Damn Straight

Here is a CD layout design that I recently did for Jack Straight's debut EP release "Coming Alive", that I think turned out really well. The goal, inspired by the Jack Straight wordmark that was provided, was to emulate the look of an old 70's vinyl EP jacket that has become worn over time. Last week I attended Jack Straight's CD release party and took a bunch of pictures. The show rocked the Park Theater with songs from "Coming Alive" as well as some covers including Led Zeppelin's, Bring it on Home, which I thought was a high point. Not to say that their original songs weren't impressive. This is one band, that I did layout work for, that I can honestly say doesn't have a bad song on the album. I encourage you to check out their myspace here and hear for yourself.

You can see some of the choice pics here on my flicker account.

New Pro In Town

As of 11:33 AM local (Winnipeg) time, I am the newest Flickr Pro Account member. Above is a photo of a waterfall near La Fortuna, Costa Rica, which is the first picture that I posted on Flickr over seven months ago. Now that the warmer days are on the horizon (trust me), I hope to get out and do a lot more shooting.

Proud New Canadian

I have been quite lazy lately in that; just now I am posting about an important event that happened on the 12th of this month. My good friend "the Ragin' Kjin" Kyung Mi Jin became a Canadian citizen. Rae and I took in the ceremony on the Thursday afternoon at Winnipeg's Union Station along with another friend of mine, from Thompson, Dean Barkosky (in the background of this photo). I encourage all of those who know and support Kyung Mi in her decision to join our great country to send her a note on her flickr page. This last batch of photos I posted on my flickr account marks the 200th photo. I guess it's time to go pro.

Buchstaben Museum

As anyone who follows this blog knows, Rae and I have been taking German language classes for over a year now. Obviously this is done with hopes to visit Germany and other parts of Europe. Berlin is definitely on our lists of cities to see and among the many things there are to see in Berlin, the Buchstaben Museum is one site I will not miss. It may be a sign of Rae's and my Font Nerdedness but I'm sure that we have many friends who understand and would join us in our excitement to see a museum all about letter forms.

To learn more click on the picture above or visit www.buchstabenmuseum.de

Two in a Row

Wow, a post two days in a row. I don't think that's happened since I started this blog last August. I have been doing a lot of video rendering, DVD encoding and archiving at work lately and have put pen to paper for the first time in forever (Danger would be proud). Seriously, I haven't doodled much since college and when I did it wasn't much to show, Not that this one is spectacular, I just kinda liked it.

I'll try to make it more of a habit.

Happy St. Patty's Day

I used to have a passing interest in a site called worth1000.com. I thought that it was a great site for the Photoshop contests and challenges although I never actually posted anything, just critiqued. However I was torn between that and another facet of worth1000. In addition to the Photoshop contests they had logo design competitions for companies too cheap to hire a designer. IMHO this only exploited talented amatures by paying $100 for the winning logo.

Recently I received an Email (which is weird because I had no idea that I was on their mailing list and haven't even visited the site in a year or two) advertising the launch of their new online photo editing, vector program, colour editor and effects editor, all named after birds to go with the Aviary theme. This was in response to Worth1000 members complaining about needing expensive software to enter their contests. I tried the vector program and it's not that great but could never replace Illustrator. It will be interesting to see how it takes off and whether it will force the bigger guys like Adobe to come down in price. I look forward to trying out the other applications when I get the time. They have video tutorials but I think that you have to sign up with Worth1000 to save anyhting that you make. If anyone out in the blogosphere tries it out, let me know what you think. you can find it at aviary.com

My Mom Has Joined Flicker

Hopper 1 Originally uploaded by heyjudexxoo's

My mother has joined the flicker community. With her retirement she now has the time to get out and enjoy herself and post pictures about it. If you like pictures of Quilts, Crafts, or things found on the ground, I encourage you to help me encourage her by visiting my Mom's flicker page and leaving crass, mindless, thoughtless, ignorant, boorish, oafish, asinine, graceless, tasteless, tactless, clumsy, heavy-handed or all around buffoonish comments on her pictures. Just don't be mean, it was her birthday last Sunday.

Happy Birthday Mom
Love,
Doug