Here are a couple quick shots from the Cherry Blossom Festival that is currently being held in Washington D.C. until April 12th.  It was a good change of scenery being in a smaller city with warm weather, if anyone gets a chance to go there I would recommend it, I took the Bolt Bus which was fairly cheap I think around $30 round trip with free Wi-Fi which helped the four hour drive go by a little faster. 

Quantum of Solace’s online multiplayer game that I worked on while at Big Spaceship is now a finalists for this years Flash In The Can Awards.  If you have a minute please vote here for it, thanks.

I was fortunate enough to recently be interviewed on Design Taxi for their Travel Album feature Design City: New York City. The feature focuses on uprising stars in different cities and for this edition it was NY.  Check out the feature here.

I know this has been around for a while now but it’s really incredible and flawless, pretty much stop motion animation at it’s best.  Patrick Bolvin has a good amount of stop motion videos he has created out of toys.  Most of them are super heroes competing against one another in some type of form and also a few choose your own adventure type videos.  Click the images above to watch the videos, first one is Bruce Lee vs Ironman and the second one is a break dance battle between Batman and Joker, definitely worth a watch you won’t be disappointed!

I’m probably the last person to find out about this but Google Labs created a feature in Gmail that I could have used many times as I am sure others needed as well, ‘Undo Send.’ There have been plenty of times where I have sent emails to clients and after sending the email I go back and realize I used the wrong word or spell check didn’t catch a misspelled word and I think to myself I wish Gmail had a Undo Send button like AOL did way back in the day.  Well to my surprise, this feature does exist and I can’t believe I never knew about it! If there is anyone else out there that has yet to discover this but needs it, in your Gmail account click on Labs and scroll down towards the bottom and enable the Undo Send, once you do that from now on whenever you send a email the Undo Send button will appear for 5 seconds before going away. 

I came across this article by Eric Demay which he has made 50 posts of his trip to China, each post on a different day accompanied by some interesting photos and some brief words. Worth a look.

I was contacted a couple weeks ago by the curator of the Digital Art Gallery for MacWorld and he told me that Steve Wozniak saw my design at the show and wanted a signed copy for himself to display in his home.  For those who don’t know Steve he is pretty much the Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison of our time, Wozniak created the 1st ever Apple computer in the mid 70’s and is a co-founder of Apple along with Steve Jobs, he was also recently on Dancing With The Stars haha.  When I first heard the news my instant reaction was “Wow, damn what a huge honor, I can’t believe it!”, to have someone with such a status as him wanting one of my design’s is just shocking.  I received the printed poster earlier this week and signed it then dropped it off at the post office where it will now ship back to California to get framed before getting delivered to the legend himself, Steve Wozniak. 

I recently stumbled upon this new compilation titled “Dark Was The Night” a benefit project hosted by the Red Hot Organization whom are dedicated to fighting HIV and AIDS.  This album is filled with tons of amazingly talented artists including Beirut, The National, Arcade Fire, Ben Gibbard, Yo La Tengo and just too many to list but take a look at the image above to see who else has contributed to this album. Many of the tracks in this album are relatively mellow and slow making it a very pleasing sound for the ears.  Dark Was The Night will also be having a very limited tour with some of the artists later on this year which I’m sure will sell out pretty fast.

I was browsing around some older work from last year and forgot that I made some marquees for mtvmusic.com, these weren’t used but I still like the concept of them. First one is based off David Bowie’s Space Oddity, followed by Daft Punk and lastly the classic Snoop Dogg album Doggystyle.

I submitted an illustration a couple months ago for the OFFF 2009 Catalogue and I just received word the other day that my design was selected and will appear in the book. Thanks OFFF!

For anyone that lives in New York there is an amazing gallery showing coming in spring titled ‘Earth From Above’.  This exhibit is based off the works of photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand and from the couple of sample photos I have seen, this gallery is a must see for anyone into art, photography, nature or just wanting to see something awesome. 

Beirut - La Llorona

Beirut - The Concubine

Beirut recently released their third album titled “March Of The Zapotec” and much like their previous album this one delivers the loud horns, trumpets, and the beats of a marching drum, all perfectly blended together.  One thing they do very well with their music is to make each song sound like a story or soundtrack and in their latest release they continue to provide that creativity almost making some of the songs seem like your watching a magic show or attending a theatrical play of some sort.  Towards the end of the album they seem to step out of their comfort zone just a tad as they experiment with the synthesizers in their songs and I’m not sure if it’s working for me.  Don’t get me wrong it still sounds like it’s well put together but I prefer 100 piece loud banging instrument sounds that caught my attention in the first place.  Overall, March Of The Zapotec is another great album released by Beirut. 

One thing that I really like about watching movies besides the previews is the title sequences in the beginning of the film.  Every movie has it’s own creative way of displaying the credits and it’s really inspiring to see what they come up with and from which studio. I recently came across The Art Of The Title which has a nice amount of archived movie titles layed out in a storyboard frame as well as a link to the actual clip.  This site is definitely worth checking out even if your not into movies, just looking over all the art of the storyboards is quite a site to see. 

As I mentioned the other day I was working on some playlisting stuff for mtvmusic.com, well the official launch of the new feature is now up.  This definitely makes it a lot easier to listen and watch music videos all day especially at work, just add your favorite songs and let them play continuously. You can also view other popular playlists as well as share your own.  Mtvmusic.com is also working on getting additional licenses for their music videos so that all the good people over in the UK will soon be able to watch their favorite artists. 

I have been out of the loop lately with taking pictures but here is a quick one I took of the George Washington Bridge during my trip to Cloisters NYC over the weekend.