WMC Fest recap, go!

Gush, gush, gush, awesome unicorns and sprinkles, gushing inspiration overload, tasty beer, hot dogs, gush. My brain is a mush of gush. I expected to have a blast of course, but I didn’t expect to be absolved of all my design angst and stress about what I do. I lost all of that and the desire to make took its place, which is priceless. Too bad we can’t go to these things all the time so this feeling never has to wear off! If you go to no other design festivals next year, make it WMC Fest. Come as you are learning & inspiration is the best kind if you ask me. Plus I can’t emphasize the cheap factor enough, best bang for your buck in living memory.

+ Gear, cards, and many Tattlys from the likes Jennifer Daniel, James White, Vaughn Fender, Joseph Hughes, To The Moon Studios, and Tuesday Bassen. Somehow I missed out on the festivale goody bag though, whoops. I did pick up the ticket for it, but I promptly lost it and got distracted by awesomeness at every turn so I never remembered to go back. Ditto for the photo booth too.

+ If you live in the Kent area you have to go to Hollo’s Papercraft. Man, what I wouldn’t give to have a place like this closer to Chicago. Aisles upon aisles of delicious papers, materials, party gear, art supplies at super duper prices. Same goes for Cleveland’s thrifting, I hear it’s some of the finest. We did stop at the used office supply shop on Detroit Avenue near the festival & found a few goodies. That’s where I found the wooden pushpins for $1!

+ Great talks over all, but there were a couple of designers who gave real estate tours of their work. I guess it bears repeating once again, you shouldn’t only show your portfolio when giving a talk. I know how to use google dudes, I can look your work up if I want to. Doing this is a lot like a looking at slides from someone else’s vacation; it’s boring after 10 minutes. Interspersing fart jokes between slides is cute at first, but it’s a crutch and doesn’t add any depth. Up your game. Plus, winging it up there is insulting to the speakers like me who lost more than a little sleep and a few tears while putting our talks together. Bravado is crap on stage. Bring the real, please.

+ Happy Dog has better hot dogs than all of Chicago (ok, almost, Hot Doug’s excluded).

+ I was sad that so many people left early! I know, I know extenuating circumstances blah-de-blah, they do happen. But unless you’re Austin Kleon with a pre-scheduled cross-country book tour or a similar airtight alibi I find it hard to buy other reasons for leaving early. Trekking all the way there only to miss out on learning is like cutting school at recess. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s final keynote brought the house down with a full standing ovation, I wouldn’t have missed that if you paid me. And in fact, I lost billable hours because this meant I had to take Monday off as well, but don’t care, worth it. This holds especially true for speakers & the designers who were displaying work. If you got a free pass to the conference or an honorarium for attending, you better bend over backward to attend everything you can.

+ Cleveland streetwear brand iLTHY blogged some of the street style from the fest, look how we love polka dots!

+ Jen Myers‘ talk on women developers was enlightening. Especially because it stirred quite the rumor mill, which is sign she gave a great talk. Engaging rumors online is a messy business, and generally not worth addressing, but in short, a few bros said her talk was nonsense and women don’t face discrimination when it comes to design or development. OH HA HA HA. HA. HA. Are we still here discussing this? Really? It’s actually probably better that I didn’t hear these things in person because I would not have been able to resist sticking my neck out. I wonder if this was stated in male-only company too. Pfffft. If you can’t or don’t say your opinion in front of the people you’re knocking it means you’re not giving us the chance to refute, and that right there is active discrimination. Congrats on proving that this inequity exists one more time.

+ Other people I got to hang out with who didn’t speak: Veronica & Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Jacqui Oakley & Poly Studio, Caroline Sewell, Jessi Arrington, Jason James, Troy DeShano, Mikey Burton, Fringe Focus, Max Temkin, Nick D, Jana Kinsman, Elaine Chernov, Mig Reyes & Kik McNally and all the rest of amazing Chicago designers who came and offered their support. It gave me much courage seeing so many friends in the audience while I was talking.

+ Finally a HUGE, huge thank you to Joseph Hughes & Jeff Finley for organizing this and giving me the chance to take the stage. You obviously know how to throw it down. It’s no small thing to create so much community motivation. You are the very heart of Cleveland.

+ Now for the trickier next step: recapping my actual talk. I said some important things and I want to make sure that even the people who went get a chance to take it in. Stay tuned!! It’s in the works, hopefully with video.

Let's recap, shall we?

I have precisely 15 minutes to push out this missive, so I’m just going for it! Here’s what happened in the last month.

