Urban Cookhouse has opened a new store in the Summit! Jared and I were asked to design and build a table and two benches for the eating area. We were inspired by a design from Pielab but wanted to use one consistant wood type to fit the interior of the restaurant. We got a truck full of oak and started working. The finished piece surprisingly fit in my car. Visit the Cookhouse, order an El Cubano and sit on some Alabama oak benches for the complete experience.
Urban Cookhouse commissioned Jared (an architect friend) and I to design and build a table top for a booth in their new restaurant. The top is laminated oak and is supported by two “L” shaped struts coming out from the wall. You don’t want your knees bumping into table legs when eating cheesy pasta.
Anything I get to design for Bici is always a lot of fun. They recently had their annual girl’s alley cat race called the Kitty Cat. I only have one really bad photo to prove it existed…
I was inspired by Bicycled playing cards and….yes…Mary Popins..
It’s cool when people you are friends with start businesses. It’s even cooler when you can help. And coolest of all is when you can help and get free coffee in return.
Working on Church Street Coffee and Books hit the third tier of coolness.
The logo came from the idea of combining coffee and books…hah…but seriously…it did. We wanted it to look English-y and not overly modern or “new” since it would be in Mountain Brook. Carrie Rolwagon had a good idea of the look she needed- so that made everything easier.
I was happy to design a poster for Bici Coop’s 2nd anniversary race and party. I got really inspired by communist propaganda that glorifies the working man. I’ve noticed that that will now be the second Bici poster I’ve done where someone is raising their fist in the air…hmm…maybe I need a new look. I did the screen printing in my own house for this one. Cheep acrylic paint from Walmart was all it took (only Walmart because it was the only place open). They dried pretty fast, but I did mess up about 7%.
Sometimes it’s good to step back from functional and verbal mediums and just make a sculpture. This is a piece for a show the Birmingham Art Collective put on a few years ago. The inspiration came from the collision of ideas/emotions/people into something more interesting than before. The piece is designed from perfect cubes of different sizes intersecting each other.
This was a Christmas present to a certain someone, but now I’m thinking of doing a series on Birmingham buildings. Screen printing on plywood has a nice feel and I hope to do more in the future.
I like what twitter does. You can keep track of people, places, businesses, tagged words, events and on and on. I also like the idea of bringing tweets into a more public setting. This idea is an LED light matrix that broadcasts tweets as they appear on an iPhone. The user would download a special twitter app just for this device, hook up their iPhone or iPod touch, and watch each tweet appear on the big screen. A restaurant could have a screen mounted in their eating space that shows all tweets @mentioning their name.
Local bike racks got some handouts printed! I think the coolest thing on them is the great photos by Caleb Chancey of bikes and racks locked happily together. I got to do the logo and branding for Local, which was a lot of fun and a little challenging. I wanted a grass roots kind of look and took inspiration from hand painted signs in downtown Birmingham. A special website dedicated to selling these guys will be up soon!
I was happy to design and print some Christmas postcards for the very creative architecture firm Standard Creative. We talked about a Christmasy-architecturalish-friendly card, and that’s where front design came from (with their logo on the mantle). But to give a subtle hint to the story of this year (the firm had experienced several break-ins at their new address, including all the computers being stolen…twice) a sneaky elf is running out with an iMac on the back of the card. Originally, I had the reverse of the window from the front broken with glass shards….but that was not very merry.
The project was screen printed on chip board using plastisol ink.
