tiny gigantic

After 2 years of work, our graffiti book, Written on the City, is about to come out, and we’re psyched! We’re extra psyched because it just got an awesome review in Newsweek this week. Page 10 of the print version, or visit the online article and gallery.

And when you’re, done, don’t forget to buy a copy of the book!!!

Yasmin Sethi has designed a super sexy chess set inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece.

Read more here.

via notcot.

So we were asked to design the name, logo, interior, website, and experience for a new restaurant here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Super fucking fun.

It’s called Beretta, and they serve up gourmet pizzas and fancy-ass cocktails you won’t find anywhere else, except for maybe a Hemingway novel. We’re psyched they’re blowing up.

Oh yeah, and they’re open late too. If yer in SF, go give ‘em some love.

Check out this minimalist cabin built from off-the-shelf parts. It’s 140 square feet, and features a cleverly re-purposed garage door.Link.

Found on notcot.org

We’re in New York City this week playing with a few clients and digging on the city. Last time we were here, this place kicked our asses pretty good. We worked too hard and played even harder and by the end our stay we were mere shells of our former selves. Ridiculously fun, but not sustainable. This time, we’ve given ourselves a few extra days with no obligations to allow ourselves to adjust, to open ourselves to all the surprising stuff that rises unbidden out of the city, and to give ourselves the time to meet some random good people.

So if you’re in town this week, come have a drink with us. We’re gathering the troops this Thursday night, at The Back Room (102 Norfolk St) in the lower east side. I look like a Jewish baby Elvis, and Axel has a white stripe in his hair. If you’re in town, we’d love to meet you.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, we hate corporate bullshit. We think it’s dehumanizing. It diminishes conversation and weakens communication. Both Axel and I are refugees from the brand/advertising worlds where that language runs rampant, so one of the first things we did when we started Language in Common was to make a bunch of corporate bullshit t-shirts. It was therapy, really—a way of cleansing our souls—but also we thought you might be able to relate. The line is called Corporate Hack Enjoy.

For those of you who saw this a few years ago, watch it again. It’s still brilliant and creepy and good for you too.

“Fuck! I’m about to drop 100 dollars on J-date! And I’m really not very Jewish at all.”

That’s what I heard when I walked into the studio this morning. I’m all for online dating, but this can’t go on. My creative partner is tired of being single. And hell, I’m tired of him being single. He’s spent half the morning IMing with the random women from various dating sites. Our conversations have been cut short by some beautiful woman or another walking by outside our window. But there’s work to be done here, in the studio! I can’t have my partner all distracted all the time.

So in the interest of my sanity and our success, I’m declaring this month “Date Axel” month.

Here’s how you can help:
You’ve seen how smart the guy is, you’ve seen how creative, but until now you never knew how pretty. And I’m certain that most of you are super-smart. And I’m hoping that some of you are female and single. And pretty.

Send one sentence of any length to antenna at tinygigantic dot com about why you’re the girl for Axel. Winner(s) get an all expenses paid trip to nirvana with Axel. And no matter if you like him or not, at the end of “Date Axel” month, all you lovelies who play will get something really cool from us both.

Here’s a good New Yorker article on a beautiful emerging sport called parkour, which is the art of moving fluidly over any terrain.

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs.

Read the rest here.

Don’t miss this sweet VIDEO here.

This is a picture I did not take of a prostitute in front of four men on a street corner at dawn, asking them a question with her hands out, to which the men replied in unison, like a choreographed dance troupe, by pulling the lining of their pockets inside-out to show they had no money.

This “photograph” is from Unphotographable, a text account of pictures missed. It’s a beautiful thing.

What a beautiful thing this is. Seriously, let’s all make a decision to do one thing each day for no other reason than to make others happy.

Thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link.

Most of you know by now that I have a serious thing for robots. And The Robot. You know, the dance? Here, thank the robot gods, is the most amazing group robot I’ve ever seen. Watch the video here.

Most days, I wake up with an deep urge to do the hard work of changing myself and the world around me for the better. But some days, I wake up and all I want to do is ENJOY the world—just to have a day where I live as if everything is just as it should be. Those are the days I dream of train jumping.

via FecalFace

Something happened today as we were experimenting with possible layout directions for the Written on the City book: I stopped looking, I stopped thinking, and I finally felt like progress got made.