Chad & I went to Minnesota to hang out with my fam and do some co-working at Loose Cubes. But we also got a really stellar behind-the-scenes tour of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Designer Dante Carlos showed us their incredible library, archives, design offices, and introduced us to the rest of their design team. It was so incredible! I could have spent the whole afternoon pawing aroung in their library. Dante had the librarian pull some handmade pop-up books by one of my long time favorite artists, Tauba Auerbach. Wow, right? We even made the Walker blog too!

+ I started working with Aeolidia, I’m designing websites with them on the reg now.

+ Personal milestone: I turned 30! Pie-themed party (with requisite pie-eating contest, of course) was held at my co-working space Rational Park. (Semi-related, also designed & built Rational Park’s website with my super hero studiomates this month. Adding this ‘un to my portfolio, yepper.) Even though I’m thrilled to be 30 and enjoyed the heck out of my birthday, this milestone hasn’t come without some challenges, not going to lie. Growing pains as I spent these weeks not only evaluating myself but every aspect of my business, my process. Checking myself trying to make sure I’ve got my goals in focus. It’s exhausting, but man, so worth it. This is definitely to blame for my hard fall off the social media train too. And once you break the habit it’s really hard to get back into it, so I’m a bit breathless as if I were taking up running again. Plus, for the first time I noticed I had stage fright about what to post, which I admit is suuuuper lame, but there you have it. Blogger identity crisis. Progress is being made though, starting in five days, when I’ll be presenting about this exact process, on stage in front of several hundred people at WMC Fest. Either way I’m putting myself out there then, so I might as well bring it to this space too you know?

Bring it, Cleveland. Bring it, internet. Let’s tangle.

Friday Link Love + Giveaway Winner

Gabi-Piserchia-painting

+ Today’s gorgeous artwork provided by Gabi Piserchia, available for purchase on Society 6.

+ Randomizer.org picked entrant number 8, Brendan Beale from Australia, as the winner of the Sonnenzimmer poster! Congrats, Brendan! Sonnenzimmer & I are so grateful to all who entered.

+ What it Means to be a Geek offers the freedom to devour your interests with all the enthusiasm you can muster. Screw cool, care instead. I wish I’d read this when I was in high school or college.

+ Had a chuckle over the World’s Longest Invoice that’s been making the rounds this week. Currently the deadbeat clients of the world owe over 10 million to the freelancers who worked with them.

+ 37signals founder Jason Fried wrote an excellent article for Inc. Magazine on why most business writing is awful. Finally someone is stepping up to the plate and explaining the difference between compelling business writing and the watered down jargon-y crap we’re so used to seeing. Also makes an excellent case for using a more informal, conversational tone for online writing, thank goodness, I’ve been pushing for this for years.

+ MOXIE Conference tomorrow! I’m hitting the stage to do a mock-negotiation scenario with financial advisor Linda McCauley on how to wheel and deal like a boss. If you’re going, please say hello!!

Happy weekend! On the dock for next week: co-working tales & behind-the-scenes tour of ze Walker Art Center.

Four Days in Detroit

I’ve been wanting to explore Detroit for ages and finally there were enough reasons and planning to make it happen two weeks ago over Easter.

At the outset it’s hard to prepare for Detroit’s massive abandonment, decay, and poverty, even though I knew to expect it. To fresh eyes, large swaths of the city look, no jokes, like the leavings of a war zone. It’s pervasive, you can’t go more than a block or two before encountering it. Once opulently designed & crafted buildings are now windowless skeletons, sunken and rotting like forgotten jack-o-lanterns, scrappers having come and gone long ago. A particular image that won’t be leaving my head easily is the sight of the former Packard Motor plant. It’s a carcass that goes on for literal blocks. When Christina from printmaking shop Perfect Laughter showed us around her brand-new printmaking studio in the Corktown neighborhood she told us of the rubberneckers on the hunt for “ruin porn” documenting as if Michigan Central Station were the Acropolis or the Coliseum in Rome. And I can certainly understand that pastime, though it’s not my particular style, because the ruins really are a breathtaking sight to see.

Yet it’s undeniable that there are just as many marvelous things happening despite the sad parts of the city. Everyone we met in Detroit is doing something or working for something, their efforts beautifully poignant in the face of the city’s hard edges.

