Custom built print and web works.

Rem Koolhaas in Jersey City

Sunday March 25, 2007

Having grown up in Jersey City, I’m proud to learn that Rem Koolhaas is the architect for a massive mixed-use complex located 2 blocks from our current studio here in Downtown Jersey City. Koolhaas has been called the new Gehry. Some have dared to call him better. Koolhaas presented his design for the 52-story tower one month ago. The design is a little shocking and reminds me of the Citibank building in NYC. Is that even possible?? Pretty exciting for folks who’ve been lucky to afford to buy one of the many luxury condos in the neighborhood.

It should also be mentioned that there has been collateral damage due to the rapid development of this city. The future site of what will likely be the first piece of architecture that will put Jersey City on the global map (besides the wondrous Trump Tower located across the street from Koolhaas’s buildings), was once the home of many of the very artists who helped create the district now known as “The Powerhouse Arts District”. The old building was called 111First, now being demolished to break ground for the new buildings. Sadly and obviously, the artists lost the fight to renew their leases and so goes the demolition and rebuilding of JC. See some photos of this rapidly changing area.

The question is…where have all the artists gone now? Very few struggling fine artists can afford the 800 sq. ft luxury condos with their granite countertops and marble baths. I hear many are moving to the Jersey City Heights where East Erie will be relocating to next month. Hip hip hurray!

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March of the Penguin

Wednesday February 21, 2007

I was fortunate to catch Paul Buckley’s presentation at the Type Director’s Club recently.

Paul, the Executive Creative Director for Penguin presented an amusing and informative look at his work — from early art school paintings to his award winning Penguin book covers. In addition to his own work, Paul introduced the other Penguin creatives and discussed in short detail some of the methods used to arrive at the final designs. All very interesting — especially the designs that were rejected and the reasons for the rejections.

Amusing sidenote: in his correspondence with Robert Crumb, Paul described how Robert doesn’t actually email, but instead scrawls a note on some paper, has his assistant scan it and then emails the jpeg. That works.

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Up to Eight Images!

Thursday February 1, 2007

This is another great tutorial from Andy Budd that presents a simpler, cleaner approach to rounded corners with CSS.

What I think is super cool here is the ability to add up to eight background images to a single element in the new CSS3 spec. This opens up a lot of design possibilities without creating messy code. And that’s great. Also much needed. I think/hope this and other CSS3 enhancements will lead to more creative designs that comply with web standards. We’ll see.

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Updates in progress

Wednesday January 17, 2007

We’ll be revamping the site over the next several days. Some sections might look a little strange until we get everything settled.

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It's Christmas time

Monday December 18, 2006

Or happy holidays time, depending on your preference.

2006 has been a great year for us, as we officially launched East Erie Creative. Much more to come next year.

If Christmas shopping has you down, here’s your excuse. Or, maybe you want to show some Christmas enthusiasm.

meet your neighbors

Sunday October 22, 2006

The Jersey City Artists Studio tour took place this weekend. A few of the contributing artists were in our building here at 150 Bay, so Aubrey and I went to check it out.

This is an interesting event – you get to walk around and check out art studios and meet some of your neighbors. The event is sponsored by these guys. Overall, most of the art was impressive. A couple standouts for me were Robert Koch scultpure and Lynda D’Amico – both artists here at 150 Bay.

Hopefully events like this continue – nice to see peope interested in the local scene – the fact that it’s a visual arts event is a plus.

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textpattern = sweet

Thursday September 14, 2006

I've spent a lot of time looking into open source cms systems. I've evaluated, modified, deployed etc. I like plone a lot, but I there is a ton of set up involved and you really need to work with a very skilled python developer to get what you want. I've been very fortunate in my soon to be ex-day job to work with such folks and we built some great systems. Plone is excellent if you're concerned with SEO and it's packed with some pretty great features. That said, I really wanted to try a different system for this site.

So, I looked at all the usual suspects - drupal, mambo, wordpress(which I do use), joomla, ez-publish, movable type and so on. And after months of comparing feature sets I'll probably never use and driving myself crazy over analyzing every possible scenario, I decided on Textpattern.

If you know and use textpattern, then you know why it's great. If you don't, try it. You'll be happy you did. It's clean, easy to use, easy to modify and it "feels" nice. Working in textptattern is a pleasant experience.

There were two CMS products I cam across in my hunt that I'll mention also. Modx and ExpanseCMS. I've built sites with both of these and they're very good. I'll write more about them later.

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building as we go

Tuesday August 29, 2006

Between client projects and general life distractions, we’ll be building this site out. So – if something looks funny, breaks or acts strange, please bear with us. Work samples, music and lots of other good stuff will be added soon.
Most of the writing here will be about design – print, web, typography, inspiration, standards, etc. But we’ll discuss issues outside of the design world also. More on that later.

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ignition sequence start - guidance is internal

Friday August 18, 2006

this is our new space, but we aren’t new. been doing this for a while. will have more up soon. stop by now and again.

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