An Institution Closes

Yick Fung Co., a Seattle Chinatown institution, will close its doors this week. Tara's great Uncle has been running the place since the late 1930's and has now decided to let the store's legacy live on at the Wing Luke Asian Museum, where the store will literally be transplanted as a permanent exhibit.

Read about here.

Air Travel = Hard

Air travel is hard. Whatever happened to the glamourous skylines with the beautiful stewardesses serving us cocktails in a skylounge on a giant plane? Instead, our flight out of Seattle was delayed, which meant we missed our connecting flight in Denver to New Orleans. Luckily, our airline put us up in a hotel for the night and got us out to New Orleans Saturday afternoon. Having to fly somewhere for three straight days is something I don't think I could ever get used to.

Hayden and I were sent to New Orleans for NBA All-Star weekend to document the booth experience we produced for the T-Mobile for the NBA Jam Session. Because our flight was delayed, we only had about 24 hours to spend in New Orleans, so we tried to make the most of it.

Celebrate

Congrats Kathleen and Joe! Absolutely one of the nicest and most enjoyable weddings we've been to. The ceremony was short and sweet, held in the beautifully modern Novelty Hill Winery. The delicious food and wine was served family style on two very long tables for the 100 or so attendees—a nice change from the typical banquet style round tables and buffets. The printed materials were of course, gorgeous, and at the end of the night we all got to play with sparklers!

Less To Worry About

In my spare time this past week I've been working on business cards for the shop. It's been a nice change of pace working on a project that allows me to focus my time and energy on only a few elements—shape, layout, color—trying to make them as perfect as I can (still working on it).

That's not to say that those aren't my primary considerations on interactive projects, but there are a far greater number of other elements to deal with—user flow and experience, information architecture, hardware specs, dev platforms, interface (keyboard/mouse or other), OS/browser compatibilities—that take away focus from the first three graphic elements.

The small sandbox has been refreshing and I'm really looking forward to the satisfaction of having a physical object at the end of project instead of a website or installation that will disappear or become obsolete in the next 6 months.