun-Ha's Milky Elephant 2008 Postcard of the Month calendar to our friend Cindy at Favorite Printing and the pages are drying as we speak! It still has a ways to go before it will be done as it's the most complex binding job we've ever come up with. The pages need to be perforated twice, the cover needs to be drilled and scored in three places, and then the whole thing has to be stapled and glued. yowzer. It's a lot of work, but it's totally going to be worth it. We can't wait to see how it turns out!

proofs for Eun-Ha's calendar

On top of all that, I've been working with John Porcellino on coloring his Little Otsu 2008 calendar and mini-book, Through the Year with Gordon the Fox. We're so used to seeing John P's work for King-Cat in black and white--it's part of the simplicity that makes his work so moving--but we were inspired to do a full-color calendar with him because of the cover that he did for the Comics Journal a few years back. It was a lovely seasonal scene and it got us thinking that it would be great to have a whole year of such things. We've admired John's work for a long long time and got to know him during his stint in SF, and it's an honor to be working on this with him. I've done a lot of editing and cleaning on our projects, but I've never done anything like this before so I was looking forward to the challenge. It's been a pretty smooth process so far, although it has definitely pushed my limits as far as thinking in color. But John's been a great help and very encouraging. I think the end result is going to be great.

sneak peek at one of the month's with Gordon the Fox

Anyhow, I need to finish doing some revisions on a couple months today and we're finalizing the layout for Keri Smith's Non-planner Datebook. We got some much needed help from Kristine in putting it together and just have some minor details to take care of before wrapping it up and hopefully turning it in tomorrow. Did I mention we've been busy?

After a little hiatus I am back, working full force on the Annual Planner #2! This time around we're featuring illustrations of buildings. Drawing buildings is like fitting puzzle pieces together or playing tetris. I don't like to sketch it out with pencil first, I start with one side of the building and work my way to the other side and try to make all the windows, details and doors fit together . It's fun!
Here is a drawing that is almost finished:

I need to add some windows, some shingle shadows and other things then clean it up with whiteout.

And here is a drawing that didn't really turn out because I wasn't concentrating and was watching tv:

Lart was back in SF from Berlin after spending a week in New York with Yvonne working the stationery show. She stayed at our house part of the time while we all took turns working on cleaning up the landscape she drew for the Come Along Planner. Design intern (and friend) Kristine was nice enough to come work overtime helping Lart put the landscape together.

Lart and Kristine hard at work on the Come Along Planner

One of the long work sessions was at our apartment. Yvonne made this amazing rice & quinoa dish while I watched the fantastic documentary Life in the Undergrowth (which i highly, highly recommend), pretty much avoiding working as much as i could. After a few days we all easily put in 10 hours each getting rid of paper texture and trying to get the landscape to match the rest of the page. It's basically neccessary grunt work, but essential to making a consistant looking page. Especially because this planner consists of one very long landscape (over 60 feet long!) that was drawn over time and consists of different textures and styles, all drawn with colored pencil.

Yvonne originally had the idea after we went to a book art exhibit at the NY Public Library based on the Japanese Ehon books and seeing a long scroll that told the story of a man and his friend traveling down a river and recording everything he saw from the boat. It was an amazing exhibit about a basically unknown art (Ehon) and it has had a definite effect on how we have thought about our books since (this planner being the obvious case in point). The NY Public Library website has great info and photos of Ehon books if you are so interested.

Lart is back in Berlin now still working on the landscape and after that Kristine will start collecting pages and putting them together in InDesign for us to do our final editing. Then maybe we'll get some sleep, but probably not as when Lart was here we had one of our all night ideas sessions and came up with a good 5 new possible projects that we are already working on and thinking about. We miss Lart a lot and it was great to have her back. Even when she broke my deoderant.... But, that's another story for another time.

But seriously, Life in the Undergrowth is awesome; rent that thing.

I'm back from a week-long trip to New York and finally have a chance to give an overview. We had a booth at the National Stationery Show and it was our first time and we had no idea what to expect. We'd been preparing for a couple months, but it was always squeezed around putting together projects and minding the store, so it was crazy to think the trip was upon us and we still weren't really ready for it. Jeremy had to stay home to hold down the fort, but luckily I had assistance in the form of Lart and my brother George. I met up with Lart, who flew in from Berlin, at JFK late Thursday night and after a few hours of sleep and a stop at an art auction (crazy! like in the movies, but more chill), we made our way to the massive Javits Center, which is basically an evil sort of biosphere. We managed to improvise our set-up (our theme ended up being green masking tape and salvaged foam core) by 8pm and were excited to have Saturday away from Stationery Show madness.

The day off flew by--although we worked in breakfast with Jeremy's great aunt & uncle, some vegan cookies, pizza, and cake, and a visit with friends Lawrence, Julia, and baby Fiona--and we were back there bright and early on Sunday. To be honest, the next four days are all mashed into a big blur for me, but it was great to meet old and new stores and fellow vendors. And I finally got to meet Allison Cole in person, who was at the neighboring show SURTEX helping her old teacher. It's always nice to be able to put a face to a name, not to mention a LO collaborator! We got to have a nice non-work dinner at Red Bamboo (vegan fish sticks anyone?) and an in-the-booth work session on our new tour diary travel planner & journal. Exciting!

Lart and Allison waiting for the subway

I also got to drop in on Eun-Ha and Karl of Milky Elephant to have a nice dinner on their patio, a peek at Eun-Ha's progress on the very cool (if we may say so) new postcard calendar that she's working on for us, and my introduction to Wii (which I suck at). Besides work, other memorable moments include a pop into Central Park (watched softball, kickball, and a squirrel chase), stone rice bowl at Hangawi, a quick jaunt through ICFF (the design fair that was downstairs at the Javits--like walking through the contemporary design wing at a museum--so cool!), lunch special at Pukk, St. Marks Books (besides being a great store, they took some copies of Teen Power!), Vegan Treats peanut butter bomb cake, listening to Mirah on the way to the subway, randomly coming across our cards being carried at Bluestockings, and Lifethyme's strawberry shortcake. hmmm, do you see a trend? New York is vegan food central so I can't help but get as much of it as I can. Even though I got to try a couple new restaurants, there are so many other recreational things (food and non-food related) that I didn't get to do on this trip, but hopefully we'll be back soon. More importantly though, I did get to meet tons of awesome people and come home tired but inspired.

a sneak peek at Eun-Ha's new calendar