Culture is also on the rise in Detroit too. Chicagoans would not believe the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) rivals our Art Institute, but you’d be wrong there. It’s every bit as good, if not better. MOCAD, the contemporary art museum, is consistently one of the most creative and innovative contemporary spaces out there. Every visit it’s completely remade new and you can expect to be surprised, that’s for sure. This time around we enjoyed an incredible installation by Joshua White & Gary Panter’s Light Show. The best way I can think of to describe it as a modern fun house, a huge echoing space vibrating with psychedelic rhythm and sound. So intense it’s almost repellent at first, but then little surprises and funny things start appearing and then it’s all smiles if you hang out awhile. It’s like a little mini vacation, and a pretty perfect metaphor for how the city is itself.

We stayed at the adorably rustic yet modern inn, Honor & Folly, run by Meghan McEwen of Designtripper. The space was filled with plenty of handmade and thoughtful cozy touches, just as I imagined when I posted about it before. We made good use of the full kitchen and even hosted a meal with our families who hiked in from the suburbs to hangout.

Every place comes with a story in Detroit. At the Peacock Room, a little boutique near the DIA, the shop owner told me how she tore down the drywall in her space, only to discover it was hiding a 1920’s ballroom with mirrored walls, marble columns and tin ceilings. Talk about hidden treasure, eh? Or Café D’Mongo’s, a former speakeasy which is a feast of 1920’s nostalgia. It only reopened recently, pretty much intact from it’s original heydays. The charming & feisty older lady running the joint seems like she came back to life with the bar too.

We ate really well, plenty of BBQ and soul food, as well as fresh picks from the open air Eastern Market. Lafayette or American for Coney Island Dogs, though I can’t say I can tell the difference between the two places. Maybe the joy of a boiled hot dog in a white bun with chili and mustard is lost on me though. There was also plenty of music, we saw live shows almost everywhere without even trying. Detroit’s got Motown in its blood and that influence is clear. If there wasn’t live music at a venue there was a fatty juke box instead – the real kind – not the cheesy wall-mounted electronic ones with the same 20 songs that are popular in Chicago pubs. One place we went to (The Bronx) even has a bench thoughtfully placed by the juke box so you can get comfy while you rifle through the extensive collection.

The Heidelberg Project, while not exactly new (it’s a non-profit art installation that’s been evolving since the 1970’s), is a totally unexpected response to the city’s downfall. There is color and brightness on every possible surface, with bizarre objects in not normal places, it’s like Dr. Seuss came and built landscape with trash. Here it’s okay if nothing makes sense, it’s a nice reminder that chaos can also have beauty and meaning.

For next time: bookbinding classes at Signal Return that come with home-cooked farm-to-table dinner, another visit to the DIA, Belle Isle Park, a closer look at the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. I’m sure there’s plenty else to do and see, I just hope I get to come back for it soon!

{iPhone photos from Instagram & Banana Camera’s Cross-Process, Wikipedia, and Ina Weise.}

How's about some free art, then?

Giveaways aren’t something I’m really all that excited about most of the time, but occasionally it’s just too good to pass up. Someone out there needs to have this gorgeous 18″ x 24″ screenprinted poster, with seven glorious layers of texture and color. By Nick Butcher & Nadine Nakanishi, aka prodigy poster duo Sonnenzimmer. No one does gig poster design quite like Sonnenzimmer, not even close, which is impressive alone, but of course they don’t really stop there. What’s so brilliant about their work is the process doesn’t change much in any of the media they use. Whether it’s a print, a painting, installation, or even music, the project is structured around a system or concept, and then the ensuing visuals or sounds for the most part get to happen accidentally. That’s a decision that I have heaps of respect for, because it takes major guts to just go with whatever comes out of you, as it happens. And the outcome manages to be technically well-founded, elegant, and some how effortless all at once. Plus, Nick & Nadine are so gracious to be around, the types who just show up and get to work, sans bullshit. They’ve been a solid foundation of support in Chicago’s creative faction for years it’s only fair I should give them their due.

Further if you’re into jazz you can buy Free Jazz Bitmaps Vol. 1 and get a free copy of the poster with purchase. This album is a brand-new collaboration, a perfect little capsule of Chicago’s jazz scene right now. Have a listen here.

How to enter the giveaway:
1. Leave a comment.
2. Like Pitch on Facebook
3. Tweet it on the twitters, but make sure you @reply me.

You can enter up to two times! The giveaway will be open until April the 25th at 12am and I will announce the randomly drawn winner on Thursday of next week.

We’ll also be celebrating Sonnenzimmer’s new works and the album release on Friday, May 4th from 6 – 9pm at Saki. Live music by Nick Butcher, Katherine Young, Jenna Lyle, & Joann Cho. Free, as usual.