Free Tickets to the Stones Throw Show at Chop Suey

The Stones Throw 2009 Tour hits Seattle at Chop Suey this Saturday, 4/25 at 9pm and we have free tickets to give away. All you have to do is come into the shop and beat whoever is working in a game of Rock Paper Scissors, best 2 out of 3. We only have a limited number of tickets to give away, so get down to the shop before they're gone.

Getting Ready to Move...

So we're having a big ass sale starting this weekend.

Good People

Last night we celebrated Dan and Erica's pursuit of their dreams after graduating from "Hornall Anderson University." I expect to be eating at Erica's bar and seeing Dan in the news saving a third world country within the next few years.

Why?

Yesterday I took the opportunity to use the Why? show as my first real test of my new lens. Overall I'm pretty happy with it, and anticipate using it as my work horse lens because of the type of environments I like documenting.

Going to an all ages show is not good thing if you don't like to be reminded of how old you're getting.

Weekend Shows

Friday night Joe and I attended a fashion show by the Northwest Film Forum, Blackbird, Rue, La Rousse and Lambs Ear at Pravda Studio—which is a great venue for parties by the way. It was kind of amazing to see an actual catwalk, with actual models walking up and down the runway, and people applauding at the exceptional attire the models were wearing, in Seattle! The location, the people, the clothes, the music, all made me feel like I was in another city.

Please forgive the crappy iPhone pics, but I didn't have my camera (which I now regret)!




Saturday I went to an art opening at the Wonderful Union Gallery featuring art by Don and Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature. They created a collection of fantastic Mid-Century Modern inspired illustrated prints juxtaposed with the realities of domestic life. Definitely drop by the gallery to see some really great work.

I'm really glad to see events of this sort of scale and focus happening in Seattle. The aforementioned boutiques and Demetre and Greg are doing something really great for the local fashion and art/design community respectively.

Geoff McFetridge at OSP

This weekend, we plan on attending the opening of an art installation by one of my favorite graphic designers/artist, Geoff McFetridge, at the Olympic Sculpture Park. His work is playful and whimsical, attributes I hope to incorporate more of in my own work.

For more of McFetridge's work, check out Solitary Arts, The Directors Bureau and this Western State Documentary by Coudal Partners.

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.

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!

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years, originally uploaded by Nathan Young.

Better late then never.

Busy Weekend

Last Friday we had our annual holiday party. They created a casino setting for everyone to gamble for playchips, which at the end of the night you used to purchase raffle tickets for prizes. Free booze and "high rolling" make for a very fun time.






Saturday night we celebrated Adrien's birthday. We had dinner at Oceanaire, which quite honestly wasn't that great. But we finished strong at Typhoon for drinks and to party!




Congratulations to Chris and Marissa on their engagement! It's about time!!!



On Sunday Austin and Jennifer from Dime came through the shop to shoot some shots for the magazine. Look out for the issue in February; Bruce and I might be in it!



p.s. I think I need a flash for my camera.

Going Out

I tend to be a homebody on days off, but for some reason this weekend I felt compelled to go out and actually be social (a little). Maybe it's all the hours I've been putting in at the store and at the office...

Friday night after a good meeting at the shop, Adrien and I met up with Kevin and Jonathan at Umi to have dinner and catch up.



  



Saturday night, Tara and I went over to Corey and Lauren's house for Corey's birthday. They've got quite the set up of instruments and amazingly, practically everyone in the interactive team at Hornall Anderson knew how to play something (except me). I can not believe how many musicians I work with! Not only can they design and develop your website, they can do the soundtrack too...

Corey plays with Matt, another one of my coworkers, in a band called The Fading Collection. Go see them if you get a chance.

QBN Sessions

Adrien, Joe and I will be going to down to LA for QBN Sessions. Newstoday is actually a major contributing factor for how we—Adrien, Joe, Drew, Jason and I—all met four or five years ago. Since then we've all worked together in some form or another and it's always been on projects that I've enjoyed not necessarily because the work itself was fun—although there certainly has been plenty of fun projects—but because I got to work with them.

So we're going to be making a 4 day trip down to LA for the event. Hopefully we'll see something inspiring, and hopefully make some new friendships that are just as fruitfull as our first QBN event.

Typecon

Joe and I will be going to Typecon this year in Seattle for 48 hours (over 4 days) of nonstop talk about serifs, ascenders, descenders, swashes, ligatures, kerning, leading, x-heights, modulation, phase, cap-heights, and apertures by some of the most respected designer/type aficionados in the world.

We'll be going to the Fonts for New Technologies workshop and the rest of the main conference events and forums. It'll be nice to see people whom I've learned about and respected in person to soak up any wisdom they may share. I'm also really looking forward to seeing the Seattle premiere of Helvetica. I've read many good things from designers and non-designers and I hope it lives up to the hype.

Speaking of hype, I composed and published this post from my iPhone! It truly is delight.

Crazy's Wedding!

Our lifelong friend.

The Kid

Friday night Tara and I went to see Griffey's first appearance in Seattle since becoming a Cincinnati Red nine years ago. It was a bittersweet moment for all 47,000 of us to think of what could have become of the Mariners if he and that other guy would of stayed in Seattle as Mariners. I'm glad I had the opportunity with everyone else at the game to show our love and thank Griffey for what he did for baseball in Seattle.

In semi-related news, the HADW Swingers had our first loss of the season on Thursday to the other undefeated team in our league. It came down to a collision at home plate in the bottom of the seventh inning with 2 outs. The runner (who will not be identified here for further ridicule) was tagged out by a the catcher who caught a ball that literally rolled from the 3rd baseman after a relay through from the left fielder. We lost 5-6. It still hurts.

10-8

The Hornall Anderson Swingers started the season off with a win last night at Queen Anne playfield. Adrien even had the first double-play in Swinger history, as he caught a frozen rope at shortstop, and managed to double up a runner at first. This season I think we're definitely looking to go deep into the playoffs, especially since our female players are really stepping up and hitting the ball!

UW BFA Show

Our girl Jayne will be showing her body of student work at the University of Washington BFA Design Exhibition tonight, along with the rest of her class. She's been with us the for the past three months and has done an amazing job stepping up to everything we've given her, from storyboarding to logo design.

Hope to see some of you there tonight. Get there early for the free drinks!

House Warming BBQ

This weekend Kevin and I picked up a Weber Spirit 310 on behalf of a bunch of people for Adrien as a house warming gift. The instructions said it would take 30 minutes for one person to assemble, but it took Kevin and I an hour. Apparently he and I combined aren't up to the Weber standard of a person.