Designers are trained to look. Scratch that, they’re paid to look. So I’ll understand if you want to kick me in the crotch when I tell you that when beginning a design project, it’s sometimes a good idea to stop thinking, stop looking and start simply making.

Because here’s the thing: we’ve been so trained to look for a solution at the end of a project, we don’t see all the wonderful, serendipitous possibilities in what happens along the way.

So we floundered around like this for a good week or so. And if it hadn’t been for our good friend, the kick-ass Audrey Kallander we’d be floundering still.

She told us to shut the hell up and then held us at scissor-point until we began making collages of possible spreads. I know, it seems obvious. But no one really seems to take the time (and it does take some time) to use collage as a tool to figure out some smart design directions. Mostly, we go straight to the computer, and start designing from there. But starting with the computer forces you to think immediately about a grid, it forces you to think and re-think your actions, and it makes the design process too precious.

So here’s what you do:
Make a whole bunch of black and white copies (in many different sizes) of all your images. Then do the same thing using lorem ipsum text. Make some bold, some in italics, some giant and some tiny. Get some tape and start cutting and taping.

And don’t worry about what it looks like. Seriously. This means that you shouldn’t have an idea about what it’s gonna look like, before you begin. You just have to start laying your text and your images down next to eachother without thinking about your rule of thirds or your golden ratio or your rags or a grid or anything else for that matter. You can tap those things into place after you’ve found a direction that feels good. So work with your gut. And make as many different spreads as possible.

You’ll find that once you let go of seeing the process as the product, your designs will become a lot freer, they’ll lend themselves more to conversation and narrative. And you’ll have a damn good time, too.

Have you tried this? How did it go?

I’d been gearing up to write a post blasting Microsoft’s new Vista operating system—not that I’ve tested it out or anything—but mostly I was going to rant about the monolith that is Microsoft and how they’re always sort of behind when it comes to culture and by the way that “wow” commercial really sucks. But then I ran across this awesome bit of branded content. And the branding of it is clear and consistent, but not at all offensive like you might expect. I never ever thought I’d say this but: well done Microsoft!

Often we run across astoundingly bad communications that somehow made it past the editors (if there were any) and out into the world. Some are confusing, some are too obvious, and some are just plain bad. From here on out, we’ll be intermittently posting photos of the offending communications and making suggestions for what they should have been. We’re calling it You shoulda hired us. This one seems to be the name of a band. Sorta clunky, if you ask me. Hell, even Underdog Uprising has better rhythm. Our suggestion:

Underdog Rising

Got any other good ideas?

We’ve talked about fun as strategy here before. That’s because play is an essential developmental part of the human experience. It makes work easier and better. It’s how the world’s greatest ideas come into being. And it’s way more fun than working. Play can make you famous, it can make you rich, and it’ll certainly make you happy.

But still, mainstream culture reduces the idea of play to something that children do, and then grow out of: if you’re a grownup, you work, plain and simple. And if you’re dorking around at the office—shrink wrapping your colleague’s keyboard, say—you’re wasting time. But play is crucial to creativity and well-being. When you make your job fun, it doesn’t feel like work—it doesn’t feel like slogging through the bullshit—so you do it better simply because you enjoy it more. And others will enjoy it more too. Which means there’ll be more demand for what you do.

There’s evidence to that end in your life right now: you’re attracted to people who make you laugh; you’re wowed by projects and products that look and work as if they were fun to create; and hanging out with your perpetually depressed, or over-serious friend is always more of a chore than you want it to be. Anybody out there who doesn’t want to play more?

Yeah, you can call it ‘design thinking‘ if you want, but to my mind, that’s already played out. Yes, it’s true, the MFA is the new MBA, and the kind of thinking that creative types regularly employ to make pretty things is becoming more and more in demand. But still, it’s little more than a buzzword for creativity. So fuck it, I’m coining a new buzzword: architectural thinking. Yeah! Booyah! Dig that!

Ahem.

But see, architectural thinking is also creative, works by allowing all ideas to live in the same space (and it also employs design thinking) to imagine and create spaces and places that serve social causes and better human interaction. What I mean is that Public Architecture is doing it–and has been doing it–since before ‘design thinking’ was even an itch its daddy’s drawers. They’re pretty smart over there.