Their aim is to become America’s Next Grand Wine Estate, with an estate-grown and -bottled tradition that nods to the Old World. They may be a bit off the well-worn Napa/Sonoma wine country path, but Brassfield Estates makes a worthy pitch for this title, backed by a new AVA distinction, and the confidence of knowing they sit on a property that boasts its very own Lake Serenity and (hopefully) dormant Volcano.
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The Museum of Modern Art recently announced they’ll be adding 23 digital typefaces to their Architecture and Design Collection (up til now, Helvetica was the only typeface in MOMA’s collection).

As this NYT article points out, many of these were created to be elegant solutions to practical problems created by new technologies.

Design, technology, solutions, art…

Michigan radio station WTCM and Ron Jolly interviewed our own Steve Fine and our newly own Nick Perez and Sarah Mackenzie of Big Daylight this morning on the Entrepreneur Spotlight show.

Topics covered: Big Daylight’s backstory, Steve Fine’s backstory, how cellular and molecular biology is the perfect background for a digital agency, small business in Michigan, geography as a lifestyle choice, and of course a useful bit of “what the heck does all this MEAN anyway?” SEO/PPC shoptalk.

Take a listen:

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And thanks to Ron Jolly for his hospitality.

(We were just kidding about the radio faces too…)

We are excited to announce today that we’ve added online marketing company Big Daylight to our fold. Check out the full press release below or here. We’ve worked with this company in the past, and some of you have too. And we know that their skills help enhance our abilities as online marketers and digital branders across the Paid, Earned, and Owned spheres of influence.  Read the rest of this entry »

I love simplicity.

I love to-do lists.

I’m online all day.

I have a weakness for puns.

This might be love at first sight: Teux Deux

Some thoughts (and images) of minimalism. Not so much minimalism as a design endgame, but more what still remains when you reduce what you’re used to seeing to just its bare bones.

How many (or few) elements of a recognizable brand does it take to recognize it?

Mr. Muscle, M&Ms, Muppets and more after the jump…

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Environmentally-friendly type that’s, well, just what you typed apparently.

EcoFont software puts little holes in the usual fonts (Arial, Verdana, etc), so that when printed, they use 25% less ink & toner. (Or, if you spring for the Enterprise package, house fonts).

Alternately, going Gothic can help the environment. Century Gothic, that is. In case you missed the buzz earlier this year, the University of Wisconsin made some news by switching their default font to Century Gothic saving 30% in ink over documents printed in Arial.

Type designer Cyrus Highsmith tried to go Helvetica-less for a day (he refrained from anything which uses that font).

The challenge? It’s on everything from subways to credit cards to clothing labels.

His experiment, and other font topics of interest, are discussed in the NYT review of his new book, Just My Type.

I suspect going without Comic Sans for a day would be easier…

I went to SFMOMA this weekend and finally got to check out their wine exhibit: “How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now.” It was a fairly small but quite diverse exhibit that challenged the viewer to think about where wine comes from, how it’s talked about, and how it’s evolved over time from something quite esoteric and snobby, to a widely accessible commodity that’s ripe for spinoff. There was also a crazy display of wine additives, which I’d never really thought about before. Turns out your average wine is way more than just grapes and time (such as oak chips, pictured above).

Unfortunately part of the exhibit was under renovation during my visit, but I look forward to going back to see the pieces I missed.

An excellent article from Behance which covers an adjustment to the GTD system to accommodate for creativity.  This approach directly addresses the constant conflict we all face in marketing, design and development positions: how to balance the day to day tasks of your job with the more deep focus work that make up the majority of your responsibilities.

An excerpt:

Creative work, however, is a subtle affair. If your mind is not in the exact right state, it’s difficult to produce high-quality results. Because of this, details matter. This is what’s important about GCTD, not the general idea of blocking out time, but the carefully-calibrated details that accompany it: the blocks are treated like real appointments and are dedicated to only one (or, at most, two) projects in a week; absolutely zero interruptions are allowed during the blocks; and the focus is on process, not goals.

Read the full article at the99percent.com